Kittler's Reality Machine

While both of Kittler's articles for Tuesday touched on the failings of computers as a universal representation system, I will keep this post limited to the essay "There is No Software" as it focus solely on digital representation and does not wander off into the field of visual theory.

First off, what does "There is No Software" mean. Essentially, software is a slave to hardware. All developments following the building of these programmable hardware systems simply abstract from the electric pulses that run through a machine. As Kittler points out, the engineers that took these natural materials (silicone and oxide) to build the computer in essence created everything that we do now: 1 or 0.

"The last historical act of writing may well have been the moment when, in the
early seventies, Intel engineers laid out some dozen square meters of blueprint paper.... This manual layout of two thousand transistors and their interconnections was then miniaturized to the size of an actual chip, and, by electro-optical machines, written into silicon layers."
(Kittler, 1)

Kittler then writes about our society using this machine as a representation medium. His argument states that by following the building of the computer, we are a part of this computer's technological system. This system, first theorized by Turning, allows for a collection of machines to communicate with one another endlessly. The binary system would thus classify as our "language"- superseding hardware, software, and allowing for universal representation (a Universal Touring machine).

Such "Universal" implications pave the way for the Church-Turing hypothesis. This hypothesis says "nature itself a universal Turing machine" (Kittler, 1). With a fast enough computer, we could theoretically map and simulate all processes. While Kittler argues that such a computer will never exist, the computer still holds weight in regards to many human-technological practices. All software, writing and other digital media technologies depend on hardware since they are simply higher level layers of binary, or "far reaching chains of self-similarities" (Kittler, 2).

In this scenario, the computer hardware is the end all be all. It is "the linguistic agent ruling with near omnipotence over the computer system's
resources, address spaces, and other hardware parameters" (Kittler, 2). The burning of silicone in transistors gives hardware material agency as well. The computer reduces everything to "signifiers of voltage differences" (Kittler, 3). In an effort to deal with the postmodern world, a world that lacks meaning, the computer establishes itself as the meaning maker.

Kittler argues that we mistake this binary world of the computer as our own natural world, and we are therefore forced to submit to technology, like to the "books and bucks" that Western civilization has submitted to before. Some realize this and enjoy the subservient role (Turning liked to read Hex code) while others need the GUI to mask the onus they carry for the machine. Hardware is our universal language, and hence we forget it and think of software as our universal controller. The computer makes us value work that reduces tasks, thoughts, and concepts to the simplest algorithm possible. Commerce, art, and culture rely on hardware to establish meaning, and that leads to belief in the computer logic as our nature.

The mistake that we can mirror reality in the computer falters on the assumption that we have Turing's computer, "a machine with unbounded resources in space and
time, with infinite supply of raw paper and no constraints on computation speed" (Kittler 5). We cannot place some things in binary form- namely nature. Programmability works when everything has "some notation system" which reality itself doe not. Kittler says computers are great for representing anything... as long anything is representable within boolean logic. Even the basic elements that make up these discreet machines (oxide and silicone) are prone to logical errors: "there is electronic diffusion, there is quantum mechanical tunneling all over the chip" (Kittler 6). Nature is complex, connected, and it would take an impossibly fast computer just to simulate reality.

But....

Kittler leaves room for a machine to fill the Church-Turing hypothesis. A machine that is non-programmable and focused on "maximizing noise," not reducing itself to a basic set of binary numbers. Although the machine would take algorithms, it would "work essentially on a material substrate whose very connectivity would allow for cellular reconfigurations" (Kittler 6). Such a machine would be capable of representing reality in all its complex forms.

Questions:
1. I assume Kittler's proposed machine would have no software to speak of, not even our imagined software. But how exactly would "cellular configurations" be purely hardware? Is he talking about something like chemical/biological machines? Aren't machines just incomplete representations? You would need a machine that could represent reality to work as stated.

2. The following quote challenges our notion of the originator because of our reliance on the algorithm: "In other words, the value of a message is the amount of mathematical or other work plausibly done by its originator, which the receiver is saved from having to repeat" (Kittler 4). Do we have any concrete examples of this? Or perhaps even a re-worded definition?

3. Most importantly: how do we now define software? Are you convinced software is just an abstraction of hardware? How might things like social networks change Kittler's reliance of software on hardware?