No More Learning

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screened and ordered, the diaries are presented in monthly reports to the chief of the Buribunk Department, who can in this manner continuously su- pervise the psychological evolution of his province and report to a central agency. This agency, in turn, keeps a record of the complete register (and publishes that register in Esperanto) and is hence in a position to exercise buribunkological control over all of Buribunkdom. A series of relevant practices-such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film pre- sentations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new j ournals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artist-ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buri- bunk world will ever come to an end.
Nevertheless, here too we see a rebellious spirit in evidence, albeit rarely. And yet it needs to be said that in the Buribunk world, there exists an unlimited and infinitely understanding tolerance, as well as the highest re- spect for a person's individual liberty. Buribunks are allowed to write their diary entries free from any coercion whatsoever. Not only is one allowed to say that he lacks the mental energy for further entries and that it is only the grief felt for his failing energies that gives him the energy necessary for fur- ther entries; that is, in fact, one of the most beloved types of entry, which is widely acknowledged and appreciated. He can also put down, without fear- ing the least pressure, that he considers the diary one of the most senseless and bothersome practices, an annoying chicanery, a ridiculous old hat-in brief, he is not prevented from using the strongest language. For the Buri- bunks well know that they would violate the nerve center of their being were they to mess with the principle of unconditional freedom of speech. There even exists a reputable organization that sets itself the task of buri- bunkically recording Anti-Buribunkdom, just as there is an agency created for the purpose of fostering, in impressive entries, the ability to articulate disgust and loathing for the agency and even protest against the obligatory diary entry. Periodically, when diary entries threaten to glide into a certain uniformity, leaders of the Buribunks organize a successful movement aimed at raising individual-personal self-esteem. ". The high point of this liberality,
". In this context, certain undaunted neo-Buribunkic initiatives deserve an honorable mention. They have led to the establishment of a prize-winning ques- tion that is raised periodically, "What real progress have the Buribunks made since the days of Ferker ? " and to decided efforts in that direction.
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however, resides in the fact that no Buribunk is forbidden from writing in his diary that he refuses to keep a diary.
Naturally, such freedom does not reach the point of anarchic chaos. Every entry about refusing to keep a diary must be amply supported and de- veloped. Whosoever, instead of writing about one's resistance toward writ- ing, really omits writing altogether violates the general intellectual openness and will be eliminated on grounds of antisocial behavior. The path of evolu- tion silently passes over the silent ones; they are outside of all discourse and as a result can no longer draw attention to themselves. Finally, sinking step by step until hitting the bottom of the social hierarchy, they are forced to manufacture the external conditions for the possibility of noble Buribunk- dom, for example, high-quality, handmade paper, upon which are printed the most distinguished diaries. . . . That is a rigorous but completely natural selection of the fittest, for whosoever cannot compete in the intellectual struggle of diaries will soon degenerate and disappear in the mass of those equipped only to produce the external conditions just mentioned. As a result of this physical labor and other menial services, such people also are no longer in a position to exploit, in Buribunk fashion, each moment of their lives, and they thus yield to an inexorable fate. Since they don't write any- more, they cannot respond to possible inconsistencies in their personal file; they no longer stay current, they disappear from the monthly reports and become nonentities. As if swallowed by the earth, nobody knows them any- more, nobody mentions them in their diaries, they are neither seen nor
heard. Regardless of the intensity of their lament, even if it were to drive them to the edge of insanity, the honorable law does not spare anyone who has dishonorably excluded him- or herself, just as the laws of natural selec- tion themselves know no exception.
And so, through tireless and engaged activity, the Buribunks seek to achieve such a perfection of their organization that, even if only over the span of hundreds of generations, an unprecedented progression is ensured. Daunting calculations-may progress not render them utopian! -have sug- gested that culture will eventually reach such a level that, thanks to unhin- dered evolution, the ability for diary writing will gradually become inborn in the Buribunk fetus. If so, fetuses could, with the help of appropriate, yet- to-be-developed media, communicate with one another about their cardinal perceptions and hence (by demystifying the remaining secrets of sex re- search) provide the necessary, factual basis for a refined sexual ethics. All that, of course, is far in the distance. It is, however, a historical fact that al- ready today there exists a grand and densely organized mass of Buribunk- dom-and hence a speaking, writing, bustling Buribunkdom compelled to
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enjoy each person's essential personality-that forges ahead into the sunrise of historicity.
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak, therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish, therefore I am. This contains no contradiction, but rather the progressive sequence of identities, each of which, following the laws of logic, transcends its own limitations. For Buribunks, thinking is nothing but silent speech; speech is nothing but writing without script; writing is nothing but anticipated publi- cation; and publication is, hence, identical with writing to such a degree
that the differences between the two are so small as to be negligible. I write, therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write? I write myself. Who writes me ? I myself write myself. What do I write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent cir- cle of egohood? History!
I am thus a letter on the typewriter of history. I am a letter that writes itself. Strictly speaking, however, I write not that I write myself but only the letter that I am. But in writing, the world spirit apprehends itself through me, so that I, in turn, by apprehending myself, simultaneously apprehend the world spirit. I apprehend both it and myself not in thinking fashion, but-as the deed precedes the thought-in the act of writing. Meaning: I am not only the reader of world history but also its writer.
At each second of world history, the letters of the typewriter keyboard leap, impelled by the nimble fingers of the world-I, onto the white paper and continue the historical narrative. Only at the moment that the single letter, singled out from the meaningless and senseless indifference of the keyboard, hits the animated fullness of the white paper, is a historical reality created; only at that moment does life begin. That is to say, the beginning of the
past, since the present is nothing but the midwife that delivers the lived, his- torical past out of the dark womb of the future. As long as it is not reached, the future is as dull and indifferent as the keyboard of the typewriter, a dark rat hole from which one second after the other, just like one rat after the other, emerges into the light of the past.
Ethically speaking, what does the Buribunk do who keeps a diary each and every second of his life ? He wrests each second off of the future in or- der to integrate it into history. Let us imagine this procedure in all its mag- nificence: second by second, the blinking young rat of the present moment crawls out of the dark rat hole of the future-out of the nothing that not yet is-in order to merge (eyes glowing with fiery anticipation) the next sec- ond with the reality of history. Whereas with the unintellectual human be- ing, millions and billions of rats rush without plan or goal out into the infi-
2 4 2 Typewriter
nite expanse of the past only to lose themselves in it, the diary-keeping Buri- bunk can catch each of those seconds, one at a time, and-once aligned in an orderly battalion-allow them to demonstrate the parade of world his- tory. This way, he secures for both himself and humanity the maximum amount of historical facticity and cognizance. This way, the nervous antici- pation of the future is defused, for no matter what happens, one thing is for sure: no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the type- writer key will miss the page.
The death of an individual is also nothing but such a rat second, which has no content in itself-whether one of happiness or grief-but only in its historical registration. Of course, in the rat second of my death, I can no longer hold pen and diary, and I am ostensibly no longer actively involved in this historical registration; the crux of diary keeping, the will to power over history, disappears and clears the field for somebody else's desire. If we dis- regard the pedagogical aspects of this situation, that is, its application not to waste a second in order to impose our will to power onto historiography in the making, we must confess that the termination of our will to history goes very much against our will, for the will to power in the first instance always refers to the will to one's own power, not to that of a certain historian of fu- ture generations. Such concerns, however, lend themselves to serious confu- sion, and we have already seen how even in the case of the great Ferker, the fear of death had a downright catastrophic influence on his historical repu- tation. Today, however, thanks to the evolving consciousness whose sunlight kills the bacteria of the fear of death, there is little danger of any confusion among the Buribunks.
We see through the illusion of uniqueness. We are the letters produced by the writing hand of the world spirit and surrender ourselves consciously to this writing power. In that we recognize true freedom. In that we also see the means of putting ourselves into the position of the world spirit. The in- dividual letters and words are only the tools of the ruses of world history. More than one recalcitrant "no" that has been thrown into the text of his- tory feels proud of its opposition and thinks of itself as a revolutionary, even though it may only negate revolution itself. But by consciously merging with the writing of world history we comprehend its spirit, we become equal to it, and-without ceasing to be written-we yet understand ourselves as writing subjects. That is how we outruse the ruse of world history-namely, by writing it while it writes us. 17o
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World history comes to a close as a global typewriters' association. Digi- tal signal processing (DSP) can set in. Its promotional euphemism, post- history, only barely conceals that war is the beginning and end of all arti- ficial intelligence.
In order to supersede world history (made from classified intelligence reports and literary processing protocols), the media system proceeded in three phases. Phase I , beginning with the American Civil War, developed storage technologies for acoustics, optics, and script: film, gramophone, and the man-machine system, typewriter. Phase 2, beginning with the First World War, developed for each storage content appropriate electric transmission technologies: radio, television, and their more secret coun- terparts. Phase 3, since the Second World War, has transferred the sche- matic of a typewriter to a technology of predictability per se; Turing's mathematical definition of computability in 193 6 gave future computers their name.
Storage technology from 19 1 4 to 19 1 8 meant deadlocked trench war- fare from Flanders to Gallipoli. Transmission technology with VHF tank communications and radar images, those military developments parallel to television,171 meant total mobilization, motorization, and blitzkrieg from the Vistula in 1939 to Corregidor in 1945. And finally, the largest computer program of all time, the conflation of test run with reality, goes by the name of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Storing/transmitting/cal- culating, or trenches/blitz/stars. World wars from I to n.
In artificial intelligences, all media glamor vanishes and goes back to basics. (After all, "glamor" is nothing but a Scottish corruption of the word "grammar. ")172 Bits reduced the seeming continuity of optical me- dia and the real continuity of acoustic media to letters, and these letters to numbers. DSP stores, transfers, calculates-millions of times per sec- ond, it runs through the three functions necessary and sufficient for me- dia. The standard for today's microprocessors, from the point of view of their hardware, is simply their systematic integration.
Calculations are performed by a central processing unit (CPU) that, in the case of Zilog's Z80 microprocessor, cannot do much more than manipulate blocks of 8 bits either logically (following Boolean algebra) or arithmetically (through basic addition). Storage is subdivided into a Read-Only Memory (ROM), which retains once and for all inscribed data, preferably commands and computing constants, and a Random Ac- cess Memory (RAM), which reads the variable data of a measured envi- ronment and returns mathematical data to control that environment. The exchange between individual modules runs along uni- or bidirectional
244 Typewriter
? Setup of a microprocessor (Z8o).
busses (for data, addresses, and control commands such as WRITE or READ), and the transfer from and to the environment runs via an in- put/output port (110) at whose outer margin, finally, the conversion of continuities into bits takes place.
And since, from the microprocessor to large processing networks, everything is nothing but a modular vice, the three basic functions of stor- ing/transferring/processing are replicated on internal levels no longer ac- cessible to programmers. For its part, the CPU includes ( I ) an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), (2) several RAMs or registers to store variables and a ROM to store microprograms, and (3) internal busses to transfer data, addresses, and control commands to the system's busses.
That's all. But with sufficient integration and repetition, the modular system is capable of processing, that is, converting into any possible me- dium, each individual time particle of the data received from any envi- ronment. As if one could reconstruct, custom-made from one microsec- ond to the next, a complete recording studio comprising reel-to-reels plus radio transmission plus control panel and switchboard. Or, as if the Buri- bunks' immense permeation with data coincided with an automated Buri- bunkology that could be switched, at the speed of electrical current, from a register of data to a register of persons or even their self-registration. The construction of the Golem, at any rate, is perfect. The storage media of the founding generation were only capable of replacing the eye and the ear, the sensorium of the central nervous system; the communications me- dia between the two wars were only capable of replacing the mouth and the hand, the motorics of information. Which is why, behind all registers,
PORT A PORT 8
? EXTERNER ADRESSBUS (16 BIT)
Standard architecture of a cpu.
all channels, a human being still appeared to be doing the transmitting. So-called thinking remained thinking; it therefore could not be imple- mented. For that, thinking or speech had to be completely converted into computing.
"I WILL LEARN HOW TO COMPUTE ON MY TYPEWRITER," writes an in- mate of Gugging (on his red device for this red and black book). Alan Turing did nothing else. Instead of learning his public school's prescribed handwriting, he reduced typewriters to their bare principle: first, storing or writing; second, spacing or transferring; third, reading (formerly re- served for secretaries) or computing discrete data, that is, block letters and figures. Rather than conclude that humans are superior, as did his colleague Godel, with whom he jointly refuted the Hilbert program (in support of a complete, consistent, and decidable mathematics, that is, a mathematics that could in principle be delegated to machines),173 Turing was suicidal-in life as well as in his job. He dropped the unpredictable in order to relieve mathematicians of all predictable (or recursive) func- tions and to construct the machine that Hilbert had presumed as a for- malism. The hypothetical determinism of a Laplacian universe, with its humanist loopholes (1795), was replaced by the factual predictability of finite-state machines. Rather full of pride, Turing wrote:
The prediction which we are considering is, however, rather nearer to practicabil- ity than considered by Laplace. The system of the "universe as a whole" is such
Typewriter 2 4 5
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that quite small errors in the initial conditions can have an overwhelming effect at a later time. The displacement of a single electron by a billionth of a centime- tre at one moment might make the difference between a man being killed by an avalanche a year later, or escaping. It is an essential property of the mechanical systems which we have called "discrete state machines" that this phenomenon does not occur. Even when we consider the actual physical machines instead of the idealised machines, reasonably accurate knowledge of the state at one mo- ment yields reasonably accurate knowledge any number of steps laterY4
The overwhelming effects of this predictability have since reached Man's employment statistics. The consequences of Turing's politics of sui- cide: "As Victorian technology had mechanised the work of the artisans, the computer of the future would automate the trade of intelligent think- ing. . . . The craft jealously displayed by human experts only delighted him. In this way he was an anti-technocrat, subversively diminishing the authority of the new priests and magicians of the world. He wanted to make intellectuals into ordinary people. " 175
The first to be affected were of course stenotypists. After eleven years, Turing's Universal Discrete Machine fulfilled the prophecy that an appa- ratus " also renders superfluous the typist. " His simulation game, in which a censor is to but cannot actually decide which of two data sources A and B is human and which is a machine, significantly has a precursor. According to Turing, computer B replaces the systemic position of a woman who-in competition or gender war with a man A-seeks to per- suade the data gap C that she is the real woman. But since both voices are severed from the "written, or, better still, typed" flow of information, Remington's secretary gives her farewell performance. Whenever trans- vestite A insists that he has strands of hair "nine inches long," the human predecessor of the computer writes to her censor, as mechanically as fu- tilely, "I am the woman, don't listen to him! "176
With which the homosexual Turing raised to the level of technology Dionysus's sentence, "Must we not first hate ourself if we are to love our- self? " With the added observation that against total desexualization, protest will "avail nothing. "177 Computers write by themselves, without secretaries, simply with the command WRITE. (Anyone who would like to see the phallus in the 5 volts of a logical I, and the hole in the 0. 7 volts of an 0, confuses industrial standards with fiction. ) Only those intersec- tions between computers and their environment that, following ASCII code (American Standard Code for Information Interchange), are net- worked bit by bit with typewriter keys178 will continue to offer women jobs for a while. When ENIAC, "the first operational computer," accord-
Ty p e w r i t e r 2 4 7
ing to misleading American accounts, calculated projectile trajectories and A-bomb pressure waves during the Second World War, one hundred women were hired in addition to male programmers. Their job: "to climb around on ENIAC's massive frame, locate burnt-out vacuum tubes, hook up cables, and perform other types of work unrelated to writing. " 179
By contrast, Turing, with an eye toward "computers and guided pro- jectiles," predicted good times for men, programmers, and mathemati- cians. 180 But it was a strange kind of mathematics into which he imported the elegance and complexity of classical analysis. What disappeared in the split-up of binaries was not only the continuity of all graphs and tra- jectories examined since Leibniz, and which Fourier's theory and Edison's phonographs simply followed. What was much more drastic than such primitive step functions was his crucial innovation: the abolition of the difference between numbers and operational symbols, data and com- mands. For even if numbers stood for data relationships, the signs + or - were still inhabited by a human spirit who appeared to give the command to add or subtract. Turing's Universal Discrete Machine, however, con- verted these (and all other) letters into their monotonous rows of bina- ries. In machine language, the command ADD is neither a human enun- ciation nor a letter symbol, but just one of many series of bits. (In a Z80, the command "Increase the number in the accumulator by 2" would be IlOO OlIO/00000010. )ItwasnotG6del'shumanistbeliefbutratherhis simple trick of Godelization that once again emerged victorious: only af- ter commands, axioms, or, to put it briefly, sentences had been converted into numbers were they as infinitely manipulable as numbers. End of lit- erature, which is made up of sentences.
Every microprocessor implements through software what was once the dream of the cabala; namely, that through their encipherment and the manipulation of numbers, letters could yield results or illuminations that no reader could have found. Computers are endless series of numbers only whose relative position decides whether they operate as (verbal) commands or (numeric) data or addresses. If John von Neumann, the mathematician of the Second World War, had not taken certain precau- tions for his machines, a command sequence of numbers such as ADD could also add up, aside from the usual data, command sequences them- selves, until no programmer would be able to comprehend the starry mathematics to which that take-off had abducted their computer.
The neat separation of data, addresses, commands-that is, of stor- age contents, points of transfer, and processing steps-by contrast, as- sures that for each address, there is only one command or datum on the
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bus. A box of numbered paper slips that can log on not only (as with the Buribunks) to certain books, chapters, pages, terms, but to any individual bit of the system. Computer algorithms, instead of simply reproducing a logic, consist of "LOGIC + CONTROL. "181 No wonder that govern- mental ingenuity invented the impossible job of the data security special- ist to camouflage the precision of such data control.
On the other hand, since Turing, the possible job of a programmer has run the risk of forgetting mathematical elegance. Today, prior to the conquest of digital signal processors, the hardware of average computers is at a kindergarten level: of all the basic forms of computation, it barely manages addition. More complex commands have to be reconverted into a finite, that is, serial, number of cumulative steps. An unreasonable chore for humans and mathematicians. Where recursive, that is, automa- tizable, functions succeed classical analysis, computation works as a treadmill: through the repeated application of the same command on the series of interim results. But that's it. A Hungarian mathematician, after he had filled two whole pages with the recursive formulas according to which a Turing machine progresses from I to 2 to 3, and so on, observed in German as twisted as it was precise: "This appears as an extraordinar- ily slowed-down film shot of the computation processes of man. If this mechanism of computation is applied to some functions, you start living it, you begin to compute exactly like it, only faster. "182 Consolation for prospective programmers . . .
Slow-motion shots of the spirit will exorcise it. Chopped up like movements in front of the camera, equations finally solve themselves without intuition because every discrete step during storage, transfer, and calculation takes place with bureaucratic precision. The discrete machine forms a solitary union with cinema and typewriter, but not with neuro- physiology. That is what distinguishes it from the dream typewriter con- structed by Friedlaender's Dr. Sucram, who in his main line of work took care of the Gray Magic [Graue Magie1 of three-dimensional cinema.
The doctor concentrated on his experiments with a curious little machine model. He put a metal helmet on his head; fine wires connected the helmet to the key- board of the typewriter. Without any movement on the doctor's part, the levers of the machine started moving. It was a ghostly sight to behold.
"What kind of a device is that? " [BosemannJ pointed to the helmet from which emerged the wires connecting to the keyboard.
"An extraordinarily comfortable typewriter, Mister Bosemann. It saves me a typist. I am in the process of letting the ethereal emanations of the brain work for me directly. Up to now, our thoughts, no matter how practical, have been moving
Typewriter 249
the world only in indirect ways. Our machines do not yet work under the direct influence of our thoughts, our will. I plan a direct transmission. "! 83
The typing, computing, and sewing machines in the brains or books of Nietzsche and KuRmaul hence became reality. The founding myth of a media landscape, which would only be the worldwide unfolding of neu- rophysiology, reached its peak in Friedlaender's machine fiction.
Fourteen years later, it ends in Turing's machine, which was also never built but is mathematically conceivable. The computer and the brain are functionally compatible, but not in terms of their schematics. Since the nervous sys- tem, according to Turing, is "certainly not a discrete-state machine," that is, not infinitesimally precise, all the unpredictabilities of a Laplacian uni- verse loom over it. 184 Thus, "the real importance of the digital procedure lies in its ability to reduce the computational noise level to an extent which is completely unobtainable by any other (analogy) procedure. " And even if-following Neumann's elegant simplification-the neural, but not the hormonal, conduits operate according to a digital model, their information flow is still five thousand times slower than that of comput- ers. 18S The brain, however, compensates for this loss of transmission through the parallel processing of whole sets of data; statistical breadth (presumably based on majority gates) for which computers can compen- sate only through serial processing and recursive functions. What remains unrealized, at any rate, is Dr. Sucram's desire for "letting the ethereal em- anations of the brain work for me directly. "
The white noise of brains, of the ether, of the globe: the total type- writer has nothing to do with that. But everything to do with trenches/ blitz/stars.
Even if "there is little in our technological or physiological experience to indicate that absolute all-or-none organs exist,"186 the oldest knowl- edge of gods, ghosts, and generals knows better. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership is always digital. In the scriptures of the priests, Yahweh distinguishes for seven days between day and night, morning and evening, sun and moon, earth and heaven, land and water (not to mention good and bad). That is what the priests, who have edited and continue to administer this holy scripture, call God's creation. But "it is nothing but the creation of nothing other than signifiers. "187 Earth and heaven can do without Elohim's inscription; it exists, prior to God's creation and after God's death, in another holiness, for which the Holy Bible only has the word tohu bohu:188 the random noise of events. The language of the up- per echelons of leadership, by contrast, is digitalization; it transforms
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sources of accidental noise into absolute all-or-none organs. Otherwise, commands and censures, those two antisymmetrical instruments of lead- ership, could not be communicated.
And if the invading of communication channels by scrambling noises makes it necessary, the language of the upper echelons goes so far as to overcode the binary opposition with another, that is, redundant, binary opposition. In the German General Staff,
a military language practice that was exercised and used for decades . . . aimed strictly at distinguishing between "western" and "eastward" in military briefs and reports. The reason was that one wanted to establish a distinct sound differ- ence between the two terms, because otherwise messages and dictates delivered orally or over the phone might easily have resulted in fateful mix-ups. . . . The layman might think of this as a triviality, but every soldier is surely cognizant of the far-reaching implications of this regulation.
For planning wars on two fronts, the opposition between east and west is as fundamental as that between heaven and earth for the gods of creation. Therefore, when Major General Alfred JodI, the last chief of an illustri- ous short (hi)story, "used the word 'eastern' rather than, as was common protocol, 'eastward' in an army report ofJune 14, 1940, during the west- ern offensive of 1940 . . . even though he himself had emerged from the ranks of the army . . . he violated without much ado a time-tested prac- tice and triggered widespread and intense indignation in the officers' corps. "189
The tohu bohu and, in its wake, analog media run through all the various types of conditions except the NO. 190 Computers are not emana- tions of nature. Rather, the universal discrete machine, with its ability to erase, negate, and oppose binary signs, always already speaks the lan- guage of the upper echelons. On the transmitting side, the general staffs of the Axis, just as, on the receiving end, those in London or Washington.
Whether or NOT the Japanese empire took seriously the resource em- bargo threatened by Roosevelt (that is, attack the United States), whether or NOT Vice Admiral Nagumo's flotilla would sink the Pacific battleships at Pearl Harbor with carrier-bound aircraft, whether or NOT he would maintain silence in his areas of operation off the Aleutian Islands (he did): these were precisely the digital puzzles of 194 1 , solvable only through the interception and decoding of necessarily discrete sources of information. And since the machine mathematics of the current century endowed gen- eral staffs with the ability to encrypt their orders automatically, that is,
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immeasurably more efficiently than by hand, decoding had to be done by machines as well. The Second World War: the birth of the computer from the spirit of Turing and his never-built principal relay.
This escalation between senders and receivers, weapons and anti- weapons, is told quickly and most precisely in the words of Guglielmo Marconi, which were broadcast from a gramophone record on Radio Roma by the inventor of the radio immediately after his death (as if to un- derscore the new acoustic immortality). Marconi, a senator and marchese of fascist Italy, "confessed" that
forty-two years ago, when I achieved the first successful wireless transmission in Pontecchio, I already anticipated the possibility of transmitting electric waves over large distances, but in spite of that I could not hope for the great satisfaction I am enjoying today. For in those days a major shortcoming was ascribed to my invention: the possible interception of transmissions. This defect preoccupied me so much that, for many years, my principal research was focused on its elimination.
Thirty years later, however, precisely this defect was exploited and turned into radio-into that medium of reception that now reaches more than 40 million listeners every day. l9l
Which unnamed circles feared the interception of transmissions is not hard to guess. Which circles charged Marconi with the elimination of this defect, that is, with the construction of a wooden iron, is even easier to guess. Nothing in the analog medium of the radio allows the negation of signals, their spy-proof inversion into their opposite, or nonsense. Hence, general staffs, who were afforded perfect communication to the front and possibilities for blitzkrieg by Marconi's invention, had to rely on the de- velopment of discrete encoding machines. Immensely inflated flows of in- formation demanded a form of text processing as automatic as it was dis- crete-the typewriter.
Since 1919, the engineer Arthur Scherbius had experimented in Berlin- Wilmersdorf with a "secret typewriter. " In 1923, he himself thus founded Chiffriermaschinen A. G. (Encoding Machines Corporation) and secured for his model the promotion of the world postal club. l92 For the first time, Remington'S typewriter keyboard was no longer the boring and unequiv- ocal one-way link between input and output, softened only by typos. For the first time, hitting a letter key offered numerous combinatory surprises. The 26 letters of the alphabet ran over electric conduits into a distribution system consisting of three (later, four or five) rotors and an inversion ro- tor, which always selected other substitute letters. With each strike of the
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Typewriter
? ? ? RLMNE
o
o0000
o0 000
1 - Walzen
2 - Steckerleiste und
? 000000000 00000 00 000000000
(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C)o(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)@(C)(C)(C) (C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)(C)
Blockdiagramm dcr EDigma-Mascbinc
A= 5NMLRL-lM-lN-I5-1 B = 5 P N M L R L-l
D= 5p3NMLRL-IM-IN-lp-35-1 Pcrmutationcn dcr Bucbstabcn A, B, C, 0, E, F.
Block diagram of the Enigma machine: Above, ( r ) rotors, ( 2 ) connector tray and connectors, ( 3 ) lamps, ( 4 ) battery, and ( 5 ) keyboard. Below, permutations of the letters A-F.
typewriter key, the rotors (just like the second, minute, and hour hands of clocks) advanced by one revolution, only to return to their original posi- tion not until 267, or 8 billion, hits later.
That is how Scherbius, with his machine mathematics, liberated cryp- tographers from their manual work. The sender, instead of having to la- bor for hours with pencil, tables, and graph paper, sat in front of a regu-
Steckerverbindungen
? ? 3 - Lampen
5 - Tastatur
? ? ? -1 N-l p-I 5-1 F= 5pSNMLRL-IM-lN-Ip-S5-1
C = 5 pZ N M L R L-l M-I N-l p-2 5-1
E = 5 p4 N M L R L-I M-l N-I p-4 5-1
Typewriter 2 5 3
lar typewriter keyboard and typed in the orders of his general staff in plain text. The letter output, however, which he could read from the flashing of 26 bulbs and which he copied in accordingly, looked like pure letter salad. Radio as well, with its large defect, could translate that salad in spy-proof fashion, until an antisymmetrical, secret typewriter on the receiving end converted the almost perfect white noise back into plain text, simply because the machine was calibrated on the basis of a daily command to start at the same rotor.
Year after year since the First World War, the German army had torpe- doed Bredow's plans to set up a civilian radio network, despite all the horror of a communist radio specter and the abuse of army equipment. Its own information flow, especially on long wave, was given priority. In November I922, however, postal secretary Bredow could inform the Ministry of Defense that "the switch of the official radio services to wire- less telegraphy and the use of encoding machines would soon provide suf- ficient security to protect the privacy of telegraphy. " 193 That's how pre- cisely information was exchanged between industry and the state. In I923, General von Seeckt also granted radio entertainment to Germans, but not without prohibiting with draconian regulations any misuse of civilian receivers for purposes of transmission. But the order of discourses in the current century was restored: a few public transmission frequencies thus permitted (to the joy of literary and media sociologists) the mass re- ception that Marconi posthumously welcomed; Scherbius, however, pre- vented the interception of the military-industrial complex's numerous fre- quencies, which Marconi was worried about. Since then, people have been doused in the glamor of analog media only to remove the grammar of the typewriter, the prototype of digital information processing, from their minds.
In I926, the German navy used the first encryption machines. 194 Three years later, soon after Major Fellgiebel, the subsequent chief of Army Communications, had taken over the Abwehr's cryptography divi- sion,195 the army followed. The secret typewriter of Wilmersdorf was equipped with yet more secret rotors, as well as the name of secrecy itself: ENIGMA. For a decade, it lived up to that name.
But other states also did their shopping at Scherbius. Modified Enigma models were the standard between the world wars. All classified exchanges between Tokyo and the Japanese embassy in the United States (including all the planning for Pearl Harbor), for example, took place in the machine code Angooki Taipu B, which the American counterpart re-
? General Guderian on the Enigma in his general's tank.
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named Purple for reasons of security. l96 Three months prior to Vice Ad- miral Nagumo's blitzkrieg, William F. Friedman, chief of the Signal Intel- ligence School (SIS), pulled a cryptoanalytical stunt. In mathematical pu- rity, that is, without having captured and subsequently evaluated a Purple code (following the black-box rules of the Second World War), he man- aged to retrace the infinite permutations of the secret typewriter. The last victory of humans over communication technologies, which Friedman paid for with a nervous collapse and months of psychiatric treatment. 197 But as always, it was precisely at the site of madness that machines orig- inated. Their superhuman computation capability allowed the U. S. pres- ident to listen in on Japan's plans for attack. That Roosevelt allegedly did not warn his two commanding air and sea officers in the Pacific is an al- together different story . . .
The escalation of weapons and antiweapons, of cryptography and cryptoanalysis (as Friedman renamed writing and reading under the con- ditions of high technology), at any rate urgently required the automatiza- tion of decoding. And for that need, a universal discrete machine, which could replace any other machine, was a perfect fit. "The most compli- cated machines are made only with words. "198 Turing, soon after nega- tively solving Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem (decision problem), de- scribed to his mother "a possible application" of the new and seemingly infinite mathematics at which he was
working on at present. It answers the question "What is the most general kind of code or cipher possible," and at the same time (rather naturally) enables me to construct a lot of particular and interesting codes. One of them is pretty well im- possible to decode without a key, and very quick to encode. I expect I could sell them to H. M. Government for quite a substantial sum, but I am rather doubtful about the morality of such things. What do you think? 199
The answer came not from his mother but from the government. Ger- many's "Enigma machine was the central problem that confronted the British Intelligence Service in 1938. But they believed it was unsolv- able,"20o until the Government Code and Cipher School hired Alan M. Turing (notwithstanding his moral doubts) three days after the outbreak of the war.
Bletchley Park, the bombproof site of British cryptoanalysis during the war, was in a better position than its American colleagues: young mathematicians of the Polish secret service had already constructed a de- coding machine, the so-called Bombe, based on captured Enigmas. But when Fellgiebel's Army Communications increased the number of rotors
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to five, even the Bombe could not follow suit. The I50,738,274,937,250 possible ways of electrically connecting ten pairs of letters exceeded its capacity, at least in real time, on which blitzkrieg commands and their timely countermeasures depend. The overwhelmed Poles donated their files to the British and Turing.
From this primitive Bombe, Turing made a machine that the head of Bletchley Park not coincidentally named the Oriental Goddess: a fully au- tomatized oracle to interpret fully automatized secret radio communica- tion. Turing's recursive functions laid the groundwork for the enemy's ability to decode Enigma signals with a mere 24-hour delay beginning in May I94I, and thus, to paraphrase Goebbels, to eavesdrop on the enemy. The German army did not want to believe it until the end of the war: it was "fully convinced that the decoding of Enigma was, even with the aid of captured machines, impossible given the overwhelmingly large number of calibrating positions. "201 However, only nonsense, white noise without information and hence of no use for the upper echelons, provides com- plete proof against spying. Whereas "the very fact that the Enigma was a machine made mechanical cryptoanalysis a possibility. "202 As a pseudo- random generator, the secret typewriter produced nonsense only relative to systems whose revolutions did not match its own. Turing's goddess, however, found regularities in the letter salad.
For one thing, Enigma had the practical advantage or theoretical dis- advantage that its cipher consisted of a self-inverse group. In order to be encoded or decoded on the same machine, letter pairs had to be inter- changeable. For example, when the OKW encoded its 0 as a K, the K in- versely turned into an O. From that followed "the very particular feature that no letter could be enciphered by itself. "203 Not even the OKW was capable of writing its own name. Turing subjected these few yet revealing implications to a sequential analysis that weighted and controlled all the probabilities of solution. With automatized judgment, the Oriental God- dess ran through permutation after permutation, until the letter salad be- came plain text again. War of typewriters.
And since from " I 5 to a maximum of 29 percent"204 of the German radio traffic ran through Enigma, the spy war reached a new level: inter- ception yielded "not just messages, but the whole enemy communication system. "205 The midrange levels of command-from army and division headquarters to individual blitzkrieg weapons on land, in the air, or at sea-betrayed their addresses, which are, all spy novels notwithstanding, more revealing than data or messages. Sixty different Enigma codes and 3,000 classified radio messages per day, with all of the specs for their
? ? senders and receivers, recorded the war like a typewriter the size of Eu- rope. Under the conditions of high technology, war coincides with a chart of its organizational structure. Reason enough for the Government Code and Cipher School to model, in miniature, its organization after that of the German army, that is, after the enemy. 206 Turing's game of imitation became a reality.
It is only one step from the flowchart to the computer. The addresses, data, commands that circulated between humans and typewriters in the German army or its British simulacrum could finally turn into hardware. This last step was undertaken in I943 by the Post Office Research Station at Bletchley Park. One thousand five hundred tubes were expropriated and converted into overloaded switches and, instead of reinforcing radio analog signals, simulated the binary play of Boolean algebra. Transistors did not make it into the world until I949, but even without them the uni- versal discrete machine-including data entry, programming possibilities, and the great innovation of internal storage mechanisms207-saw its first implementation, for which Turing's successors could find no other name than COLOSSUS. Because the strategic secrets of the Fuhrer's headquar- ters, Wolfsschanze, could, as is logical, only be cracked by a monster computer.
COLOSSUS began its work and decoded an additional 40 percent of the German radio traffic-everything that for reasons of security was transmitted not via Enigma and wireless but via the Siemens Cryptwriter. As a teleprinter running the Baudot-Murray Code, this typewriter no longer required cumbersome manual operation with its human sources of error; its fully digitized signals consisted of the "yes" or "no" of ticker
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tape, which, through the binary addition of plain text and pseudo- random generator, could be encoded much more efficiently than with Enigma. Moreover, radio interception became possible only once signals were sent through a radio link rather than a telegraph cable. 20s That is how well upper echelons pick their typewriters.
Obviously, COLOSSUS beat binary addition with binary addition, but even the first computer in the history of science or warfare would have been nothing but a several-ton version of Remington's special type- writer with a calculating machine209 had it not observed conditional jump instructions. 21o
Conditional jumps, first envisioned in Babbage's unfinished Analyti- cal Engine of 1 83 5 , were born into the world of machines in 193 8 in Kon- rad Zuse's apartment in Berlin, and this world has since been self-identi- cal with the symbolic. In vain, the autodidact offered his binary calcula- tors to use as encryption machines and to surpass the supposedly spy-proof Enigma. 2l1 The opportunity missed by Army Communications was seized by the German Aviation Test Site in 194 1-for the purposes of "calculating, testing, and examining cruise missiles. "212 Yet Zuse made only the most sparing use of the IF-THEN commands of his brilliant "plan calculation": Godel's and Turing's insight oftranslatingcommands, that is, letters, into numbers was a concern for him:
Since programs, like numbers, are built from series of bits, it was only a matter of course that programs be stored as well. With that it was possible to make condi- tional jumps, as we say today, and to convert addresses. From the point of view of schematics, there are several solutions for it. They all rest on a common thought: the feedback of the result of the calculation on the process and on the configura- tion of the program itself. Symbolically, one can envision that through a single wire. I was, frankly, nervous about taking that step. As long as that wire has not been laid, computers can easily be overseen and controlled in their possibilities and effects. But once unrestricted program processing becomes a possibility, it is difficult to recognize the point at which one could say: up to this point, but no further. 2J3
A simple feedback loop -and information machines bypass humans, their so-called inventors. Computers themselves become subjects. IF a preprogrammed condition is missing, data processing continues accord- ing to the conventions of numbered commands, but IF somewhere an in- termediate result fulfills the condition, THEN the program itself deter- mines successive commands, that is, its future.
In the same way, Lacan, making a distinction with animal codes, de-
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fined language and subjectivity as human properties. For example, the dance of bees, as it has been researched by von Frisch, "is distinguished from language precisely by the fixed correlation of its signs to the reality that they signify. " While the messages of one bee control the flight of an- other to blossoms and prey, these messages are not decoded and trans- mitted by the second bee. By contrast, "the form in which language is ex- pressed . . . itself defines subjectivity. Language says: 'You will go here, and when you see this, you will turn off there. ' In other words: it refers itself to the discourse of the other. "214
In yet other words: bees are projectiles, and humans, cruise missiles. One is given objective data on angles and distances by a dance, the other, a command of free will. Computers operating on IF-THEN commands are therefore machine subjects. Electronics, a tube monster since Bletchley Park, replaces discourse, and programmability replaces free will.
Not for nothing was Zuse "frankly, nervous" about his algorithmic golems and their "halting problem. " Not for nothing did the Henschel Works or the Ministry of Aviation assign the development of cruise mis- siles to these golems. On all fronts, from top-secret cryptoanalysis to the most spectacular future weapons offensive, the Second World War de- volved from humans and soldiers to machine subjects. And it wasn't by much that Zuse's binary computers missed doing the programming of free space flight from its inception, rather than determining in the bunkers of the Harz the fate of the V2 at the last moment. 215 The "range of charges" that the Peenemiinde Army Test Site assigned to German uni- versities in 1939 included (aside from acceleration integrators, Doppler radar, onboard calculators, etc. ), in a rather visionary way, what Wernher von Braun described as "the first attempt at electric digital computa- tion. "216 The weapon as subject required a corresponding brain.
But since the commander in chief of the German army (whom Syber- berg has called the "greatest filmmaker of all time")217 did not believe in self-guided weapons on the actual rocket testing site, but only during their demonstration on color film at the Wolfsschanze,218 the entropies of the Nazi state emerged victorious over information and information machines.
At any rate, cybernetics, the theory of self-guidance and feedback loops, is a theory of the Second World War. Norbert Wiener testified to that when he introduced the term:
The deciding factor in this new step was the war. I had known for a considerable time that if a national emergency should come, my function in it [sic] would be
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determined largely by two things: my close contact with the program of comput- ing machines developed by Dr. Vannevar Bush, and my own joint work with Dr.