In the case of Marshall McLuhan, you can prove that every fifth sentence is wrong and every tenth is funny and very ingenious. And Harold Innis never… - Friedrich Kittler

I don't believe in the old thesis that the media are protheses of the body, which amounts to saying, in the beginning was the body, then came the glasses, then suddenly television, and from the television, the computer... it would be better to work, like Luhmann, systematically from the independent histories of the technological media... A history like this doesn't need individual bodies or a subject that expands in and through the media... the media, including books and the written word, develop independently from the body.

Technologies that not only subvert writing, but engulf it and carry it off along with so-called Man, render their own description im­possible. Increasingly, data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as ar­tificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands. In this situation we are left only with reminiscences, that is to say, with stories.

0.1% of all telecommunications on this planet are absorbed by the NSA’s artificial intelligence. What then happens with them, no one knows. As a rule, orders for secrecy are lifted only after 30 years. Perhaps they will no longer be necessary at all three decades from now. The Word that was in the Beginning is vanishing into computer data banks anyway. When all that is said by the inhabitants of the earth has disintegrated into bits, Alan Turing's Universal Discrete Machine will be perfected.