The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers) by Paul Virilio

The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers) Reviews

• 
  Uroš Đurković

  Ako se držimo onoga što je Virilio (u)mislio, živimo u vremenu posle informatičke bombe. Zapravo, živimo informatičku bombu. Ovo je doba preplavljenosti, ubrzanja, globalnih vibracija i zujanja bez premca u istoriji. Da stvar bude još gora, obilje medijski plasiranih informacija nema za cilj to da svet postane dostojanstvenije, slobodnije mesto, već zabunu. Svako ima svoje mesto u mondijalističkoj kakofoniji – svi smo roba planetarnog industrijalizovanog orkestra, čiji je tempo sve brži. Život u ubrzanju je odbijanje vrednosti. Kumulacija telekomunikacija i ekranska kultura stvorili su LAŽNI DAN – novo svetsko vreme (18). Računar stoga nije samo mašina za davanje informacija, nego i alatka vizije, koja virtuelizuje geografsku realnost afirmišući univerzalni voajerizam (21). Virilio u duhu antiprosvetiteljstva tvrdi da je tehnologija totalitarna i da taj totalitarizam obrazuje dogmu (42) – manje zainteresovana za istinu, nauka se, veli on, danas interesuje samo za efikasnost (8). A nauka bez savesti je, jelte, „propast duše” (9). Panoptičko telenadgledanje (120), kultura LIVE-a, zagađivanje ekologije osetnog (113), kao i zagađivanje razdaljina (115) i još mnogo verbalne pirotehnike Virilio je uložio u to da uzbudljivo demonstrira protiv sveta koji je izašao iz zgloba. Ključne ideje su mnogo jednostavnije nego što se čine, a ne bi bile zanimljive da su tako obznanjene: elektronski mediji presudno utiču na sve u savremenosti – od međuljudskih odnosa, preko politike, do poimanja prostora i vremena. Posledice upotrebe novih medija su raznolike i treba razviti posebnu vrstu pismenosti i opreza kako ne bismo bili korišćeni nego korisnici. U obilju informacija teško je sačuvati autentičnost doživljaja – neposrednost susreta sa svetom – a pitanje je, dabome, i šta bi to zaista bilo. Ali šta god da je u pitanju, uz sve što se knjizi može zameriti, Virilio misli zapaljivo, a to je inspirativno i potrebno. Potrebni su ljudi koji misle odvažno i opasno, a ne udobno i utabano.
• 
  Andrew

  There are some good points, but, like in Baudrillard, these are obscured by a writing style that seems to only consist of aphoristic hyperboles strung together without any cogent argument coming forth. Like if Nietzsche was some fucking retarded cyberpunk obsessive who made annoying comments in the back of a freshman year philosophy class. And, as with so many futurologists, he gets proven wrong really quickly.
• 
  Wythe Marschall

  The book is printed handsomely, and I would buy others in this series, particularly the volume of Derrida's.
  
  Further, Virilio offers genuine insight into the dangers of a hyper-connected global economy. He should be perhaps be read as an anti-technocracy/pro-regulation thinker of merit.
  
  That's as far as my attempt at positivity re Paul Virilio goes.
  
  Like Baudrillard, but without that writer's incontestable eloquence, Virilio charges confidently and glibly into and beyond the horizons of various contemporary techniques.
  
  Yet when it comes to futurism, to network theories, to medicine, to pure science, to technoscience, to his misreading and/or wholesale appropriation of Stiegler, to style, to weight, to arc...
  
  When it comes to all that makes a book of theory either deeply challenging but deeply rewarding in detailed analysis that leads to gestalt theory (Stiegler, Derrida, Deleuze, Negarestani, Serres) or zany and discipline-jumping but surprisingly tight in logic and rewarding in novel insight into the human condition (Bataille, Baudrillard, Foucault, Latour)...
  
  Here, exactly and always where it counts, Virilio comes up short.
  
  My overall response is that we must *stop acting as if techno-science is reversible, or as if we should even desire its reverse*.
  
  Every aspect of human life is moving faster, and we can't go back. Do I hate and fear this? Or do I, like Bataille during World War II, follow Nietzche and refuse to be constrained by the simplicity of what-has-come-before? (Though knowing, via Stiegler [via Heidegger], that all we are is built of what came before?)
  
  Science is faster now, and it is beholden to, funded by, and defined by technological innovation. Coupled together, pure science and technological innovation produce cures for terrible diseases, cleaner fuels, and so forth--not only a parade of bombs. These are truisms even a young child can understand, but Virilio, in his haste (*haste*, in a book lambasting speed!) to destroy the bombs, forgets.
  
  His may be a noble impulse, I don't know; it's deeply conservative, whatever it is: He bashes sexuality, all technological progress, and all global inter-connectivity.
  
  But I'm straying too far from the text. Here are just a few choice lowlights from Virilio's attempt to scare us out of the future:
  
  ---
  
  First chapter: Virilio bashes something he terms "extreme science." But I'm not sure that the first computer-assisted suicide is in the least confusing, unethical, or extreme. A similar man in the Iron Age would have used a sword, I supposed, or waited for cancer to consume him, horribly. A man in the Magdelenian would have thrust himself before the goring antlers of the reindeer or the horn of the rhino. He would have died, if he aimed to. His will, via whatever technique was available to him in his technical milieu, would have triumphed. (This "extreme science" suicide is one of the only examples given in the entire book of a genuine consequence of globalization/technoscientific acceleration/generalized "extreme"-ness.)
  
  P 54: What characterizes a "genuine discovery," and what distinguishes this type of scientific result from other (disingenuous?) discoveries?
  
  P 8: Virilio borrows heavily from Stiegler: Loss of time intervals, endless feedback... Is the ultimate fear of a technoscientific complex always arriving too early, before anything's actually happened?--I'm talking about genetics: We are afraid of *cancer cures* we haven't made yet!
  
  P 34: *Who* is the mysterious geneticist whom Virilio attacks? Why not name him? I don't think it's very relevant or useful to cite a string of science fictions, Hiroshima, and assisted suicide (which I believe has been convincingly argued for) and conclude that mankind is screwed. Stiegler very rigorously engages with the entire phenomenological tradition, with raw data about Internet usage and television ownership, with fact and theory. He concludes that mankind is potentially screwed, and he sets forth specific educational steps to help us get un-fucked. Stiegler never resorts to fearmongering. He engages with other thinkers and doesn't claim to have a comprehensive understanding of biotechnology or information science (though he certainly must have the latter).
  
  P 26: What does Virilio mean when he says we are pressured to "like" the Internet? We are not pressured; we do like it! It's a useful set of tools. Old people like it. Kids like it. Like the set of tools we call the motor car, it is both good and bad, expeditious and dangerous. Attention spans are shortening as we are becoming smarter in the quasi-autistic sense, at compiling vividly and efficiently raw sets of data, through cyber-interaction. Virilio has nothing new or useful to add here.
  
  P 32: Is Virilio serious in his attack on human cloning, on a nonexistent industry, on a technique used for medical science--in short, on the promise of tissue regeneration and organ growth? Which would drive the terrible organ harvesters out of business? Is he serious? He can't be serious...
  
  ---
  
  And that's where I stopped bothering to type up my disgust.
  
  In conclusion, Virilio's represents the most dangerous and disingenuous type of science communication, which is faux- or pseudo-communication. He knows just enough to throw doomsday together with some borrowed verve. He is no Baudrillard, who dreamed much bigger and in brighter colors.
  
  In some ways, perhaps Virilio is the Right-wing doppelgänger of critic Mark Dery, who backs up his essays on tech-related, often specifically American fears with data and logic, and who, most importantly--like Nietzche and Bataille and Baudrillard and the other good futurists before him--writes with a grim but recognizable sense of humor, always.
  
  We cannot know the future. But we can at least laugh, at our ignorance and our continually hope, like Charlie Brown teeing up to kick the football out of Lucy's tergiversating hands...
• 
  Tara

  If you are seeking prescriptive solutions or a historical/social/psychological analysis of how we ended up erasing "here" for "now," you won't be happy. But this is invaluable and precious as a map-making resource, of describing processes and trends which usually lurk in the subconscious and manifest only as dis-comfort and dis-ease. It was written before 2000 which makes it especially impressive. It's not dated at all; rather, it's wonderful that he was able to see what was happening during the 1990s when so few did as opposed to the smartphone/social media era when a few of the slumbering masses began to sit up and say "oh wow where are we?" All of this flows logically and necessarily from choices that happened at least 100 years ago, arguably the beginning of the Scholastic movement, and probably long before that.
  
  People should read it to know exactly how disorienting things are on track to become, and avail themselves of a bit of vocabulary to recognize the new landscape around them. The old frameworks of space and time are sagging beneath the enormous weight of our assault; what happens when they go won't be pretty.
• 
  Adam Goddard

  Just wait till the bro hears about rule 34
• 
  Mo'men Tawhid - تَوْحِيد‎

  ناقد للتكنولوجيا المسيطرة باعتبارها أداة من أدوات التحكم، وانتهاء عصر الخصوصية وأثر هذا على خيال ونفسية الإنسان وكيف أن الإنسان (المستهلك للميديا) الحالي يعاني نقص من تفاعلات معينة أصبحت من الماضي بسبب تغول هذه الأدوات.. وعلاقة التكنولوجيا بالعلوم، وكيف تكاد تسلب العالِم وظيفته التاريخية وتورط المستخدمين في خيارات لا يستطيعون تقدير خطورتها إلا بعد استخدامها .. من ضمن هذا آلية الموت المنظم مثلًا.
  أتاحت الآلة موت منظم تحت تصور رحيم، لكن في قرار يأخذ ثواني معدودة لا يمكن التراجع عنه بينما أمور أخرى تتطلب موافقات طويلة ومرهقة.
  
  الكتاب يٌعلن أن قطار العلم خرج عن مساره، والعالم أصبح أداة مسيرة لخدمة هذا الجموح، ويصفه أنه تحول تاريخي في وظيفة العالِم في المجتمع.
  
  نقد واسع لمواضيع كثيرة تفتح في الذهن آفاق مهمة.
  
  قراءة تورث من بعدها الحزن وقلة الحيلة، ولكن الفهم أول خطوة لإمكانية المقاومة وفهم عالمنا للتفاعل معه على نحو واع وليس كمستهلكين غافلين.
• 
  Jacob

  In this pessimistic outlook at the future of information, Paul Virilio shows us the negative potentialities, or, in some cases, actualities, of an interconnected globalism. Virilio shows here a conservatism in the traditional sense. Technology and information is presented as the next great threat to the earth, and – perhaps even – the world. Virilio makes the case that the interconnectedness of globalization has led to a plane wherein geography is negated, so that localism becomes extrinsic and the 'Here' is erased completely and these two are replaced by the intrinsic globalism and the 'Now'. Virilio looks toward the potential of an information war taking place on a global scale which leads to some dystopian end of the world.
  
  In some sense, Virillo is hyperbolic. One can easily sympathize with the conservative move towards technophobia, which Virilio could be accused of, and yet many of his examples only look at a single case, and derive potentials from those cases. These potentials have not yet been actualized, and may actualize in different ways than Virilio expects. I think, for instance, of the example of the sheep Dolly, and Virilio's look towards the potential of human cloning. While the case he lays out about human cloning does have potential, one might argue that Virilio's vision of the future, here, looks toward the most pessimistic outcome. That said, Virilio's future does line up with capitalistic endeavor's of the past (complete with a techno-panopticon), so it is easy to see where he is coming from.
  
  What is discouraging is how negative this text was. There doesn't appear to be any affirmation, unless one reads into the text an affirmation of the past. I think that this is a mistake. It is a false dichotomy to suggest that technology is either our salvation or damnation. I think that escapism is a weak proposition, and not at all a potential solution. It may be better to look towards someone like Donna Haraway in order to see the revolutionary potential within techno-informatics that Virilio seems so antagonistic towards. I think that the points that Virilio talks about are important, and integral to an understanding of the global political world in which we live, but we should also make affirmative moves towards something. Reactionary movements are seldom successful.
• 
  Alexa

  Definitely a very interesting theoretical read, no matter how you align with/against Virilio philosophically, and stylistically even more interesting.
• 
  David

  Virilio's book is a critique of media, technology and the collective (un)conscious much in the vein of Marshall McLuhan - his predecessor by decades - and a comparison between the two is enlightening. The Information Bomb speeds along, bolding and italicizing all the way, introducing neologisms and quoting articles from (popular) media every few pages, and generally leaving the reader with mixed feelings. Its framework, one I can only assume Virilio has established in his older work, is one focusing on velocity (of travel, of information, of progress,...) and analogies between different fields (world economy, left/right politics, obviously technological progress itself), with the aim of weaving an analytical patchwork capable of offering a definitive 'this is what's going on'. With that element as the only red thread, Virilio connects euthanasia machines and satellites, cinema and the transformation of paedagogy, and much more.
  Avoiding a pseudometaphysical foundation (unlike McLuhan's sensorium) for his theses, Virilio has the appearance of making more sense of things and in a few places being eerily prescient: despite being published in 1997, he tackles the merging of facts and the very topical 'fake news', the rise of blunt demagoges, the accelerated infantilization of popular culture and video game-driven youth isolation. A weird snag, however, is hit every time Virilio brings in morality. His criticism of the pervasiveness of the sexual and the criminal is pretty undeveloped -- why is (sexual) immodesty 'dangerous'? To whom? Isn't cultural infantilizing stimulating mass passivity and political withdrawal, rather than pushing disaffected youth into massive "vandalism and theft"? -- and as such presents probably the work's weakest link. At times, the reader is even led to believe that Virilio is arguing more from a general culturally conservative point of view, rather than an actively critical one.
  On the other hand, his diagnosis of an ever-accelerating technological development with no collective moral/ethical development to support, manage or curb it, is undeniably important, and he succeeds very well in instilling the reader with a sense of the undemocratic and totalitarian nature of a society dominated by forms of 'rational' technology: a corporate-driven, totalitarian determinism to regulate which we don't even have the most inchoate of judicial structures. Like Adorno, Spengler and McLuhan (more optimistic than the first two, more critical than the last one), Virilio stresses the importance of the inconvenient, the inefficient and the critical: we live in a society hell-bent on making us think it's 'unmade' and 'unguided', the product of historical necessity and not cynical commercial interests, and the more we join this delusion, the intenser its acceleration and the more unprepared we'll be when the information bomb finally goes off.
  
  On a minor note: Virilio's syntactically unfinished paragraphs seldom actually detract from the text's intelligibility, and his own marking of key terms is very helpful. Despite The Information Bomb's habit of interweaving the important and the anecdotal, the reader is never left floundering.
• 
  Anny Sweet

  A very negative view on the present and the future with some good points but no backup or argument. Virilio says about the end of the humanity, the end of the world because of the Internet era, however, wars existed before the Internet and every era had its challenges. He used a mixture of academical and "action story telling" words which made it harder to read.
• 
  Ivan Labayne

  2000s first world ramblings, 2010s third world manifestings, virilio's tendency to hyper-valorize technological infrastructures (genetics, Internet, military science, space exploration) is susceptibly matched with an oblivion of "less advanced" (but no less pressing) realities elsewhere, i.e. in places where technology is lagging behind due to uneven development inherent in capitalism
• 
  Jack Reed

  Virilio just says stuff sometimes and like it just makes no sense then he moves on without elaboration and pretends it never happened. Still I love him and he predicts everything correctly lol. Science’s complicity with the atrocities of the 20th century, and also the humanities’, is the best point he makes.
• 
  Liam

  In an world of unstable vicissitudes:
  
  ''The invisible world meta-city whose 'centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere'(Pascal)''(11)
  
  ''The Internet, the recently civilized military network''(12)
  
  Artificial ''substitute horizon''(14)
  
  ''The globalization of the gaze''(18)
  
  ''And can we really contemplate in the near future the industrial breeding and all-out commercialization of human clones, destined, like animals, for a living death behind the barbed-wire fences of some experimental farm in the depths of some prohibited area because at least there we wouldn't be able to see these fellows of ours or hear their cries?''(32-33)
  
  ''With pseudo-individualism, liberal hedonism being nothing more than 'every man for himself', the mad stampede generated by a general abandonment in which the level of exaction's increases and inhibitions explode. This tabula rasa is an ideal situation, a prime opportunity for a scientific futurology which declares itself resolutely schizophrenic and advocates the complete virtualization of living matter, 'humanity being what remains when you have taken from human beings all that can be touched and all can be seen''(33-34)
  
  ''Human beings could still cherish the hope of surviving themselves while at the same time having ceased to exist''(34-35)
  
  ''It heaps up, accumulates and condenses in each of us the full range of (visual, social, psycho-motor, affective, intellectual, sexual, etc.) detrital disorders which it has taken on with each innovation, each with their full compliment of specific injuries. Without suspecting it, we have become the heirs and descendants of some fearsome antecedents, the prisoners of hereditary defects transmitted not through the genes, sperm or blood, but through an unutterable technological contamination''(39). A science of excess, the eclipse of the real in aesthetics of disappearance, concerned only with the effect revealed by truth than a new discovery.
  
  ''The 'art lover' has been transformed into a silent witness wandering through galleries and museums which with total impunity contain the illicit products of wartime plunder''(46); ''what surrealism means officially: an advertising enterprise carried on with sufficient savoir-faire and conformism (Reference 2: Georges Roque, 47, caused by art's consideration as a consumer product to a hyper-excessive fetishization)
  
  ''We can envisage suffering passing without complaint; horrors going unbewailed, not that here would be anyone to hear the wailing; and anxieties going without a prayer - and without even an analysis''(72)
  
  Scientific voyeurism as the use of an dead Inuit's skeleton for display exhibition, without the living son's permission or knowledge, -he was not told even at the staged funeral
  
  Infantalism of modern culture, technology as prime facie desire for immortality
  
  Agree with Virilio's assessment of Nietzsche as ''not a philosopher''(98) as a means of praise in re-inquiring into all value judgements, presenting him and Marx as a ''paranoid interpreters of the apocalypic ultimatum of youth battling with the irreversibility of time''(98). Increasing global speed rendering bodily movement stationary. Virilio should not comment on the ''rationaliy'' of individuals in the market as such is irrational
  
  ''Babel is returning - as cosmic ghetto, city and world all in one - and perhaps this time it is indestructible.''(131)
  
  ''The limit-speed of the waves which convey messages and images is the information itself, irrespective of its content''(141)
  
  ''Not 'clean war' with zero deaths, but 'pure war' with zero births for certain species''(145)
  
  ''Gaze of dissection'' of the human being as represented by Cubism in Picasso
• 
  razonabilidad

  read this instead -
  https://humaniterations.net/2015/08/1...
  
  *****
  
  on the other hand, this is gorgeous -
  
  "How are we to conceive the change wrought by computerization if we remain tied to an ideological approach, when the urgent need is in fact for a new geostrategic approach to discover the scale of the phenomenon that is upon us? And we need to do this *to come back to the earth* — not in the sense of the old earth which sustains and nourishes us, but of the unique celestial body we occupy. To return to the world, *to its dimensions* and to the coming loss of those dimensions in the acceleration not now of history (which, with the loss of local time, has just lost its concrete foundations), but of reality itself, with the new-found importance of this world time, a time whose instantaneity definitively cancels the reality of distances — the reality of those geographical intervals which only yesterday still organized the politics of nations and their alliances, the importance of which had been shown by the Cold War in the age of (East/West) bloc politics."
  
  unfortunately this is the only place such ideas appear in this text, with its focus on "extreme science" rather than the military and media technologies which virilio has greater knowledge of. mark lacey & jason adams have both written excellent monographs on virilio as a thinker of affirmation, & i'd suggest turning to those first in order to frame his project in terms of its capacity for thinking emancipatory futures.
• 
  Paul

  I first read Virilio in college, when I was too young to understand what I thought about the world. Now I'm 26 (27 in a month!) and I know exactly what I think about the world. And I think the acceleration of time and the shrinking of the world by means of technology are extremely pertinent. Virilio's writing is in-depth and insightful, and not extremely difficult to understand. The problem is the guy is super conservative, and a bit doomsday about where things are going w/r/t technology. The way I see it, the Internet isn't going anywhere, so why rage against it? Sure, it sacrifices a great deal of authenticity for the sake of ease, speed, and ubiquity, but didn't the printing press do the same thing back in the day? No one's saying we should do away with books. In fact, technophobes are lamenting the Internet's inevitable and imminent defeat of books. Fast forward like 100 years into the future, and these same people will complain about how ____ is threatening to make the Internet obsolete, and what a tragedy and c. etc. Anyway, a lot of Virilio's ideas are ones I can definitely vibe with, but his conclusions are, at least in The Information Bomb, pretty reactionary. I'll keep reading his stuff, though. Because it's good. Conservatives should read more liberal thinkers, and v/v. That's a fact.
• 
  Bryan Kelly

  A readable, insightful and purely philosophical (i.e. refreshingly free of statistics, charts, etc.) look at how technology changes our experience of knowledge and time. The central and somewhat overblown point about the end of local time and the rise of instantaneousness is, fifteen years after this was written, not what I would consider the central problem of digital encroachment from either a philosophical or practical perspective. But certain passages do seem to accurately predict innovations like Facebook, and the section arguing that the faster technology changes the more sterile we become as a society is a personal favorite.
• 
  Martin

  This book was first published in 1998 but at times it is rather prophetic of recent times, especially in light of the global 2008 financial crash, and more recently in the USA with the 'scandal' of the NSA, exposing publicly the information war that that country has been engaging in for decades. Virilio links, among other things, an increasingly globalised commercial world with the control of information by the USA, and its pressure for global free trade with global hegemonic information war. Interestingly he also raises points on the commercialisation of the human body in genetics that anticipates arguments made in the book 'Genes, Cells, and Brains' which I read recently.
• 
  Rufus

  First encountered this book one bored afternoon spent in the college library. What attracted me was the book's appearance. It's a beautiful book. So I opened it and the ideas were interesting, but the tone and the style of the prose is more interesting. Frenetic. Hectic. Apocalyptic. Can't remember much, but I remember a lot of neologisms and words I haven't encountered before. It's an example of those books that is somewhat beyond my understanding to totally appreciate.
• 
  Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides

  I checked this out from the library in April 2007 but never got around to reading it.
• 
  Keith Seekwhence

  Been sitting on the shelf...will get to it.