Sorry, this is a bit late...

When I was reading Kittler, I consistently thought to myself, "why is he writing this? Why does this matter?" It seemed so idiotic while at the same time so frustrating. It completely jarred with my perspective concerning information.

When I was littler, I would read books on particle physics and general relativity, because I was a precocious brat with no friends. Luckily I ditched the physics for music and friends, but the knowledge, and the perspective, remains. One of the rules of relativity is that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. A note of contention was J.S. Bell’s thoughts about quantum spin: if two particles begin to spontaneously exist, a particle and its antiparticle (this happens fairly often) and become separated, they will have different spins (“spin” is a nonliteral, theoretical construct that designates a certain quality of particles). So, if you catch one particle and find its spin, you will know the spin of the other particle immediately, no matter where it is in the universe. I don’t remember the resolution of the paradox, but the point remained: information was a discrete packet as real as any matter, and confined by the same rules.

Kittler, on the other hand, marginalizes the importance of information in exchange for the method in which that information is disseminated. To physicists, and myself, the very fact that particle A has spin B is a material object; to Kittler, the fact that particle A has spin B is immaterial. It needs to be written down, to have a physical manifestation, in order to be “real.” To Kittler, the fact that particle A has spin B does actually exist if you type it in a computer, but in a way that’s not able to be interpreted by humans; likewise, writing on a sheet of paper has physical presence and thus the information is real. But to me, the information has been real all along, unlike Bruce Willis, who has been dead all along.

The point that software is not real, that it’s all manipulations of hardware, seems so trivial. It reminds me of my little brother being scared of going to the beach: he learned that sand was actually crushed fossils and shells and didn’t want to go because he thought it was a graveyard. He’s not wrong, per se, but he’s not right either. Software is a construct to help us better understand the information we’re processing in our computers. Writing is merely a tool for conveying information: the information is just as real as the piece of paper or minute indentations on a hard drive. So Kittler’s not wrong, per se, but he’s not right either.