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Open Sky (Radical Thinkers) by Paul Virilio (17-Jan-2008) Paperback
Writer and political activist Paul Virilio makes a passionate critique of information technology and the global media. OPEN SKY is a call for revolt against the insidious manipulation of perception by the electronic media and the infantilism of cyberhype. Virilio pleads for a new ethics of perception and a new ecology, to protect not only the natural world, but also the urban community.
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First published January 1, 1995
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About the author
Paul Virilio
140 books264 followersPaul Virilio is a cultural theorist and urbanist. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
May 5, 2014
"One day
the day will come
when the day won't come"
So there ya go. Now then--four stars and a "favorite?" How can such things be? Well, if you're the type of person who reads these things (I'm not), here goes:
1) There are probably five or six truly brilliant insights in this book, often presented in the profound/pseudo-profound sentences that comprise the bulk of an entire Wesley Morris film review. e.g., "real time" will triumph over space and distance, our vision will be altered by various means (biotechnology, improved hardware), "glocalization" will render us sedentary nodes at computer terminals, cybersex may result in the extinction of the human race, and so on.
2) And yet...and yet this entire book is just too poetic and precious for its own good. I pity the translator here; perhaps the original was beautiful and the garish Anglo-Saxon/Latinate fusion of the English language simply couldn't convey that. But even in the original, 150 pages to make the aforementioned points when one isn't even covering one's philosophical trail (by battling against other critics or offering any solutions to the problem being described) strikes me as expanded beyond necessity.
3) Virilio seems to regard this shift as a fait accompli, and from the perspective of several years later, he's been proved right. I'm genuinely fascinated to see how the children of today evolve into the college students I'll be teaching tomorrow.
4) Finally, the chapter "From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion" deserves a book of its own, one that is longer than 150 pages. "With cybersexuality," Virilio writes, "you no longer divorce, you disintegrate." As someone who has disintegrated too many online love affairs to count, who has explored (if not enjoyed) every debauchery available on the World Wide Web, perhaps that someone will be me. Even if the chapter doesn't quite fit with what comes before or after, I'm glad Virilio included it...but I wish he'd written more.
In short: an essential book, a brilliant book, but not a good one. Lots of jargon, lots of McLuhan-izing, no real engage with the big-time critical theorists who have already paved the way in this area...and such a slow read, for the most part. But my goodness there are a few beautiful parts.
the day will come
when the day won't come"
So there ya go. Now then--four stars and a "favorite?" How can such things be? Well, if you're the type of person who reads these things (I'm not), here goes:
1) There are probably five or six truly brilliant insights in this book, often presented in the profound/pseudo-profound sentences that comprise the bulk of an entire Wesley Morris film review. e.g., "real time" will triumph over space and distance, our vision will be altered by various means (biotechnology, improved hardware), "glocalization" will render us sedentary nodes at computer terminals, cybersex may result in the extinction of the human race, and so on.
2) And yet...and yet this entire book is just too poetic and precious for its own good. I pity the translator here; perhaps the original was beautiful and the garish Anglo-Saxon/Latinate fusion of the English language simply couldn't convey that. But even in the original, 150 pages to make the aforementioned points when one isn't even covering one's philosophical trail (by battling against other critics or offering any solutions to the problem being described) strikes me as expanded beyond necessity.
3) Virilio seems to regard this shift as a fait accompli, and from the perspective of several years later, he's been proved right. I'm genuinely fascinated to see how the children of today evolve into the college students I'll be teaching tomorrow.
4) Finally, the chapter "From Sexual Perversion to Sexual Diversion" deserves a book of its own, one that is longer than 150 pages. "With cybersexuality," Virilio writes, "you no longer divorce, you disintegrate." As someone who has disintegrated too many online love affairs to count, who has explored (if not enjoyed) every debauchery available on the World Wide Web, perhaps that someone will be me. Even if the chapter doesn't quite fit with what comes before or after, I'm glad Virilio included it...but I wish he'd written more.
In short: an essential book, a brilliant book, but not a good one. Lots of jargon, lots of McLuhan-izing, no real engage with the big-time critical theorists who have already paved the way in this area...and such a slow read, for the most part. But my goodness there are a few beautiful parts.
July 31, 2025
old man yells at cloud.
May 27, 2025
Another day, another french guy. Interesting book if u want to learn more about how time, speed, light, “dromospheric pollution”, and telecommunications all interact together to shape our perceptions and understanding of reality 😂. Flashes of really good insight here and there but many parts were boring and repetitive. Per usual, everything these guys lamented in the 80s and 90s has only 100x in severity. If only they knew how bad things really are….
January 15, 2009
Sunday: Of the books purchased today not the most scintillating but it was in tough company. The others were off the charts.
Tuesday: In response to Mia's review, below--
On such a serious topic, your review feels dismissive. Though you gave it five stars so I don't think you were meaning to be dismissive. Words like "now" and "obsolete" don't give any hints as to consequence or value of those meanings. As if humans could live with a vertical horizon and as if two-point perspective is an option among a series of types of perspectives. I'm only at the beginning but he seems to be talking more about Renaissance perspective in general, with one vanishing point, or two, or however many. To say that Renaissance perspective, however many points, is obsolete, is also to ignore what was before even that, which Virilio does not do. In other words, 2D rendering is not absolute or fundamental.
Tuesday: In response to Mia's review, below--
On such a serious topic, your review feels dismissive. Though you gave it five stars so I don't think you were meaning to be dismissive. Words like "now" and "obsolete" don't give any hints as to consequence or value of those meanings. As if humans could live with a vertical horizon and as if two-point perspective is an option among a series of types of perspectives. I'm only at the beginning but he seems to be talking more about Renaissance perspective in general, with one vanishing point, or two, or however many. To say that Renaissance perspective, however many points, is obsolete, is also to ignore what was before even that, which Virilio does not do. In other words, 2D rendering is not absolute or fundamental.
May 6, 2023
3.5 stars, some of it was kinda reactionary/conservative, but had an interesting approach to how instantaneous communication and modern technology fundamentally changes the ways we define our subjectivity. Particularly enjoyed his ideas about the shift from linear historically grounded time to an “infinite present”/chronoscopic time of underexposure, exposure, and overexposure. Comes from the same place as some of his contemporary Proto-accelerationist thinkers like deleuze and baudrillard but arrives at some different and potentially questionable conclusions. Read with a critical eye.
December 12, 2011
Fun and Funky!
This book was a wonderful, clear read. Anyone interested in the conjunction between neurophilosophy and the underlying logics of the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics should give this book a try.
This book was a wonderful, clear read. Anyone interested in the conjunction between neurophilosophy and the underlying logics of the transition from Newtonian to relativistic physics should give this book a try.
June 28, 2007
The horizon is now vertical.
Two-point perspective is obsolete.
Two-point perspective is obsolete.
October 15, 2025
In Open Sky, Virilio argues that, just as the transport revolution of the 19th century eradicated the friction of distance, the ongoing telecommunications revolution is obliterating all duration. What does this mean? That our relationship to — and perception of — time is steadily being warped and altered by the encroach of ‘instantaneity’. An instantaneity rendered possible by the birth of the internet, the screen, and the long-distance conversation.
This relentless encroach is compressing and condensing our temporal horizons, leaving us suspended in a perpetual present. There is no longer a sense of history or of future; instead, we are confronted with a totalizing, omnipresent ‘now’. The now of global-time, which eclipses spatial constraints and sits above distance, having broken free from its usual limitations — we’ve hit “escape velocity.”
This comes with consequences. The most blatant of which is the reign of the image over that which it is an image of — a supremacy of representation. The image no longer portrays reality so much as it constructs reality; it is reality. The identities we curate for ourselves, influenced by images and expressed through images, become our social form. And slowly, this form becomes us. Remove the mask and all you find is blank space. The mask is the face, the image is reality. We become digitally mediated beings, forever split down the middle: one half exists this side of the screen, the other, that side.
Virilio’s great fear is that this way of being — “terminally online,” in today’s parlance — reduces the agent into an object, a mere interface through which pulse and throb the electromagnetic signals that spit messages from one side of the earth to the other. We become inert. Static and stagnant. Worse still, we become atomized in our inertia. Isolated, disembodied beings. We substitute IRL interactions for the ping of notifications, but the latter can never truly replace the former. I’m inclined to share this fear, but then, I’m also a technologically challenged luddite.
When you see the overthrow of governments organized via app — I’m thinking of Nepal here — you realize that there are two sides to the coin. Yes, as far as the workaday fabric of our lives is concerned, the sleight of hand by which we’ve traded face-to-face interaction for screen-to-screen interfacing leaves us yearning for skin-to-skin. But at the cultural and political strata, we’re more connected and tapped in than ever before. There is space for collectivity, even if it doesn’t exist anywhere in particular. It extends globally, diffusely and amorphously. Before you know it, the con becomes the pro.
Beyond alienation and the death of duration, Virilio also fears that the explosion of telecom technologies will bring with it an unstoppable barrage of images. As expressed in one of the standout essays in this collection, ‘Eye Lust’:
"How can we resist this deluge of visual and audiovisual sequences, the sudden motorization of appearances that endlessly bombard our imagination? Are we still free to try and resist the ocular (optic or optoelectronic) inundation by looking away or wearing sunglasses? Not out of modesty any more or because of some religious taboo, but out of a concern to preserve one's integrity, one's freedom of conscience."
With the steady rise of generative AI models — and the corresponding flood of slop, visual and otherwise — this feels more pressing than ever. Especially when considering a downstream worry: the ready availability of pornographic content. Or, more accurately, the way in which content of all types is being made increasingly pornographic. Sex sells. Always has, always will. But it wasn’t always readily accessible — now it is. In fact, it’s quickly moving from easy-to-find to hard-to-avoid. Everywhere, sexualized imagery that dances a little dance on our reptilian brain, which is all too happy to oblige. Our eyes, our vision, slowly co-opted in the service of capital. Sedated by an unending flow of images, thumbs stronger than ever, we become a distracted underclass. Dramatic? Melo, yes. But still, there’s undeniably some validity to the drama, to the fear.
Virilio, ever the soothsayer, of course recognized this risk:
"Imagine for a moment that the oldest profession in the world were to become the biggest 'multinational' there is; better still, that the consumer society, looking beyond the products currently available at the supermarket, were shortly to turn into a telesexual consumer society. The multimedia world would no longer just be the casino so loudly decried by economists but an actual brothel, a cosmic brothel, the startling commercial success of the sex hotline repeating itself ad infinitum thanks to the prowess of interactive telecommunications."
In the face of all this, he calls for the formation of a new ecological sub-field, ‘grey ecology,’ which busies itself with that class of pollution brought on by mass digital media: the eradication of duration, the proliferation of speed, and the reign of the image. In the same way that we are outraged at the destruction of our planet, we need to be outraged at the alteration of our sense of time and the continued disembodiment foisted upon us by the digital realm. Quoting Paul Morand, Virilio reminds us that, "Speed destroys colour: when a gyroscope is spinning fast everything goes grey.”
Naturally, there are also shortcomings that undermine Virilio’s project. For one, he is very much a FRENCH THEORIST ™, and he’s not shy about it: neologisms everywhere you look, hyphens hidden behind more hyphens, medical and psychiatric language co-opted for no discernible reason beyond ‘style’. This makes for a painful, clunky, and over-engineered read. What took Virilio 150 pages to do could have just as easily been done in 50, had he opted for leaner prose. Especially when many of the essays in this collection have a significant amount of thematic overlap. It’s bad enough to have to slog your way through the textual equivalent of wet cement once, let alone two or three times. Maybe, just maybe, some of this tedium can be blamed on the translation, but I find it hard to imagine that Virilio’s style is any more palatable in the original French.
~~ All this to say, if you think my review is pretentious … boy do you have it coming ~~
Another gripe with the work is the borderline religious pessimism. Yes, I get it, we need to worry, and highlighting the potential upsides of technological change isn’t the best way of doing that — I understand. But at times it feels symptomatic of an atrophied imagination. That, or willful ignorance. Again, this is a bit of a silly complaint — like going to a sauna and complaining it’s hot — insofar as the pessimism is a methodological feature of Virilio’s undertaking in this book. Namely, to unearth the “generalized accident” that accompanies the advent of telecommunication technologies. In his words:
“Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us."
Even so, it becomes a bit tiresome after a while. And although diagnosis is imperative, it’s no good without corresponding treatment. Virilio does a great deal of diagnosing — and the prognosis seems dire — but he doesn’t offer much by way of treatment. He points to the issues, but he doesn’t provide any solutions. We need both.
This relentless encroach is compressing and condensing our temporal horizons, leaving us suspended in a perpetual present. There is no longer a sense of history or of future; instead, we are confronted with a totalizing, omnipresent ‘now’. The now of global-time, which eclipses spatial constraints and sits above distance, having broken free from its usual limitations — we’ve hit “escape velocity.”
This comes with consequences. The most blatant of which is the reign of the image over that which it is an image of — a supremacy of representation. The image no longer portrays reality so much as it constructs reality; it is reality. The identities we curate for ourselves, influenced by images and expressed through images, become our social form. And slowly, this form becomes us. Remove the mask and all you find is blank space. The mask is the face, the image is reality. We become digitally mediated beings, forever split down the middle: one half exists this side of the screen, the other, that side.
Virilio’s great fear is that this way of being — “terminally online,” in today’s parlance — reduces the agent into an object, a mere interface through which pulse and throb the electromagnetic signals that spit messages from one side of the earth to the other. We become inert. Static and stagnant. Worse still, we become atomized in our inertia. Isolated, disembodied beings. We substitute IRL interactions for the ping of notifications, but the latter can never truly replace the former. I’m inclined to share this fear, but then, I’m also a technologically challenged luddite.
When you see the overthrow of governments organized via app — I’m thinking of Nepal here — you realize that there are two sides to the coin. Yes, as far as the workaday fabric of our lives is concerned, the sleight of hand by which we’ve traded face-to-face interaction for screen-to-screen interfacing leaves us yearning for skin-to-skin. But at the cultural and political strata, we’re more connected and tapped in than ever before. There is space for collectivity, even if it doesn’t exist anywhere in particular. It extends globally, diffusely and amorphously. Before you know it, the con becomes the pro.
Beyond alienation and the death of duration, Virilio also fears that the explosion of telecom technologies will bring with it an unstoppable barrage of images. As expressed in one of the standout essays in this collection, ‘Eye Lust’:
"How can we resist this deluge of visual and audiovisual sequences, the sudden motorization of appearances that endlessly bombard our imagination? Are we still free to try and resist the ocular (optic or optoelectronic) inundation by looking away or wearing sunglasses? Not out of modesty any more or because of some religious taboo, but out of a concern to preserve one's integrity, one's freedom of conscience."
With the steady rise of generative AI models — and the corresponding flood of slop, visual and otherwise — this feels more pressing than ever. Especially when considering a downstream worry: the ready availability of pornographic content. Or, more accurately, the way in which content of all types is being made increasingly pornographic. Sex sells. Always has, always will. But it wasn’t always readily accessible — now it is. In fact, it’s quickly moving from easy-to-find to hard-to-avoid. Everywhere, sexualized imagery that dances a little dance on our reptilian brain, which is all too happy to oblige. Our eyes, our vision, slowly co-opted in the service of capital. Sedated by an unending flow of images, thumbs stronger than ever, we become a distracted underclass. Dramatic? Melo, yes. But still, there’s undeniably some validity to the drama, to the fear.
Virilio, ever the soothsayer, of course recognized this risk:
"Imagine for a moment that the oldest profession in the world were to become the biggest 'multinational' there is; better still, that the consumer society, looking beyond the products currently available at the supermarket, were shortly to turn into a telesexual consumer society. The multimedia world would no longer just be the casino so loudly decried by economists but an actual brothel, a cosmic brothel, the startling commercial success of the sex hotline repeating itself ad infinitum thanks to the prowess of interactive telecommunications."
In the face of all this, he calls for the formation of a new ecological sub-field, ‘grey ecology,’ which busies itself with that class of pollution brought on by mass digital media: the eradication of duration, the proliferation of speed, and the reign of the image. In the same way that we are outraged at the destruction of our planet, we need to be outraged at the alteration of our sense of time and the continued disembodiment foisted upon us by the digital realm. Quoting Paul Morand, Virilio reminds us that, "Speed destroys colour: when a gyroscope is spinning fast everything goes grey.”
Naturally, there are also shortcomings that undermine Virilio’s project. For one, he is very much a FRENCH THEORIST ™, and he’s not shy about it: neologisms everywhere you look, hyphens hidden behind more hyphens, medical and psychiatric language co-opted for no discernible reason beyond ‘style’. This makes for a painful, clunky, and over-engineered read. What took Virilio 150 pages to do could have just as easily been done in 50, had he opted for leaner prose. Especially when many of the essays in this collection have a significant amount of thematic overlap. It’s bad enough to have to slog your way through the textual equivalent of wet cement once, let alone two or three times. Maybe, just maybe, some of this tedium can be blamed on the translation, but I find it hard to imagine that Virilio’s style is any more palatable in the original French.
~~ All this to say, if you think my review is pretentious … boy do you have it coming ~~
Another gripe with the work is the borderline religious pessimism. Yes, I get it, we need to worry, and highlighting the potential upsides of technological change isn’t the best way of doing that — I understand. But at times it feels symptomatic of an atrophied imagination. That, or willful ignorance. Again, this is a bit of a silly complaint — like going to a sauna and complaining it’s hot — insofar as the pessimism is a methodological feature of Virilio’s undertaking in this book. Namely, to unearth the “generalized accident” that accompanies the advent of telecommunication technologies. In his words:
“Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us."
Even so, it becomes a bit tiresome after a while. And although diagnosis is imperative, it’s no good without corresponding treatment. Virilio does a great deal of diagnosing — and the prognosis seems dire — but he doesn’t offer much by way of treatment. He points to the issues, but he doesn’t provide any solutions. We need both.
December 17, 2022
I get that Virilio isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. For silly reasons but also because no translation in the world can dissolve the inherent convolution in thought. That said, for those who can see the way many of his visions have come to fruition this is a masterpiece. There is the Kurzweil crowd who gets swept away by the fanaticism of the spectacle and the predictability of the market. With Virilio you get the bigger picture coming from a place of understanding rather than control seeking. His books all tend to get better as they go because you eventually understand the concept he’s been rambling about in an unfocused way for the first half of the book. This one’s similar but then also requires a higher knowledge of physics and a parallel with political and economic paradigms. If you are prepared for that, you get how this book is one of the greatest achievements in the history of human thought.
October 8, 2014
Quite possibly the most important book you could read today. At times difficult to understand and at other times difficult to bear, this work is recommended for anyone trying to grasp the reality of the world today. Virilio offers no solutions but instead simply lays out where we are, leaving the reader to step into the madness and see for themselves.
April 1, 2020
Man's a good writer, probably on par with Adorno. This book has some funky phrases that are easy to remember yet profound. However, the rest of the content pales in comparison to these transient moments. I found the thesis to be rather reactionary and overblown. It flirts with critical theory at times but there is a lack of acknowledgement of its influence. Nice read, but not necessary.
October 2, 2020
Full disclosure: I do not agree with the prescriptions (whatever can be drawn from Virilio here) or with the general sentiment towards technology here. Whilst Open Sky is a very well written book, in the sense that it's rich with prose and baroque conceptualisation, particularly of speed and time, it falls demonstrably flat when it has to descend down to a digestible dimension into what this all actually means for the reader. Yes, in many ways technology comes with faults - integral accidents are an interesting notion to explore, but Virilio's total foregoing of any remotely economic analyses of the tech he is exploring is a constant source of frustration that reminds me of how well received Baudrillard is in the public sphere relative to how parochial, and oftentimes, circular the central thesis is. If light-technologies change the way we perceive reality, then maybe that calls into question our relation with reality itself? Is there anything fundamentally sacred (I know Virilio doesn't explicitly argue this) in the pre-world war period where we started to slowly digest mechanised travel through the railway, or was technological development always outpacing our capacity to consider notions of reality in the first place? Are we really at the mercy of technology here, or is it possible to reconstitute our relationship through a rigorous analysis of the social formation in which these devices and gadgets are deployed in the first place? Admittedly, I am very biased. As a linguist, computational models aid significantly in creating grammar formalisms that are able to capture a variety of phenomena in the mechanic constitution of language itself. The question there, as it is for Virilio, is history. Chomskyan linguistics to me is limited by its lack of consideration of history and social formations through its excessive bracketing, but it is only through our privileged perspective in being able to document and analyse past events that we are able to conceive of it as such. Consequently all the social upheaval brought with technology and the supposed distance that it generates (the most antagonistic of which for me was his chapter on cybersex where I could scarcely contain myself at the mention of 'universal condoms') is also met with the distance it eliminates in those willing to use it for good. I have crafted several meaningful relations and have the benefit of the entire assembly of human knowledge at my fingertips - I am able to learn at an unparalleled rate to my parents, and the improvement of communication technologies serves only to undermine the social structure that financially supports them in direct proportion to radical action. This total surrender to the electronic to me is in stark contrast to the realities of the pseudo-feudalistic social formation that they obliterate through an almost Hegelian movement of an enlightening. In short, my own experiences are totally contrary to those that Virilio warns against.
That being said, the prose and the conceptualisation are a treat for those who do not have the same experiences as me. I will not claim therefore that one ought to avoid the book or the author, but one should necessarily ask these questions, and I am very glad that Virilio has posed them. They could have simply been articulated in a better way. The sensation and conclusions I am left with are those of frustration and mild exhaustion, though at the same time I now have an increased interest in his influences (aside from Baudrillard) and in particular Bergson. Maybe the weather just wasn't right for me to read him, or maybe we have already attained the benefit of hindsight over Open Sky.
That being said, the prose and the conceptualisation are a treat for those who do not have the same experiences as me. I will not claim therefore that one ought to avoid the book or the author, but one should necessarily ask these questions, and I am very glad that Virilio has posed them. They could have simply been articulated in a better way. The sensation and conclusions I am left with are those of frustration and mild exhaustion, though at the same time I now have an increased interest in his influences (aside from Baudrillard) and in particular Bergson. Maybe the weather just wasn't right for me to read him, or maybe we have already attained the benefit of hindsight over Open Sky.
May 5, 2021
In Open Sky it may be true that Virilio has to some extent theorized our Facebook (or even Zoom) era, circa 1995. I think there's even a case to be made, because of his heavy emphasis on the notion of speed in this volume, that he simultaneously anticipated and denounced accelerationism, way before it could be said there was such a thing.
But perhaps I'm being too generous. I'm not sure why Virilio spent 145 pages to say so little. He does have a certain poetical sensibility, but what that adds up is to next-to-nothing wrapped in a language that sounds like it came from an early PK Dick novel:
Straight from the telephone age.
Other times, Virilio seems to be simply larding it on:
Really? Or another example:
In the end, I could only recommend this book if you find it helpful to discover that the baffling and trenchant technology-related problems of our era were both theorized about and cautioned against even when they were just being birthed, and you wish to read such findings written with an absolutist's poetic license.
But perhaps I'm being too generous. I'm not sure why Virilio spent 145 pages to say so little. He does have a certain poetical sensibility, but what that adds up is to next-to-nothing wrapped in a language that sounds like it came from an early PK Dick novel:
Meeting at a distance, in other words, being telepresent, here and elsewhere, at the same time, in this so-called 'real time' which is, however, nothing but a kind of real space-time, since the different events do indeed take place, even if that place is in the end the no-place of teletopical techniques (the man-machine interface, the nodes of packet-switching exchanges of teletransmission).
Immediate teleaction, instantaneous telepresence. Thanks to the new practices of television broadcasting or remote transmission, acting, the famous teleacting of remote control, is here facilitated by the maximum performance of electromagnetism and the radioelectric views of what is now called optoelectronics, the perceptual faculties of the individual's body being transferred one by one to machines.
Straight from the telephone age.
Other times, Virilio seems to be simply larding it on:
Speed not only allows us to get around more easily; it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely. Tomorrow, it will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body's sphere of influence and that of its behavioral ergonomics.
Really? Or another example:
A few souls were already talking about a hole in space some years ago; others, more recently, have been talking about a hole in time, the real time of the instantaneous transmission of historic events and, in particular, the Gulf War. This semantic vacillation seems characteristic of the perceptual disorder now afflicting our society, confronted as it is by the progress in teletechnologies and the dwindling importance of geometric optics, the passive optics of the space of matter (glass, water, air) which, in the end, only covers man's immediate proximity.
In the end, I could only recommend this book if you find it helpful to discover that the baffling and trenchant technology-related problems of our era were both theorized about and cautioned against even when they were just being birthed, and you wish to read such findings written with an absolutist's poetic license.
July 22, 2025
One would have to credit Virilio for his intervention at the level of "dromology" here, which has had its progenies in such astounding works as Mohan and Dwivedi's Gandhi and Philosophy. But here it seems, usually, more mundane than all that, mainly teasing out the implications of recent developments in technology for space, time, etc., which is paired with some pseudo-scientific jargon. However, the way that disability is tackled here must strike one as a bit odd, as is the idea that the rise in sexual assault allegations is reducible to this technological periodization.
June 18, 2020
The concern when reading critics of technology, virtual worlds, and telepresence (especially in today's age of COVID aka The Generalized Accident) is you tend to agree and see parallels with the current state, then end up concerned that you may more in tandem with Kaczinksy thought than you'd really like to.
January 13, 2021
If you're writing about digital technology you might want to start a bit closer to the present day than by launching into a treatise on the Big Bang. Confirms every negative stereotype anyone might hold about "philosophical writing". Eventually gets to the point, surveillance is bad... congrats I guess. Give this as a present to someone you really hate.
October 17, 2017
Too many short (one sentence) paragraphs, too much jumping around without fleshing out ideas, too much moralizing.
December 24, 2021
Yeah Paul, computers are wild, huh. An essentialist bedfellow of Heidegger and Agamben, but it’s an entertaining read.
September 24, 2022
Seems to misuse scientific jargon. Some insightful points about digital communication.
March 11, 2023
I might have understood 9% of this book, but that 9% does seem prescient
October 3, 2010
This book truly opened my eyes to new ways of looking at the ways in which technology affects our mental and physical orientation to space/time. The argument he outlines in this short inquiry into the human spirit is so convoluted that, during academic discourse, I am scarcely able to verbally explain even its most simple premises to others without getting lost in the cerebral fog of its more complicated ideas. Conversely, his presentation of the argument is so lucid, the syllogistic connectivity of its persuasiveness so masterful, that comprehension upon reading is as immediate as it is stupefying. Virilio is a visionary, one of the most insightful thinkers of our day and I am certain that he will be regarded as such for generations to come. In truth, I owe much to the intellectual enrichment attainted in reading this and many other books from one of the only second generation post-moderns to explore beyond the philosophical boundaries established by that same renowned consortium.
February 10, 2013
Virilio attempts to describe some of the dangers hidden but inherent in our digitally dominated world. Lacking the language to adequately describe how technology is altering our experience of reality, he instead relies on a prose that is poetic, metaphorical, philosophical, and loaded with neologisms. This prose, in addition to being translated from French, does not lend itself to easy understanding. The sense one gets, however, is a very real concern for the overlooked implications of a massively mediated world. Virilio sounds an alarm that is too often muffled by the naively hopeful optimism of Progress.
November 10, 2011
I wasn't really a fan of this book. Virilio seems like a smart dude, and he had some valuable cautionary tale type things to say but IMO he came off so prematurely pessimistic that it turned me off. Also for the first couple of chapters i was like WTF is this guy talking about?! Maybe it's the French to English translation? I don't even know.
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