Friedrich Kittler on Accelerationism

“Media are not pseudopods for extending the human body. They follow the logic of escalation that leaves us and written history behind it... Machines... are not so much for us humans, for we are so-to-speak built much too big, but that in these machines, nature, this luminous and recognizing part of nature, interconnects with and feeds back onto itself… For the Internet exists so that computers are wiring up with computers, onto which keyboards and users can be plugged in, but don’t have to be.”

“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... 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.”