The Futurism of the Instant: Stop-Eject

by Paul Virilio

With around 645 million people expected to be displaced Ð by wars and other catastrophes Ð by 2050, Virilio begins The Futurism of the Instant by looking at the future of human settlement and migration through the evolution of the city. What he finds is an accelerating exodus from the city as we have known it, an exodus that reverses the desertion of the countryside for the city in the past. This exodus creates a circulating city of transients on the move that will remove us further and further from our native lands en route to the ultimate exile, beyond planet Earth itself Ð something the world's mad scientists have already been planning for some time. Exploring the shifts in scale involved in such population flows and the fraught and complex relationship between sedentary settlement and globalization, Virilio considers what the resultant loss of identity might mean, not only in terms of the exhaustion of biodiversity, but also in terms of the catastrophic elimination of temporal diversity, with the compression and fragmentation of time enabled by the nanotechnologies in an ever increasing acceleration of reality. This previously unimaginable prospect is brought closer by the accident of an instant that wipes out all distinction between past, present and future within the black hole of globalized interconnectivity.

Genres: Philosophy

100 pages, Paperback

First published April 24, 2009

About the author

Paul Virilio was 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.

Reviews

[T.J. Price]

"This is the futurism of an uninhabitable instant ... in which it is no longer a matter of leaving in order to get there safe and sound any more so much as of getting out in order to clear the terrain for a future 'twilight of places' ... In actual fact, we are looking on, powerless, at the great wreck of the land, of all lands, in favour of the sky, of the sky's gaseous state, where waves, clouds and the storms they give rise to stir, meteorological features of a celestial body whose solidity gets blurred in the optical illusion of the speed of light."

if all doomsayers were this poetic, I'd probably have wanted to be one when I grew up

[Luke]

A good book alongside Open Sky. The idea that after the utopia of capitalism there is a regression and fundamental change in the perception of time as we get closer to the technology of the instant.

[Ivan Labayne]

kapatid ni braidotti sa pag-hahalellujah sa teknolohiya na parang ang lahat ng bansa ay parang japan, europa at amerika na naglalaro lang sa mga modes of technology na magta-transport daw sa atin out of earth ngayong namamata na lahat ng resources nito, modes of technology na babali sa lumang notion ng space-time.

though there was a fair hint about, but no same identifiable negative stance towards, the loss of history and the sweeping away of geographic space. among other polysyllabic cherries