Paul Virilio
Cultural theorist and urbanist.
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When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution... Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.
What he resists is not technology proper, but the propensity for us to confer upon technology a salvific function. Virilio, in other words, resists the mythologizing of technology, and he does so because it is precisely by idealizing technology that we come to unthinkingly embrace it.
Time is not something that can be measured with a pendule. Time is something that we build together within a tribe, a family, a region.
The first deterrence, nuclear deterrence, is presently being superseded by the second deterrence: a type of deterrence based on what I call 'the information bomb' associated with the new weaponry of information and communications technologies. Thus, in the very near future, and I stress this important point, it will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed 'the integral accident' that is the continuation of politics by other means.
The thing about collaborators is that you don’t know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do. [In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official Militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.
Images contaminate us like viruses.
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