As we extend into screen life, we build a digital body. What is this techno-hybrid being you have become? French intellectual Paul Virilio, author of “The Information Bomb” and “The Administration of Fear” is our witness, along with guest John David Ebert. With short readings from Virilio by Brent Ragsdale.
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Meanwhile, every day, records of where we visited, shopped, blogged or Tweeted are fed into algorithms determining what we see – not just advertising, but content. Information and disinformation flow together. Who does that leave on the ground, in your chair, the physical foot of the Instrument?
“In the same way that Virilio says that fear has become the new surround – I think that catastrophe has become our new environment. We are so surrounded with it. It has become so ubiquitous … every day on this planet some new catastrophe, inflicted by technology is in the constant process of unfolding. And global warming is simply one giant accident that is happening in slow motion, with us inside of it. We don’t even see it. We don’t even realize that we are inside a catastrophe.”
– John David Ebert on Paul Virillio
This Ecoshock program was originally Posted on December 15, 2021. Find all my extended notes in my show blog here.
Watch John David Ebert discuss Paul Virilio on YouTube PART 1
“The present Empire of Speed based upon computer-driven acceleration is one where there is no one in control because politics can no longer synchronize (keep up) with the pace of change that has become an end in itself.”
- Robert Hassan on the acceleration of everything in his 2009 book “Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society”.
“Crashes, derailments, explosions, destruction, pollution, the greenhouse effect, acid rain… Minamata, Chernobyl, Seveso, etc. [Bhopal, Fukushima…] In those days of deterrence we eventually got used, after a fashion, to our new nightmare and, thanks among other things to live TV, the long death throes of the planet assumed the familiar guise of one series of scoops among others. Thus, having reached a high degrees of ‘soft stupor’, we simply contented ourselves with ticking off the events, with enumerating the unfortunate victims of our scientific reverses, our technical and industrial mistakes.”
– Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb.
THE IMPACT OF CLICK-BAIT ON EYE AND BRAIN
“Over time, with the reliance on vision machines, the human body decreasingly perceives and recollects. Instead it simply receives whatever images flash before it. Virilio concludes that the body is reduced to a simple organism drawn to phatic images and other stimuli. The phatic image is…
’a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention—[it] is not only a pure product of photographic and cinematic focusing.… [It] is the result of an ever-brighter illumination, of the intensity of its definition, singling out only specific areas, the context mostly disappearing into a blur.” (Virilio, 1994, p. 14)’
Here Virilio suggests that, like infants, we are drawn to intense images, rather than exploring the underlying forces of what is at play.”
– Kirsten Emiko McAllister, SFU
I am reminded of something Margaret Atwood said that when we move faster than our legs can take us we leave behind our soul (or something like that). This episode should be required reading/listening in school.