Friedrich Kittler

"Media determine our situation."

"Printed laments over the death of Man or the subject always arrive too late."

"Nur was schaltbar ist, ist überhaupt. [Only that which is switchable, exists.]"

"[Discourse network is ] The network of technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store, and process relevant data."

"Culture is not the accumulation of concert reviews, a bit of science and a literary journal. But that is very difficult to change... Our parents were so ashamed after the war that they didnt want to touch technology anymore. Then Adorno flew in and his student Habermas announced the separation of communicative and instrumental reason."

"What remains of people is what media can store and communicate. What counts are not the messages or the content with which they equip so-called souls for the duration of the technological era, but rather (and in strict accordance to McLuhan) their circuits, the very schematism of their perceptibility."

"a few far-seeing scientists say ... nature is not a computer ... the only rational hope I have that we have not arrived at the end of history. Because if the digital calculators did not have a kind of internal limitation, they would truly bring world history to an end, in all the aspects that you have mentioned: time would no longer be human time, space would no longer be human space, but merely a corridor within the circuits of these wonderful little machines."

"The general digitization of channels and information erases the differences among individual media. Sound and image, voice and text are reduced to surface effects, known to consumers as interface. Sense and the senses turn into eyewash. Their media-produced glamor will survive for an interim as a by-product of strategic programs. Inside the computers themselves everything becomes a number: quantity without image, sound or voice ... With numbers, everything goes ... a total media link on a digital base will erase the very concept of media. Instead of wiring people and technologies, absolute knowledge will run as an endless loop."

"It has become clear that real wars are fought not for people or fatherlands, but take place between different media, information technologies, data flows."

"Take the concept of media from there – in a step also beyond McLuhan – to where it is most at home: the field of physics in general and telecommunications in particular"

"At best, the Internet will remain a space of freedom for a year or two, but, within a few years, it will most probably have fallen into the hands of big capital, and then the controls will be put in place. The other danger is that, along with the control mechanisms, the informational bureaucracies — precisely in order to avoid an information Chernobyl — will also expand. Thus, together, big capital and the informational bureaucracies may well simply scuttle the liberalisation of information."

"And when Liesegang edited his Contributions to the Problem of Electrical Television in 1899, thus naming the medium, the principle had already been converted into a basic circuit. Television was and is not a desire of so-called humans, but rather it is largely a civilian byproduct of military electronics. That much should be clear."