Brilliant, controversial and cantankerous. In his penetrating examination of our increasingly militarised and 'mediatised' existence that, he argued, replaced human agency, Kittler outlined with great energy the post-human historical condition. Perhaps his greatest academic transgression was to have such an emphatic sense of technology's triumph over the delusions of human agency, articulated in his writings on war and speed, mathematics and cryptography, in addition to the style of his claims, sculpted like a series of steps of military escalation, in imitative performance of the computerised world of total militarisation and technologisation that he portrayed.