Friedrich Kittler: “The realm of the dead has the same dimensions as the storage and emission capacities of its culture.”

For all their impact on the living and the lived environment, new technologies also mean new forms of death: the airplane, aerial death; the automobile, high-speed death; the atomic bomb, sudden mass death; and perhaps now, through the cumulative effects of technological development, its concomitant destruction of the natural environment through urbanization, deforestation, and the emission of greenhouse gases, we are coming up against a new form of death: a slow death, a death of populations protracted long into the future. As Kittler points out, however, it is not the mere fact of destruction and devastation or the manifold actual deaths that make up the realm of the dead. The realm of the dead is the realm of the representability of death. So, in a way, this new form of death—the realm of future deaths—could be thought as the result of information models capable of anticipating death. The expanding realm of the dead would, through this understanding, have everything to do with the storage and emission capacities of simulation, a system of models capable of reproducing death in advance, preproducing death, as it were. For us the realm of the dead is simulation.