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| Paul Virilio
Politics of the Very Worst
| Every technical
object has brought about accidents that were specific,
local, and situated in time and space. Through the
new communication technologies, we have created the
possibility of an accident that is no longer local
but global, and that will occur everywhere at the
same time. We are faced with an original phenomenon:
the emergence of the accident of accidents. |
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Based upon a 1996
conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist
Phillipe Petit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes
Virilio’s speculations about the impact that
accidents will have on the planet now that we operate
on one-world time. Virilio argues that accidents have
now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can
no longer be confined to markers in history like Auschwitz
or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions:
past, present, and future. But now, the hyper-concentration
of time into “real time” reduces all trajectories
to nothing. Consequently, an accident of time is bound
to affect our entire being as well as the entire planet.
And this is the hidden face of technical and scientific
progress that Virilio is attempting to reveal, shrugging
off any illusion we may have left about its alleged
benefits.
Globalization doesn’t make the planet bigger, it signals the
beginning of “the great confinement.” Speed pollutes
the distances of the world. After the 'green ecology' (the pollution
of nature), we are now experiencing another, more invisible and mental,
kind of pollution: the “gray ecology.” Soon, Virilio
suggests, we are going to experience the end of the world—not
the apocalyptic end, but the world as finite. The communication revolution,
the attainment of absolute speed, is the reduction of the world to
a virtual city in which democracy is no longer possible. This extermination
of world-space is a cataclysmic event. For the first time, history
has hit a cosmological limit. |
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