“If and when the old humanities deal not with man, their topics are cultural technologies such as writing, reading, counting, singing, dancing, drawing—surprisingly almost the same skills that every free young man and girl in Lakedaimon or in Athens once displayed. For the humanities, there is nothing nontechnical to teach and research.”

“[T]oday’s knowledge is only as powerful as its implementations are. The future of the university depends on its faculty to unite separated notation systems of alphabets and mathematics into a superset, which Vilem Flusser once ironically called the alphanumerical code.”

“The secret manifest in commercial chip designs, operating systems, and application program interfaces (APIs) lies in the fact that technical documentation – in screaming contrast to all technical history – is not published anymore.”

Friedrich Kittler, ‘Universities: Wet, Hard, Soft, and Harder’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004.