Cyberesistance Fighter: An Interview with Paul Virilio

frances bolton fbolton at chuma.cas.usf.edu
Fri Apr 30 06:30:14 PDT 1999



>David Dufresne
>
>Cyberesistance Fighter: An Interview with Paul Virilio
>
>(For Apres_Coup Magazine)
>
>City planner and authority on speed, Paul Virilio's smile is as wide as
>his remarks are serious. "Who loves well punishes well," he likes to
>repeat. "When you like something, you hope it will progress. Those who
>like technology can only resist all that is regressive, self-centered or
>insufficient. The limitations of technology must be exposed," he says,
>somewhat annoyed by the excitement surrounding the information
>superhighway. An occasional Internet user ("I prefer to keep my distance
>and participate laterally. Frontal encounters are encounters where you
>never fail to be 'had'."), Paul Virilio has come out with Cybermonde, la
>Politique du Pire, an interview format book about the frightening and
>profound risks inherent in new technologies. He is as lucid as he is
>alarmist.
>
>- In Cybermonde, la Politique du Pire you talk about "propaganda"
>surrounding the Internet, going so far as to compare the media to the
>"Occupation" and your work to that of a "Resistance fighter". Isn't that
>an exaggeration?
>
>When computer science appeared in 1947-1948, computer scientists said it
>was the best of things but that it could also be the worst. We were coming
>out of a totalitarian period and computer science itself, through the
>birth of the computer, served in the struggle against totalitarianism. But
>the computer scientists of that time warned us that this new power must
>not become a "cybernetic" power, a new, worse totalitarianism. I am only
>forging a link with this tradition.
>
>If I have become a Cassandra, it is because the publicity became so strong
>in September of last year with the introduction of Windows 95, that I
>could only cry foul faced with this delirium of publicity. Serge Daney
>used to say, "During the Occupation you didn't talk about the Resistance.
>And the media are the Occupation". If the media are the Occupation, the
>multimedia are likely to be far worse. Just as they entail promise: the
>world citizen will be shaped by worldwide information. It's obvious. But
>we are not there yet. First we must fight against the negativity of the
>new technologies.
>
>- Because for you there is no profit without loss, no invention without
>accident...
>
>To invent something is to invent an accident. To invent the ship is to
>invent the shipwreck; the space shuttle, the explosion. And to invent the
>electronic superhighway or the Internet is to invent a major risk which is
>not easily spotted because it does not produce fatalities like a shipwreck
>or a mid-air explosion. The information accident is, sadly, not very
>visible. It is immaterial like the waves that carry information.
>
>- Yet you call yourself an "adept of technologies".
>
>I am an art critic of technologies, a fan worried about the propagandistic
>and sudden nature of the new technologies. When machines begin to be
>idolized, social catastrophe is never far behind.
>
>- Is the "propagandistic nature" of the new technology, according to you,
>due solely to the financial powers?
>
>If large corporations such as Time Warner, Microsoft, Disney, etc., are in
>the process of becoming giants, it is because they must be competitive on
>the worldwide level. The multinationals did not all aspire to worldwide
>status. But, today, a multinational corporation is necessarily faced with
>becoming worldwide. Hence, a considerable increase in publicity investment
>and an inevitable propaganda effect. The second aspect of this propaganda:
>the origin of technologies such as Internet. They derive from deterrence.
>Specifically, from the Pentagon and Arpanet, that network intended to
>resist the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear war. One cannot understand
>the development of information technology without understanding the
>evolution of military strategy. Since the atomic bomb is no longer a real
>deterrent, outside of superpower politics, an information war has
>occurred, an absolute power. This mixture is not to be trusted: on one
>side an investment in publicity; on the other a silence concerning the
>control of information by the military powers.
>
>- Yet, by giving the Internet user the possibility of being a receiver as
>well as a potential sender, it is hard to understand how information can
>be controlled.
>
>This is true. But you cannot focus on Internet and forget the rest of the
>information superhighway and the whole system. The term "linked" applies
>to a system of which Internet is only a part. The debate on the Decency
>Act is linked to a future media control. There exists a de facto
>Department of Worldwide Information: it's the National Security Agency
>(the NSA, the American intelligence agency that intercepts almost all the
>radiowaves in the world). The Internet and the NSA are linked in one way
>or another. How far will this complicity go? Is the Internet the
>Resistance fighter of the NSA Occupation? You cannot focus on the Internet
>and forget what surrounds it. What characterizes cybernetics is that it is
>systematic. Everything is connected, linked in a system of world power, in
>the hands of the Pentagon, and maybe tomorrow, of the Europeans....
>
>- Does this mean that channels of diffusion have been opened, the better
>to control them later on?
>
>The Internet is a stunt designed to legitimize the future information
>superhighway. It is in kind publicity, a loss leader, very attractive as
>well, which therefore ensnares those who might have some reservations
>concerning information made worldwide. The goal of both the spiderweb and
>the Web is to catch everything.
>
>- In your book, you claim that cyberspace has nothing to do with
>democracy, that "the point of absolute speed is to also be absolute
>power".
>
>I do not at all believe in what I call automatic democracy. I believe in
>reflection, not reflex. The new technologies are conditioning technologies
>and they are frightening in that they are related to the Audimat [French
>Nielsen ratings] and to polling. So-called electronic democracy will be
>the end of participatory democracy. While direct democracy may be viable
>for microscopic societies like the Swiss cantons or university AG's, it
>cannot be viable on a worldwide scale.
>
>- You even speak of a guarantee'd "regression", now that man has reached
>the limit of speed, that of real time ...
>
>Each time a wall is reached, there is a retreat. And history has just
>struck the wall of worldwide time. With live transmission, local time no
>longer creates history. Worldwide time does. In other words, real time
>conquers real space, space-time. We must reflect on this paradoxical
>situation which places us in a kind of outside-time. Faced as we are with
>this time accident, an accident with no equal.
>
>- What might this "regression" look like?
>
>Worldwide application brings about the autonomization of limited groups.
>In other words, of sects that share power. There is an Internet
>sectorization and sectarianism, an integral part of worldwide becoming.
>The nation-state is superseded by smaller groupings. There is a
>deconstruction of the nation-state which does not mean a progression
>beyond but a regression to the tribes, to the special interest groups that
>had preceded the nation-state... And it will only be by fighting the
>negative impact of progress that a parade will be invented; as the railway
>engineers did in 1880 when they met to prevent train derailments by
>inventing the block system to regulate traffic. It is our turn to invent
>the block systems of worldwide information. Before there are any
>accidents.
>
>- For you, as a City Planner, the new technologies undermine one of man's
>basic freedoms, freedom of movement...
>
>The teletechnologies of distance information reduce movement. When
>traveling is no longer necessary, the development of inertia or cocooning
>is to be feared. And that the overequipped able becomes the equivalent of
>the equipped disabled. There is a menace of infirmity and paralysis. But
>also a psychological menace, for the future generations of implemented
>interactivity who could see the world reduced to nothing. Generations may
>experience a feeling of "great internment", of an Earth too small for the
>speeds of transport and transmissions, a feeling of "incarceration". This
>is a fearsome distance pollution for the collective imaginary of tomorrow.
>We already feel this contraction of the world with the speed of supersonic
>planes or teleconferencing....
>
>- Hence, your idea of a "hypercity", a world city, of a "real time which
>is urbanized as soon as real space is de-urbanized.
>
>The virtual city is the city of all cities. It is each important city
>(Singapore. Rotterdam, Paris, Milan, etc.) becoming the borough of a
>hypercity, while ordinary cities become in some sense suburbs. This
>metropolization of cities leads us to conceive of a hypercenter, a
>real-time city, and thousands of cities left to their own devices. If I am
>correct, this would lead to a pauperization, not of continents but of
>cities, in all regions of the world.
>
>- Despite these harsh observations, do you find some merit in the
>information society?
>
>Yes. It finally poses the question of a common language. It cannot be
>otherwise if there is to be world citizenship. It is Babel, moreover. What
>we are witnessing is not the Tower of Babel but the return of Babel! Can
>the world have a single language? Is this unicity of communication good or
>evil? Another positive point: Information will make us Earthlings. In the
>sense that there is a natural identification of man and the Earth and that
>the question of world citizenship prompts that of Earth being where
>ecology would no longer simply be an ecology of nature, but a social,
>planetary ecology, where the human species would be united around the
>globe. But all this is also fearsome: these questions somehow accomplish
>what totalitarianism never even dared to hope.
>
>(Translation by Jacques Houis)
>
>
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