It is impossible to think about contemporary urban culture without referring to Paul Virilio. A philosopher and urbanist who died on September 10, Virilio devoted himself to investigating the political and social implications of the acceleration of everyday life.
In his book Speed and Politics, from the 1970s, he showed how speed had become a value, with the speed of destruction becoming more important than that of production. In this context, the present becomes the fundamental category in a world contracting and shrinking as information technologies bring all places closer together.
According to Virilio, the increasing acceleration of life abolished the notion of the past. Whereas we once spoke of past, present and future, today there would be only two times: a recent past and real time, with the future belonging to machines and programming logic.
A scathing critic of the internet and its utopias, Virilio draws attention to how these transformations, driven by advances in telecommunications and the digital revolution, affect our cultural experience and social dynamics. In a lengthy interview published by the excellent journal Semiotext(e), which became the book The Administration of Fear, he comments on the explosion of social networks and mobile phones.
Virilio argued that thanks to the mobile phone, “the contemporary sedentary person is someone who feels at home anywhere,” while the nomad, in this world of new technologies “in which we carry the city with us,” became the excluded person: someone who, deprived of connectivity, lives in ostracism.
It is curious to think that we lost Virilio in the same week that Wired, one of the publications most attuned to the utopian vision of the internet, turned 25, celebrating the mirage of new technologies’ power to build a better world.
In dissonance with the euphoria of sharing culture, Virilio warns of how social networks impose a kind of “privatized communism,” fostering a culture that exchanges the notion of identity for traceability.
After all, we live under constant surveillance, watched and scanned, revealing ever more of ourselves. And accepting all this as a fate, a destiny of progress in our time. But promoting progress, Virilio says, makes us feel we are always behind. There are always updates to make—to our Facebook profiles, our equipment, our email replies. In other words, we condition ourselves, as he puts it, to live “a daily masochism under constant pressure.”
The time pressure of my Rádio USP column did not allow me to explore Paul Virilio’s work further. To learn more about the philosopher, I recommend watching recordings of his lectures, available here.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7 FM).
Access the playlist with all audio recordings of the Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP | Read all transcripts and posts.