As Speed Increases So Must Our Trust II: Unexpected Next Step, Research Time, 09/12/2014

As I thought about the basic idea that lay behind yesterday’s post, I had an intriguing idea. It was an answer to Paul Virilio’s critique of the accelerating speed at which information and material in modern human society moves. Remember that Virilio’s analysis is based on the notion that as communications and materials move faster and faster in a society, the more militarized that society becomes. Or at least, the more vulnerable to militarization the society becomes.

Virilio himself isn’t quite so hesitant as I am, but that’s because of a fundamental difference between he and I on the human capacity to adapt to high speeds. In this sense, for all his association with radical left politics, I find Virilio a conservative figure. He has little faith in humanity's ability to change with its changing world. In so many aspects of our existence, I consider humanity an immensely changeable and adaptable species. 

A foundational psychosis of our modern sensibility is the
simultaneous fear of mechanization and breathless
anticipation to become a machine.

The danger of accelerating speed in human life is that humanity’s control of itself will be overwhelmed. The prophets and theorists of totalitarian politics and life envisioned humanity as constantly accelerating (as in the propulsive image of the car on an empty highway for Marinetti) and embracing a mechanization that renders individuality superfluous until it disappears (as in Jünger’s nightmares of the First World War). 

Organic existence requires, in this perspective, slowing down and thinking. Only in slowness can we hope to take control of our existence, of the processes that determine how we live. In a slow-moving communications environment, possible knowledge accumulates at a speed that allows a single person to get on top of the details of every intellectual and political event and development. This is the myth of the early modern polymath, the idealization of men like Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton. 

When we are able to move slowly, we can take self-conscious control of every aspect of human life and politics. Comprehensive knowledge frees us because it empowers us to act as an expert in every domain of human life. Such slowness finds itself deluged in the propulsion of contemporary communication and material flows.

My first critique of this idea is that I don’t think such totally comprehensive knowledge was ever possible on an individual scale. Even if human society was ever so simple that one person could ever plausibly understand everything that was going on with any genuine comprehensiveness, the physical world around us was always more complicated than this. One aspect of this simpler, slower world that is too often romanticized is that everyone was incredibly ignorant about almost all of existence. Our knowledge has exploded beyond the scale where any one person can be a true master of everything, but it’s become more comprehensive as a whole of the world itself.

Here’s what all this has to do with the Romney-Obama campaign story I told yesterday. When an individual or a small group attempts total control of all of a complex field of action, their knowledge to control it is inevitably inadequate. The top Romney campaign brass would not let anyone else communicate without their knowledge, and they could not build their knowledge and understanding with the speed required for adequate response in our fast digital media environment.

The key factor was trust, enabled by the democratization of knowledge. Every member of the Obama digital media team was included in the intimate knowledge of the key messages and public images that the campaign developed. Having been welcomed into that knowledge, they were empowered to enact that knowledge in their communication. They knew the organization’s goal, and they already had the expertise in action to push that goal forward in their own venues. They could do so because no one at the top expected to have total control over every act of communication.

The lesson for our politics is this. We need not be afraid of a world of accelerated media and material flows. The fear lies in the inability of any one individual to master knowledge of every phenomenon as it changed. But a group can achieve what is beyond the means of an individual. A team working together to combine their specialties is more powerful than even a superman. Knowledge and trust binds those teams together, just as it binds together communities and societies.

Here is a key lesson underlying the anarchism — sorry, network politics — in my own political ideals. Our greatest enemies, the most fundamental forces of destruction in our world, are willful ignorance and fearful paranoia. Practical action in the world must be based on knowledge and our ethics at every scale of human action must be based on trust.

As Speed Increases So Must Our Trust, Research Time, 08/12/2014

I came across an article today that was very revealing not only of the power of contemporary social media, but its nature, which also put me in mind of some of the more abstract political philosophy that I’d read over the last year or so. In particular, I’m thinking of Paul Virilio, because it has to do with the speed of social media processes.

Daniel Kreiss teaches at the Media and Journalism School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He got several high-ranking people in the Obama 2012 and Romney 2012 campaigns to talk to him in obsessive detail about the social media strategies, organizations, and noteworthy events of the most expensive political campaign in the history of modern democracy. The paper was written like a bog-standard social science chunk of research academia: intro, lit review, methods and sources, findings, analysis. The content is fascinating.

What stands out about the paper is how brilliantly it illustrates the speed of Twitter as a medium. That speed affects the medium’s strong limits and incredible potentials. There are two examples. 

All the preparation in the world can't prepare you
to react with the speed you need to live.

1. Connectivity. Before the first Romney-Obama debate, the Republican team had a pile of infographics and tweetable material prepared to launch with every mention of a concrete Romney policy. The Mitt Romney twitter feed broadcast the accounts of influential campaign activists who’d be retweeting prepared material, like those infographics, before the debate, and prepared their dedicated followers to spread the Romney gospel far and wide.

The result was so many retweets of pre-approved Romney material during the debate that its sheer volume made blog-based and traditional journalists declare (with a little help from Obama's own lacklustre performance on the night) Romney the winner. It was a vision that looked organic, but was really deeply prepared.

But while the Romney team’s preparation was a virtue, it was also a terrible vulnerability. The Republicans could prepare for an event that they knew was a long time coming and seed the online audience, essentially, with plants whose volume would manipulate the wider perception of what public opinion was. They understood the dense connectivity of online media.

2. Spontaneity and autonomy. The Romney team didn’t understand the biggest problems of online media’s radically compressed time scale compared to other media. Kreiss describes a key difference between online and traditional media as their cycles of dominance. Online media moves immensely fast. The equivalent of dominating the 24-hour cable news cycle for an entire day is to be among the top trenders for one to two hours. Kreiss doesn’t mention this, but I'd say the older-media equivalent would be holding the front pages of a nation’s newspapers for about a week.

Virilio associates the human capacity to control a political movement – whether in information as I’m discussing now, or in the movement of people and soldiers – with humanity’s ability to handle its speed. A process that unfolds over weeks allows more control, and therefore freedom, than a process that unfolds and finishes before you even know it’s started. If you can move yourself with the movement, then you can maintain control. If the movement overtakes you, you’re sunk.

This is apparently a photo of Mitt Romney dancing to
"Gangnam Style." It is also evidence that typical
American Republicans do not understand the finer
details of popular culture, whether those details are
transformative or trivial.

What sunk Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, at least insofar as it moved through online media and the perceptions such media affected, was that it couldn’t keep up. The Romney campaign could prepare a great deal of pre-approved material in advance. But they were so paranoid about maintaining total control of messaging and public content* that anything needed to be approved by the entire campaign leadership before being sent out. Depending on the point in the campaign, that could be anywhere between 17 and 22 people. 

* Really, who knows why? I could speculate that it was paranoia over the possibility of a staffer making a gaffe, fear of the “liberal media” spinning even the tiniest of ambiguities into an anti-Republican talking point, or any other thing. I don’t know what they were thinking. This is the Mitt Romney campaign. Who knows what any of them were thinking?

This completely constrained the ability of the Romney campaign to respond to unplanned crises. The Obama team, meanwhile, had total autonomy. The upper brass trusted the digital media team enough (and they were trained well enough) on the major messages and images of the campaign to tweet without pre-approval. As a result, they could move as fast as Twitter itself.

That’s why, when Clint Eastwood went on his rant to the empty chair at the Republican National Convention, the Obama campaign could tweet the perfect reply within hours: a photo of Obama’s head and ears sticking over the back of the President’s chair in a White House meeting room, and three words, “This seat’s taken.”

Snap.

When your medium of communication moves beyond a particular threshold of speed, you have to trust everyone whose fingers are on the keyboards. Romney’s team was so paranoid about messaging and a hostile media that they kept a communications approval process barely suited to the speed of cable news: they could formulate, approve, and broadcast a response to an unexpected development by the next day. 

Setting an agenda in online media requires a response time of an hour. Perhaps even less. That takes lightning fast reflexes. But it also takes trust in the lower-level staff whose job is to physically broadcast those messages.

Individuality Only Exists With Time to Breathe, Research Time, 23/12/2013

A critic of Marxism and fascism for the
same reasons, Paul Virilio would be a
favourite left-wing thinker for many
contemporary libertarians.

Paul Virilio makes for a slight conundrum for me. I picked up his Speed and Politics a couple of years ago because I remembered that a colleague had praised his work and ideas. But I never got around to reading it until now, when I’ve been casting around for analytical ideas for the Utopias project. My posts on his work never seemed to get too many pageviews, and I’m still rather standoffish toward him. Nonetheless, he gave me some valuable ideas, and I’m happy to have read him. 

Let me explain it this way. When I was first looking for foundational ideas for the Utopias project, I thought Marxism was going to be a major source. But this ran into two problems. One, I found there was simply too much Marxism to sort through, with the entire field split into too many fine conceptual distinctions. Taking any set of ideas as key to Marxist thinking (or even making my own idiosyncratic set of principles from diverse works, as I’m more likely) would spark massive unnecessary conflict because I was letting another school go by the wayside. There was no way I could appropriate my ideas from the Marxist traditions for my own theoretical purposes without fights over my legitimacy. I’ll never study Marxism to adopt a school of it as my own thinking; I’ll study Marxism to appropriate its ideas for my own work. That’s how I, and the best philosophers, treat philosophy itself.

Second, these distinctions were all virulently opposed to the other, considering themselves to have the one true Marxism. I could refer to a book like Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism simply as a useful historical sorting tool: a set of signs to recognize the different schools of Marxist thought. But one of the first reactions from among my colleagues who knew the Marxisms in my detail was to dismiss Kolakowski as a biased thinker writing an en masse hit job.

Virilio has helped convince me that I don’t need to dive into Marxist scholarship and become a Marx scholar myself to study and use ideas that come from that tradition. Like Arendt, he’s another theorist who draws connections between Nazism and Stalinist communism, but expands his critique of the far left totalitarianism to the Marxist tradition in general, describing Josef Goebbels and Friedrich Engels as men whose aim was transforming society from more complicated structures to a pure mass. To make all of society proletarian is to militarize it.

Now, I don’t know Engels’ writings very well at the moment, but given what Virilio finds in them, I’ll probably look for the ones he refers to in the book. Because the Utopias project is about how ideals, held strongly enough, justify violence. This is most obvious in political revolution, but when an essential social condition for political revolution is the proletarianization or militarization of society, daily violence as ubiquitous as the state and numbing in its frequency becomes necessary. Only through forcing the complex desires of a people to conform to a unified will can those people become a weapon to realize a new political and social order. The people aren’t broken down so they can be reborn, but so they can simply become a blunt instrument to achieve the goals of an ideologue.

Technological participation shapes humanity into a mass
by overpowering us through sheer size. Fritz Lang was
something of a prophet here.

His analysis doesn’t only stop at totalitarian military interventions in colonization movements and the mobilization of domestic society. He even critiques the founding idea behind the welfare state. Virilio analyses social security as the state mobilizing its citizenry to work not as soldiers or the military itself, but to repair the domestic infrastructure by which social militarization operates. This is another example in a phenomenon I’ve seen lately in contemporary politics regarding the United States surveillance apparatus: left-wing and right-wing people agreeing on an issue, or at least leftists speaking in terms that rightists sympathize with. Because Virilio’s critiques of the welfare state sound exactly like some libertarian ones: it’s a government apparatus that interferes with people’s lives to control their labour power.

Virilio’s theoretical analysis of how societies are militarized also shows the phenomenon’s common features with colonialism. Imperialism is, physically and geographically speaking, the rapid expansion of territory where all native creatures in the way of the expansive force are swept out of the way, either co-opted or destroyed. And he uses some of the descriptions Goebbels used for Nazi eastward expansion (Ostkolonisation) to emphasize the colonial nature of the war. Just as Arendt discussed, the Nazi plan was not only the extermination of the Jews; they were just first on the list. If the war had lasted a few years more, or if the Nazis had won at least a victory against Russia, the Poles, various Slavic ethnicities, and the Russians would have been fed to the gas chambers because they stood in the way of German expansion simply by existing in the space Hitler and his movement wanted. Extermination of the colonized culture is the end goal of colonialism taken to its extreme. The Nazis only added explicit racial dynamics to the practice, did it in Europe, and took the extermination process to its highest degree of technological efficiency.

Yet even this horrifying intensity of military mechanization of a populace is outdone once nuclear warfare becomes possible. Total war under the mechanized brutality of the early 20th century chewed people into their component gristle, removing all individuality from people to become a pure force, a weapon thrown against other types of weapons. Marinetti’s and Hitler’s generation thought this was the most intense war could become. Total war makes people into a mass, but at least this mass still has some agency. 

Nuclear weapons concentrate militarized destructiveness to such a high intensity that a physically small arsenal can destroy the world. After all the bombs dropped and missiles fired, all it took were two bombs to end the Second World War in the Pacific. The arsenals capable of destroying hundreds of planets consist of only a few thousand weapons. 

Even worse for human agency, nuclear war is so intense that it has become automated. The Cuban Missile crisis, says Virilio in a quite brilliant analysis, was not ultimately about threats of nuclear attack itself. It was about the American military leadership’s concern that Soviet missiles in Cuba would cut the possible defensive reaction time to almost nothing, beyond the point where human decision powers could interfere. The hotline between nuclear state leaders is to interfere with the others’ decision process, giving the suspicious enough information that he no longer suspects that you’re planning an attack.

Because nuclear war can become literally automated. If a nuclear missile moves so fast that its time from a submarine or a silo to its target is less than a minute (a very easy goal to achieve with modern ballistics technology), then all humanity has been removed from war. It is only a matter of automated technology to screen for incoming missiles and scrambling counter-attacks. A networked computer can learn more about the situation faster than any human could. 

In nuclear warfare, all that a human can do in the face of automatic warfare
like the Soviet doomsday weapon in Dr. Strangelove, is ride to the end with
a theatrical gesture, an artistic flourish being all the power we have left.

So the technological movement of building weapons and infrastructure that moves continually faster first militarizes people to the point of destroying their personalities, making them into a mass man. But nuclear weaponry takes this to such an extreme that no human involvement is even required for military mobilization. If computers alone can process information fast enough to make decisions in the context of nuclear warfare, then humanity truly does become a mass without agency. Even collective agency becomes impossible.

Insofar as he’s described a framework for how this process can work, using the increasing speed and quantity of warfare information production and interpretation, Virilio is an incredibly useful figure for the Utopias project. The mass man is mobilization that erases individuality to make humanity a unified collective weapon. The erasure of agency becomes inevitable when the speed of mobilization and information continues to grow unchecked. Military mobilization smooths away differences and destroys the messiness of individual material existence.

“I Would Make Them Sweat. War, War,” Research Time, 18/12/2013

At heart, Speed and Politics strikes me as a philosophical analysis of modern warfare and its place in contemporary society. Another thing that strikes me about Speed and Politics is how much of its analysis has become largely obvious. For example, he discusses how war is the driver of technological progress, particularly in terms of how it encourages faster physical and communicative connections. 

Are you Gellin? Or are you invading Saxony?

Virilio’s examples are novel, at least to me. He discusses how this trend of using technology to increase the possible speed of movement has roots going back centuries. He leaves the most well-known examples behind to focus on orthopedics. The science of good shoes and foot health was developed during the Napoleonic period to keep soldiers from developing foot injuries on rapid marches to invade German duchies. Only then does he draw the continuity from the ancestors of Dr. Scholl’s to modern telephone and cable communications.*

* No, he doesn’t talk about the internet, but this book was written in 1977. I’m reading it for the theory, in case you hadn’t noticed.

What was novel for a philosophical writer in the 1970s — that technological progress is driven by warfare — is common knowledge today. What still matters in the book is the philosophical analysis, which has quite a few interesting elements. Another part of his analysis of warfare that took my fancy is his account of economic warfare: the blockade and the trade sanction. Economic warfare is actually more destructive than straight invasion or military assault because it cuts off the logistical lifeblood of a territory. Economic warfare literally prevents people from eating, prevents the country itself from eating. This type of warfare is enforced by naval fleets, at least in the paradigm he discusses. 

What’s remarkable about fleets as compared to more traditional warring bodies is their deterritorialized nature. It’s a better illustration of what it means to be deterritorialized than a lot of how Deleuze and Guattari described the term. The fleet has no specific home when it is in action; it doesn’t even have a location. When a naval fleet is after you, you don’t fear its actual presence. You fear its possible presence, that a hostile vessel could appear from anywhere at any time. It isn’t that you’re constantly under siege, but that you could be besieged from one moment to the next. A force without a territory inspires a constant sense of paranoia and fear. 

Yet there must be more to the articulation of these developments in everyday society than their use in warfare. Much of the talk I had heard about Virilio was how Speed and Politics diagnoses problems in society as a whole. Apart from the inextricable involvement of our supposedly peaceful society in brutal warfare, where the goal of  technological progress is to increase the efficiency of invasion and destruction, there doesn’t seem to be much critique. 

I mean, we knew that already, didn’t we?

A Man of Infinite Chutzpah, Research Time, 17/12/2013

One reason I think Paul Virilio sounds radical is that he says some very radical things. Under this sarcasm, I’m rather impressed with his gumption. His chutzpah. 

His radicality* lies in a technique that I feel has become standard, but which still feels refreshing. He uses his concept of how increasing speed of movement and communication militarizes society to explain not only explicit militarizations of society like the Nazi blitzkrieg, but innovations in armed conflict going back to the French Revolution at least.

* My word processor tells me ‘radicality’ isn’t actually an English word. This is why I’ve always considered myself cooler than most word processors. 

His examples include Napoleonic troops and the sans-culottes proto-communist radicals of revolutionary France. When you conceive of militarization in terms of a very abstract concept like the increasing speed of movement, you can understand many political developments in terms of their militarization. If you don’t use this kind of abstract thinking, then political developments can shock you. They appear to come from nowhere, and have no identifiable cause. 

Consider how shocked people were by Nazi German blitzkrieg techniques and the constant assaults of the secret police on civilian society. If you understand the militarization of conflict and society by the kinds of technology invented, you won’t see the continuity among many different militarization movements over centuries. With Virilio’s conception of militarizing speed, we can see that continuity, that totalitarian warfare is the culmination, or at least the highest intensity, of a movement that began with outfitting Napoleonic troops in proper shoes so their soldiers weren’t walking barefoot across Europe, or in using rhythmic singing to spur and increase their marching pace.

A historical hero of modern democracy and
a dangerous political radical. These two
don't contradict each other.

Of course, these basic innovations have existed for thousands of years. The Romans and Greeks of the imperial and Periclean periods had some fancy footwear, and they certainly had some catchy marching music. Virilio isn’t only interested in demonstrating this continuity between military marches and tank warfare. It’s an interesting idea to show how militarization consists in speeding up and precisely directing movement. There’s a rhetorical element to his historical interpretation as well.

We think of the totalitarian movements as separate from our own politics, a dangerous aberration of racism, thuggishness, and fanaticism. Virilio helps us see the potential for totalitarian militancy in even the most romanticized heroes of the left, like the sans-culottes radicals of the French Revolution. In this, he’s something of a kindred spirit for the utopias project, a conceptual friend. One important element of the utopias project is finding the common dangers in radically ideological philosophies of left and right. Insofar as Virilio also sees these dangers, we’re colleagues. We may choose a different focus for each of our analyses (Virilio has speed, I have the dream of Earthly paradise). But it’s good to meet a fellow traveller.

An Ideal of Totalitarianism, Research Time, 16/12/2013

While I can understand the basis of his excellent reputation, I don’t actually find Paul Virilio all that original. He was writing in the 1970s about the nature of technology, how its power transforms society by increasing speed of communication, production, and movement. Speed and Politics traces the qualitative transformations, the complete changes in human lifestyle, that increasing speed allows and forces. 

My only real problem, although I haven’t yet finished the book, is that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work was more successful in explaining the details of the actual forces involved. Virilio’s work, in contrast, looks for illustrations and metaphors of the transformations themselves, examining historical and social phenomena to show how speed has changed us. 

Virilio is one more voice of the 20th
century's central idea that technology is
inherently totalitarian.

The technique itself can be very insightful, especially in making explicit the political tendencies of an increasingly technological society. In his political openness, he is very useful for analyzing the connections between totalitarianism and technological progress. He discusses the essence of the police as being the control of traffic: being able to dictate where one can move, and what people can move where. 

One controls human material and communicative traffic through the administration of violence, or rather, making the use of violence itself administrative. The bureaucratic institution is such an administration, dictating who can move where and enforcing those decisions through direct acts of violence. It’s very useful to see how totalitarianism (particularly how Arendt analyzed it) is the purest articulation of the bureaucratic process: a bureaucracy that has authority to control every movement.

Yet we never quite got one of those historically. That was simply the general philosophical aim of totalizing society into a single mass movement. The actual totalitarian regimes we got (or that I’ve yet read any particular historical research on, to start), Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR, built their totalizing bureaucracy out of a swirl of contrary government agencies all constantly breathing down each other’s necks (Germany) and a single overarching institution whose members were periodically randomly purged (USSR). 

Virilio describes totalitarian institutions as the logical outcome of the technological drive toward speed. As the speed of communication and production increases, more control of that drive is required, so a unified bureaucracy takes control of the energy and channels it into a single popular movement. Through bureaucracy, the nation moves as one. 

But this is only the ideal. Actually building one of these bureaucracies requires a mechanism of generating fear to keep a unified movement from fragmenting. Generating fear and terror requires compromising the unity of the bureaucracy itself (either through overstuffing the bureaucracy with competing agencies or randomly purging, as per our examples so far). Virilio’s analyses come from the material world, but don’t seem to describe it.

How Having 30 Minutes to Talk Makes for Some Radical Changes, Composing, 13/12/2013

Most of my philosophical work yesterday consisted of editing my Bergson essay from the longer version under review at Social Epistemology to a shorter version that can go to the Canadian Philosophical Association. I don’t really want to discuss that one in detail because it’s still under review. So the arguments themselves in all their gory detail will be absent from this post.

But I can discuss the editing process, because this is more complicated than I had originally planned. See, the essay with Social Epistemology’s reviewers is pretty complex. I treat Bergson as a case study to comment on particular aspects of philosophical disciplinary relationship with the sciences. So the beginning and end frame the general questions, and the bulk of the middle takes up the Bergson case. The case itself is quite complex on its own: I examine key points of how he adapted scientific research on neurology (Matter and Memory) and evolutionary biology (Creative Evolution) to his philosophical inquiries, tracing how he ultimately went wrong in his formulations of relativity theory in Duration and Simultaneity. 

I do find Bergson legitimately fascinating as
a philosophical thinker and writer, even
though I have serious issues with him. Maybe
this is the best way to write philosophical
secondary material. I've always found
distasteful the academic attitude that your
target philosopher was right about everything.
Bergson will likely become a historical
specialization of mine, but I'll never be a
Bergsonian.

His neurological work is still relevant, because the basic concepts he discussed still hold true. His evolutionary work has become ridiculous because the science has completely moved beyond him, as it would when the discovery of bacterial diversity and DNA came well after his writing and his life. His treatment of physics he just wrote clumsily: all he wanted to do was establish that the theory of relativity can’t speak to the subjective experience of time, but he was interpreted as saying (and quite often actually said) that subjective experience gives a better insight into the nature of time than physics. I think some of Bergson’s ideas are really interesting and productive. Not all his ideas, though.

The CPA presentation is taking an entirely different tack, because I couldn’t jam all that analysis sensibly into 30 minutes. So it’s now an essay analyzing Bergson more historically. Specifically, it focusses on points in his philosophical development that would have led him to believe that philosophy was a superior form of knowledge to scientific inquiries, and how this arrogance also bled into his public life, and exacerbated political conflicts in the League of Nations, where he was active organizing their proto-UNESCO. 

Essentially, I’ve had to rewrite that paper in the opposite order that I originally composed it. The old framework was General Issues > Early Bergson > Starts Going Wrong > Public Disaster > Reasons Why > Political Dimensions > Lessons for General Issues. The CPA version has become Public Disaster > Core Evolutionary/Philosophical Concepts > Reasons for Philosophy’s Superiority > Political Dimensions.

As a writer, think about how radical the changes to a project must be if tighter time and space constraints are introduced. Highly complex concepts can’t always be introduced in any time frame at all, at least not in their original style of presentation. It is true that any concept can be explained quickly, but the explanation doesn’t always take the same form. Changes in how much time you have to explain an idea can seriously affect how you explain that idea. Condensing isn’t just a matter of trimming sentences and making a text shorter, but reorganizing it so that a faster explanation still makes as much sense as a more relaxed meditation on details. 

Speaking of how changes in time periods alter the nature of a creative work, on a recommendation from Edward Said, I’m finally going to check out Paul Virilio. Speed and Politics has been on my bookshelf for a long time, but was one of those that I never got around to, and there’s now a copy of Popular Defense and Ecological Struggles on my iPad too. 

I had a mixed suspicion about Virilio for a long time, because my first introduction to him was a presentation of a chapter from Speed and Politics at Jockey Club during my undergraduate years. It seemed interesting enough, but at the time too simple. I didn’t really understand how the speed of transactions in a society could alter fundamental social relations. 

Since then, I’ve read Deleuze, Guattari, and DeLanda, which has demonstrated the scientific principles behind qualitative phase transitions, and how those phase transitions operate in economic and ecological terms. So I’ve understood how changes in the speed of transactions and energy consumption can cause sudden massive changes to the system in question. Over the next week or so, I’ll see what Virilio has to say about this.