SAARUTU · Critical Media Theory Library · Brief
The thesis the title carries: after the atom bomb, which used the energy of radioactivity to smash matter, a second bomb is detonating at the end of the millennium. This is the information bomb, which uses the interactivity of information to wreck the peace between nations. Virilio sets the two as a paired sequence, and by the final chapter folds in a third, the genetic (demographic) bomb, attributing all three as a trio to Einstein.1 The book’s organizing wager is an analogy held with absolute consistency across fourteen chapters: interactivity is to information what radioactivity is to energy.2 Everything else, globalization, tele-surveillance, the supermodel, the clone, the infantile citizen, is a deduction from that single equation.
The argument moves by a recurring rhetorical engine. Virilio takes a news item (a euthanasia machine, a cult suicide, a chocolate poster, a satellite outage) dated to the month, and reads it as a symptom of a structural reversal already underway. The brief preserves these anchors because they are what travel: Virilio almost never argues in the abstract for long, he argues from a datelined fact toward a structural claim and back. The chapters are not titled in the original; the labels below are this brief’s, and Virilio’s own sequence and emphasis are preserved as found.
One feature worth flagging up front, because it shapes how the book reads: the prose runs on coinages that Virilio treats as already established (globalitarian, endocolonization, trans-appearance, grand-scale transhorizon optics, the integral accident, world time). He rarely defines them on introduction; the meaning accretes by repetition across chapters. The brief tracks the recurrence rather than supplying a definition Virilio withholds.
Opens on a definition of truth as the verifiable, then turns it against contemporary science:
Page 1“If truth is what is verifiable, the truth of contemporary science is not so much the extent of progress achieved as the scale of technical catastrophes occasioned.”Science, after half a century in the East–West arms race, has pursued limit-performances rather than coherent truth, and in doing so has become techno-science, which Virilio defines in apposition:
Page 1“Modern science, having progressively become techno-science — the product of the fatal confusion between the operational instrument and exploratory research — has slipped its philosophical moorings and lost its way, without anyone taking umbrage at this, except for a few ecological and religious leaders.”The chapter’s lone cited ally against this drift is Pope John Paul II, footnoted as criticizing the militarization of science and its “culture of death” from the late 1980s (page 1n).
The move-structure: science abandons truth for immediate effectiveness (page 2); the analogy to doping in extreme sport is deployed, so that as anabolic steroids destroy the meaning of athletic effort, extreme science moves “away from patient research into reality to become part of a phenomenon of generalized virtualization” (page 2). The Rabelais tag carries the weight of the indictment:
Page 3“‘Science without conscience is mere ruination of the soul’ (Rabelais), and a techno-science without a consciousness of its impending end is, however unwittingly, merely a sport.”Science, which with Copernicus and Galileo was the science of the appearance of relative truth, becomes the science of the disappearance of that truth, cybernetic rather than encyclopaedic knowledge, “a knowledge which denies all objective reality” (page 3).
The chapter’s anchor case: the Bob Dent–Philip Nitschke affair. On Thursday 26 September 1996 Bob Dent, a cancer patient in his sixties, became the first person to use the Northern Territory’s “Terminal Act” (in force from 1 July 1996; the translator notes it was overturned 27 March 1997, page 4n). Linked to a computer managing his IV, Dent said “yes” once, then after the legally required nine days clicked “yes” a second time, with a lethal injection administered within thirty seconds. Virilio extracts the structural figure:
Page 5“From these facts taken as a whole — nine months to be born without any choice in the matter, nine days to die voluntarily, thirty seconds to change your mind — there arises the question of the limits of science, of a science which is here akin to therapeutic extinction.”The doctor’s role is confined to a machine that launders responsibility:
Page 5“There is much to be said about this ‘decisional death’, in which the doctor’s participation is confined to developing a buck-passing machine, the cause of active euthanasia advancing behind the mask of a cybernetic procedure for inflicting sudden death.”Nitschke is “no more responsible than a dealer in firearms or knives” (page 5), and the case is set parallel to Kasparov playing the machine built to beat him, a “new ‘fatal’ couple” (page 5). The chapter closes by routing all of it back to MAD, the doomsday machine deciding “the passive euthanasia of humanity” (page 6).
The interrogation of globalization: is the word a substitute for “internationalism” (too close to communism) or a reference to single-market capitalism? Virilio: “Either answer is wide of the mark” (page 6). What is revealed instead is not the “end of history” (Fukuyama, footnoted, page 6n) but the beginning of the end of the space of a small planet held in the electronic ether. The Aristotle tag does load-bearing work: “excellence is a completion,” and “perfect accomplishment a definitive conclusion” (page 6).
The central thesis arrives as a flat declaration:
Page 9“We are not seeing an ‘end of history’, but we are seeing an end of geography.”The mechanism: the loss of time intervals, the cancelling of distances by instantaneity, the substitution of world time for local time. Virilio introduces the Pentagon’s view (since the early 1990s) that geostrategy is turning the globe inside out like a glove (page 10), the global becoming interior, the local exterior. The Clinton inaugural is quoted as the threshold:
Page 10“‘For the first time,’ declared President Clinton, ‘there is no longer any difference between domestic and foreign policy.’”The real city gives way to the virtual city, the meta-city, the Pascal tag deployed: “centre is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere” (page 11). Anchor anecdote: mobile phones defeat the Los Angeles narcotics squads because dealer–user meetings are now “essentially de-localized”, “literally, anywhere” (page 12). The chapter ends on the Bachelard tag (“The destiny of every image is enlargement,” page 13) and the figure of the Earth as “that phantom limb” offered up for inspection in “the strange little window” (page 18), under “the globalization of the gaze, of the single eye of the cyclops” (page 18).
Built on Clinton’s 20 January 1997 inaugural, the “American Century” rhetoric set against the same address’s admission of a “run-down American model” (page 18, citing the White House press release, page 18n). Virilio’s reading is that America is the nation of perspectiva, of seeing-through, of the vanishing point. The case is built on Bill Gates buying not a Rembrandt but Leonardo’s Codex Leicester, which lets Virilio claim America is “more Italian than Dutch” (page 20), discovered by Vespucci and Columbus at the moment Alberti was introducing perspectival vision.
Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis is the figure that gets sustained engagement here (quoted at length, with the translator’s correction that the 1893 address was read in Chicago, page 21n; the “frontier has gone” conclusion, page 22n). The pioneer is defined by an appropriation through the eyes:
Page 20“The true hero of the American utopia is neither the cowboy nor the soldier, but the pioneer, the pathfinder, the person who ‘takes his body to where his eyes have been’.”When the frontier closes at the Pacific, America invents substitute horizons: Hollywood (Mrs Wilcox naming the 700-person development in 1903 because “holly brings good luck,” page 24), a “cinema of acceleration” producing “false frontier effects” to overdose (page 25). The 1930s California “blockade” (three police divisions on the Oregon/Arizona/Montana lines; mass raids and deportation of Mexicans, page 25) and the Wall Street crash figures (1929; 50% in near-poverty, 40% minimal sanitation, 18–28 million unemployed, page 26) supply the density. Closes on the question of whether we have the freedom to say “no” to the “promise” the “America of perspectiva and trans-appearance has been endlessly trotting out for 600 years” (pages 26–27), against the Barlow/EFF cyber-utopian slogans quoted from the 1996–97 Cannes Milia salon (page 27n).
Opens on Dolly and the requests already reaching “the famous Dr Wilmut” for exact copies (page 28). Virilio’s thesis reverses the usual periodization of the century:
Pages 28–29“As the century of unbounded curiosity, covetous looking and the de-regulation of the gaze, the twentieth has not been the century of the ‘image’, as is often claimed, but of optics — and, in particular, of the optical illusion.”The Kafka tag (“The cinema involves putting the eye into uniform,” page 29, sourced to Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka, page 29n) anchors the claim that optical hardware is now “omniscient and omnipresent” like a totalitarian regime (page 29). We are owners of our bodies and “also of the images of those bodies” (page 29), yet unknown general staffs steal our “optical clones” (page 30). The Rheingold citation (Virtual Reality, 1991, page 30n) carries the disposable-body line:
Page 30“Your conditioned notion of a unique and immutable body will give way to a far more liberated notion of ‘body’ as something quite disposable.”
The chapter darkens into the human-experimentation argument. The unnamed Japanese friend: “I can’t forgive the Americans for the fact that Hiroshima wasn’t an act of war, but an experiment” (page 31). Dolly “has, as the saying goes, ‘a past’”, the military-industrial past in which “scientific futurology and crime — all crime — have been closely associated” (page 31). The escalation: human cloning made legal by “committees of ‘the great and the good’” (page 32); a new sub-proletariat for nuclear catastrophe or genocide (page 32); the Clausewitzian soldier as “‘a resource to be mined like any other’, a disposable product” (page 33); the British chartering a prison-ship/hulk (page 33). The unnamed Nobel-laureate geneticist’s definition supplies the chapter’s coldest line, which the translator dates to March 1997 (page 34n):
Pages 33–34“… the complete virtualization of living matter, ‘humanity being what remains when you have taken from human beings all that can be touched and all that can be seen’.”The chapter closes on the figure that recurs across the book: the Lumière baby still guzzling its food on film “even though he long ago died of old age” (page 35), surviving oneself “while at the same time having ceased to exist” (page 35).
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Theory Underground · SAARUTU — internal production standard. Not a brief; not for third-party distribution. This document reconstructs the source by its own lights; comparative and contrastive work is reserved for the Critical Media Theory master reference (Postman, McLuhan, Mumford, Ellul, Baudrillard).
