360 Degree Head

“[In our era] the computer screen [becomes] the ultimate window, but a window [that] not so much allow[s] you to receive data as to view the horizon of globalization, the space of  its accelerated virtualization…”

Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 16.

We have to recognize that geographic localization seems to have definitely lost its strategic value and, inversely, that this same value is attributed to the delocalization of the vector, of a vector in permanent movement–no matter if this movement is aerial, spatial, underwater, or underground. All that counts is the speed of the moving body and the undetectability of its path.

Paul Virilio, “The State of Emergency” in Speed and Politics, pp. 107-108.

The media are the privileged instruments of the Union. They alone are able to control the social chaos of American panhumanity; they are the guarantors of a certain civic cohesion, and thus of civl security itself. Inversely … American democracy will make no real efforts to integrate its ethnic minorities, its factions, into a constant civilization, into a truly community-oriented way of life. For segregation is what sanctions the system’s hegemony of the media, on which rests the nature of the American State’s authority.

Paul Virilio, “Essay on Dromology” in Speed and Politics, pp. 107-108.

… the arms race has caused the margin of political security to narrow still further, bringing us closer to the critical threshold where the possibilities for properly human political action will disappear in a “State of Emergency”; where telephone communication between statesmen will stop, probably in favor of an interconnection of computer systems, modern calculators of strategy and, consequently, of politics…. the immediacy of information immediately creates the crisis …”
Paul Virilio, “The State of Emergency” from Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology (1977). Mark Polizotti, trans. (New York: 1986), p. 143.

It is no longer continents that have become agglomerated but the totality of the planet that is diminished. . . .The continental translation that, curiously enough, we find both in the geophysician Wegener, with the drift of land masses, and in Mackinder, with the geopolitical amalgam of lands, has given way to a worldwide phenomena of terrestrial and technological contraction that today makes us penetrate into an artificial topological universe: the direct encounter of every surface on the globe.
Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics