10

Science as Open Source Process

Friedrich Kittler
Translated by Peter Krapp

Ladies and Gentlemen,

If I had begun my fifteen minute intervention not in the European style with “Ladies and Gentle-
men” but instead addressed you in C style with “hello world,” then I would presumably not be able
to count on my liberty for too long. I would have had the pleasure of spending my time under a
compiler and an assembler instead of entering silly ASCII keystrokes, but who knows whether this
wonderful ASCII sequence, print f (“Hello world”); will not soon be protected by source copyright,
even here in Europe.
So I have two concerns. First, I worry about carrying coals to Newcastle, because I could not
be here earlier. And secondly, I worry that academic freedom will stand or fall with the freedom
of source code. In referring to academia, I mean above all the university, without wishing to talk
self-servingly pro domo. For it is crucial for the university, since the Athenians, that the knowl-
edge generated and passed on by it must be able to circulate without the protection of patents and
copyrights, unlike in closed or even secret research organizations and industries. I would like to
elucidate this history briefly with an eye to the dangers that imperil academia today.
The European universities I refer to were a creation of the High Middle Ages, and as far as I
can see without any models or predecessors in any other cultures. This uniqueness is based on a
media-technological reason: knowledge proliferated not only in oral explications or lectures from
docents to students who in turn might become teachers, but in contrast to the ancients Greeks, at
this university one had to work, not just chat. With the introduction of paper, which was cheaper
and lighter than papyrus, universities ran scriptoria, where lectures were transcribed and hand-
written notes copied, as well as libraries, which archived these processed data. Thirdly, to make
the parallel to the contemporary global net obvious, universities also had their own medium of
transmission: as incredible as this sounds, they had their own courier services.
In early modernity, the universities lost this wondrous hardware of processing, storage and
transmission which defines every computer. The developing territorial states and later nation states
disallowed or swallowed the mail services of butchers, monasteries and universities, and deregula-
tion, as you know, only happened recently. After Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, the
lion’s share of the knowledge produced in the university fell to the system of books and publishing

177

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 178 • FRIEDRICH KITTLER

houses. Suddenly the universities ceased to write books and merely stored the books printed by
others in libraries as well as in the heads of their students.
I leave open how Gutenberg’s media revolution changed knowledge, modern universities,
academies and labs. I am interested in this revolution above all in the context of open source and
free software, as a rather precise model of what is going on these days. Without exaggerating too
much, one may perhaps say that computers, at least on the software side, are also a creation of the
university. If hardware, on its long march from tubes to transistors to integrated circuits, largely
comes from military technology, the universal Turing machine as a concept (as software) stems
from an academic dissertation, answering certain unsolved questions of the mathematical institute
in Goettingen. Turing told Hilbert, if you like. Accordingly, the still dominant von-Neumann-ar-
chitecture was developed by someone who made it from mathematics professor at Goettingen to
chief consultant of the Pentagon. On its way to power, the knowledge contained in the computer
and its algorithms has once again experienced the closure that threatened universities in their
take-over by nation states.
As far as I know, the fastest and best algorithm testing prime numbers remains a trade secret
of the Pentagon. The hope for pure, which is to say academic, mathematicians that pure math
was never going to be abused for earthly ends, as Hardy still wrote during World War II, has been
dramatically disappointed. But the parallel I draw between early modernity and the present only
comes out fully in the so-called PC revolution. It was no accident that the garages and tinkerers’
rooms that laid the groundwork for global firms like Intel and Apple were and are located next to
or even on the grounds of institutions like the Rand Corporation or the Leland Stanford Junior
University. The computer industry does what Gutenberg’s printing press did when it took over and
industrialized the calligraphy of the medieval university. The headhunters of Microsoft lurk around
Stanford and at other doors of computer science departments, catch new programming serfs with
new algorithms and squeeze them for five years, until the algorithms become proprietary and the
coders, with their stock options, are dismissed into early retirement.
The worst aspect of this scandal seems to me that nobody talks about it. An American common
law whose reach extends from the European Commission to the People’s Republic of China has
made an impossible concept of intellectual property as ubiquitous as it is unquestioned. Machines
that, according to Turing’s proof, are able to be not only all other machines but equally all human
calculation, are now supposed to legitimate patents and copyrights more profoundly than ever.
Machines that, according to the most recent results, run fastest and most efficiently when they
were not programmed by programmers but by themselves, are supposed to belong to humans as
private property—perhaps by way of euphemism for the capital corporate interests. Humanism,
one might say, is today as in early modernity nothing but a fig leaf.
You all know better than me that the critique of this system can only be a practical one. Theo-
retical or historical remarks like mine can at best help not to lose one’s overview among all the
upgrades and benchmarks. However, it was practical when some programmers at the MIT resisted
venality and when a computer science student at the University of Helsinki overcame the wide-
spread fear of assemblers and cold starts. That is how immediately open source and free software
are connected to the university. Look how much “edu” is in the sources of the Linux kernel. That
is also how directly the future of the university depends on these free sources.
When the printing press and the nation state swallowed the media technologies of the medi-
eval university, knowledge was left pretty much untouched on the content-level. The storage and
transmission were privatized or nationalized, but data processing proper was still conducted in that
beautiful old feedback circuit of eyes, ears, and writing hands. That is what changed with the com-
puter revolution. Universal Turing machines make especially this data processing technologically
reproducible. They see to it that the differences between the knowledge about technology, natural
sciences, and humanities progressively disappear. This revolution, in other words, concerns all the
faculties of the university, only to level their old distinctions that grew from media technologies.

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 SCIENCE AS OPEN SOURCE PROCESS • 179

The conflict of the faculties as Kant had described it may be solved peacefully, simply because it is
no longer a matter of books against labs against counsel in the different faculties, but because all
knowledge, including cultural knowledge, is processed in computers. This, it seems to me, grants
an essential part of their chances to open source and free operating systems.
As usual, mathematicians may have been the first to grasp what this freedom delivers. World-
wide, two academic publishers distribute the mathematical journals of record. It should be obvi-
ous to catapult these journals from the Gutenberg galaxy into the Turing galaxy, especially after
Adobe & Co successfully pirated almost the entire set of lead fonts from Garamond to Zapf. All
mathematical knowledge would move to fully electronic publications, and their price as well as
their copyright would be under the control of the said two global publishers. It is possible that this
calculation goes awry, though: weeks or months before the essays or dissertations that advance
mathematics land on an editor’s desk in Heidelberg or Amsterdam, they are already on the computer
server of a mathematical institute. This kind of bypass operation is more obvious than commercial
distribution. The university can put its innovations online.
If this example, which I did not make up, is imitated, then the outlook for the commercializa-
tion of software is not rosy. The only way remaining to make knowledge proprietary would be to
embed it in hardware. Once something is burned into a chip, it belongs to the firm who invested
millions into the design and billions into their mass fabrication. No university can compete with
that, regardless of whether it still depends on the financial support of a nation state or (more likely)
already drifted off into medieval independence.
It seems as significant to me as it is sad that our congress deals with open source and free
software, but does not even begin to discuss the possibility of open hardware. Since Gutenberg,
constellations where, as in the middle ages, the hardware of knowledge resides with knowledge
seem unthinkable. It is my impression that there are only two hopes left for hardware. Either
academic freedom, while not building its own CPUs, can still produce a critique that would make
faulty chips, or such stupid command sets as the complex instruction set of Intel, impossible. The
division bug on the first two steps of the Pentium processor—A and B I believe—was discovered
by a university, which forced Intel to conduct a recall that cost millions.
Or else, this chip- and hardware-production may act as its only possible critique. For if the prices
for design and production of a machine that can be all other machines may climb to astronomi-
cal levels, they may also drop to zero. The first practical success of Turing’s machine was that the
Wehrmacht had forgotten an elementary fact: anything encoded by a machine can also be decoded
by a machine. What Advanced Micro Devices calls reverse engineering is one of the best reasons
why the mass market price of CPUs is now inexorably tending towards zero.
Free sources and open operating systems only have a chance because the computer industry al-
ways already undermines its own concept of property. Before Linux was ported to different hardware
platforms, it was a highly specialized software that is said to have dismayed Andrew Tanenbaum
(of Minix) by relying minimally on the Intel 386. Everything Linus Torvalds needed to that end
was a publicly accessible programmer’s manual, the software-abstraction of its hardware.
This may lead to a confident conclusion. “In the future,” Bill Gates is supposed to have said in
a perhaps not proprietary, but still internal, memo recently, “we will treat the end user as we treat
computers: both are programmable.” But as long as there are people who themselves are able to
program instead of being programmed, this vision hopefully has no future.

Note
Originally delivered at “Wizards of OS,” a conference organized by Volker Grassmuck and the Federal Office for Political
Education [Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung], House of World Cultures, Berlin, July 1999.

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 new media
old media
A History and Theory Reader

Edited by

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun &

Thomas Keenan

New York London

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Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

New media, old media : a history and theory reader / edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Thomas W.
Keenan.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-94223-3 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-415-94224-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Mass media--History. I. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong, 1969- II. Keenan, Thomas, 1959-

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 vi • CONTENTS

6 Dis/continuities: 105
Does the Archive Become Metaphorical in Multi-Media Space?
WOLFGANG ERNST

7 Breaking Down: Godard’s Histories 125

RICHARD DIENST

8 Ordering Law, Judging History: Deliberations on Court TV 133

LYNNE JOYRICH

Part III Power-Code 155

9 The Style of Sources: 157
Remarks on the Theory and History of Programming Languages
WOLFGANG HAGEN

10 Science as Open Source Process 177

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

11 Cold War Networks or Kaiserstr. 2, Neubabelsberg 181

FRIEDRICH KITTLER

12 Protocol vs. Institutionalization 187

ALEXANDER R. GALLOWAY

13 Reload: Liveness, Mobility, and the Web 199

TARA MCPHERSON

14 Generation Flash 209

LEV MANOVICH

15 Viruses Are Good for You 219

JULIAN DIBBELL

16 The Imaginary of the Artificial: 233

Automata, Models, Machinics—On Promiscuous Modeling
as Precondition for Poststructuralist Ontology
ANDERS MICHELSEN

Part IV Network Events 249

17 Information, Crisis, Catastrophe 251
MARY ANN DOANE

18 The Weird Global Media Event and the Tactical Intellectual 265
[version 3.0]
MCKENZIE WARK

19 Imperceptible Perceptions in Our Technological Modernity 277

ARVIND RAJAGOPAL

20 Deep Europe: A History of the Syndicate Network 287

GEERT LOVINK

Chun_RT2241_C000.indd vi 10/17/2005 4:02:20 PM