There Is No Software
Following Kittler, a computer, or a computing system, is the approximation to a touring machine, which in turn is able to imitate any other machine. Now, the beauty lies within that the human is also just an approximation to some idealised system. That means that a computer can create or imitate systems that are good enough and are accepted as sufficient illusions by humans.
The question arises, what kind of ideas had video game developers about computers or computing systems in the 80s, when they get to know them first?
âProgramming languages have eroded the monopoly of ordinary language and grown into a new hierarchy of their own. This postmodern Tower of Babel reaches from simple operation codes whose linguistic extension is still a hardware configuration, passing through an assembler whose extension is this very opcode, up to high-level programming languages whose extension is that very assembler. In consequence, far-reaching chains of self-similarities in the sense defined by fractal theory organize the software as well as the hardware of every writing. What remains a problem is only recognizing these layers which, like modern media technologies in general, have been explicitly contrived to evade perception. We simply do not know what our writing does.â (Kittler, 2014, p. 148)
He situates the problem of software between the language of computing and the language of human expression. Software becomes the mediating factor between computing and humans.
âRather, there would be no software if computer systems were not surrounded by an environment of everyday languages.â (Kittler, 2014, p. 150)
In the latter half of the text he begins to rant about political (military) and economic reasons for hiding the machine, as well as underlying layers, starting with:
âOn the contrary, the so-called philosophy of the so-called computer community tends systematically to obscure hardware with software, electronic signifiers with interfaces between formal and everyday languages. In all philanthropic sincerity, high-level programming manuals caution against the psychopathological risks of writing assembler code.6 In all friendliness, âBIOS servicesâ are currently defined as designed to âhide the details of controlling the underlying hardware from your program.ââ Consequently, in a perfect gradualism, DOS services would hide the BIOS, WordPerfect the operating system, and so on and so onâ (Kittler, 2014, p. 150)
Besides, going into the same argumentation, Kittler doesnât seem to be very fond of the GUI, basically ignoring the aspect of democratizing computing by making it accesible to the many.
âFirst, on an intentionally superficial level, perfect graphic user interfaces, since they dispense with writing itself, hide a whole machine from its users.â (Kittler, 2014, p. 151)
See also
Bibliography
Kittler, F. A. (2014). There Is No Software. In 16. There Is No Software (pp. 219â229). Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804792622-016
Abstract
There Is No Software was published in The Truth of the Technological World on page 219.