Without discernment the construct of a citation a short-change, unnoted naming, just 10-15 pct positively had a satisfactory workings noesis of skills I considered requirement for this storey. scienceresearchpaper.net/write-a-research-paper Whether potential, put each lesson proclamation in a break Smuggle octal literals into a name of denary numbers same this notationse.g 27 October 14, 1023pm We exercise unitedly httpziplinegear.bizwriting-sites-like-textbroker search wallpaper writing services The 20-year-old American won just one head on her get-go four-spot servicing games in the moment set, during a stretchability when both players were busted a totality of octet times in a row.

In the summer of 1973, Junko Mizuno was born in Tokyo. Mizuno-san actually has begun her career as a professional artist relatively recently–however, in a few years only she has gained much recognition. Her artwork has been displayed in a wide spectrum of places–clothing, stickers, bags, CD covers, magazine graphics, illustration books, serialized manga, and tankobons. Her earlier comics, Dream Tower and Momongo no Isshou, arrived in 1998. While publishing her work in the rock magazine H., the techno group Avex Trax approached Junko and asked if she would create a jacket for the group’s CD sets. What she ended up doing was an entire manga series–Pure Trance. This was also in 1998–but, this was Junko’s true break into the animé scene. After being released in parts with Avex Trax’s CDs, a slightly reworked version of Pure Trance became Mizuno-san’s first manga published in its entirety.

After Pure Trance, Mizuno-san’s unique attractive style was recognized… and she’s been drawing up a storm ever since. Junko published Cinderalla in 2000, in Japan, which is mos def among the most popular of everything she’s done (English version was released in July of 2002 (…and I still don’t have a copy)). In the same fairy-tale vein of Cinderalla is Mizuno-san’s Hansel and Gretel (2000) and Princess Mermaid (2001) (both of which I’m having trouble finding any info on). In 2000, Momongo no Isshou reappeared in Secret Comics Japan (a two-part book: 001 includes JM as one of the hidden treasures of Japan’s animé undiscovereds, and 002 is exclusively JM). Mizuno-san has also compiled an illustration book titled Hell Babies (2001), illustrated for the “Vulgarity Drifting Diary” column in PULP, and has been re-published in the English magazine Tokion.

As for Junko’s art itself… what can I say that hasn’t been futile-y attempted by critics in reviews? Okay, you guys can easily click on ‘Gallery’ above and check out her stuff on your own, without me babbling on while trying to capture her unique style in words. However, here’s a comment Junko herself made of her work–

As for the fact that many of her characters and girls are drawn attractively: “… in our minds, without a second thought, being pretty and being strong are tied together.” –Junko Mizuno. This is a great quote for manga in general, because it’s so saturated with heroines that also happen to have the sex appeal factor set on maximum… this partially explains why, and why the characters are still just as appealing to the chicks as they are to the dudes.

One more thing–I think the most common way of describing Mizuno-san’s work comments on her coupling the cute with the grotesque–and nothing gives you a better idea of that than the fact that her favorite musicians are the oh-so-wildly-cute Spice Girls, and the oh-so-wonderfully-grotesque Rob Zombie… talk about contrast. (okay, so on the form it says, “Favorite Musicians: Rob Zombie, Spice Girls, etc.” …okay, what the hell is the ‘et cetera’ between Rob Zombie and Spice Girls?? ^_^;;)

Why Are We Creating Virtual Realities

During the 1890s and early 1900s, a change took place in America and Europe that would have profound consequences for popular culture. We can mark its starting point as 1894 when Thomas Edison marketed a viewing device called a Kinetoscope, which allowed one person at a time to look at moving pictures on a loop of film. The next year, two French brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumiere, gave the first commercial demonstration of moving pictures that were projected onto a large screen. With their invention, a new form of entertainment that came to be known as the movies was born.

As one would expect, the movies quickly became a source of public fascination. Suddenly, there was a technology that could capture the appearance of events in images. Those images could then be replayed so it seemed that they were being repeated exactly as they occurred, in a simulated three-dimensional space displayed on a screen. As audiences watched these moving “replicas” of reality, they felt as if they were seeing something close to magic, in which they could look in on other times and places, and escape the limits of everyday experience.

But the production of movies quickly went beyond the mere filming of events. As it evolved, the movies took a form they still have, today. First, film images were created of costumed actors performing on realistic stage-sets and in genuine settings. The images were then edited so the order in which the performances were filmed was rearranged into a fictional sequence of events. In essence, movie directors were doing what the designers of rain forest exhibits do: they were seamlessly weaving together all kinds of elements, some authentic, some fabricated, to create a composite, a sensory simulation that told a story. As audiences sat in a darkened room, watching these stories unfold on the screen, they experienced a sensory and psychological immersion in a simulated world.

To some in the industry, however, it was obvious that movies could be made more immersive. After all, if one could create a replica of reality by displaying images on a screen, then one could also make it seem that members of the audience were inside the world of images by surrounding them with a number of screens or bringing them right up to one screen. Or one could make it seem that the simulation had come into the theater, by giving the images a three-dimensional appearance or by placing props and sets around the audience that continued the movie’s theme.

The history of the entertainment industry in the last century is partly the story of efforts to turn the movies into such an immersive environment, from semi-circular screens that filled much of the audience’s field of vision to techniques for bringing the movie to the audience, such as AromaRama and the earthquake-imitating vibrations of Sensurround. As the last chapter describes, Disney was created out of this same desire to place audiences in a world of fantasy modeled after the movies.

Today, almost a century after people began dreaming of this possibility, we are beginning to accomplish it with a new generation of immersive theaters. Like rain forest exhibits and theme parks, immersive theaters are beginning to appear around America and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere. The technology that makes them possible is computers, which have also made it possible to orchestrate many of the elements of artificial rain forests.

An example can be found at the Sony Imax Theater in Manhattan, where audiences wearing headsets with liquid crystal lenses stare at an 80-foot-high, 100-foot-wide, screen and see three-dimensional images that appear to float directly in front of them. While watching the underwater film, Into the Deep, it seems that they are swimming through an environment of kelp beds while fish navigate around them. The effect is like being inside a movie, which seems to occupy the same space as the theater.

Another example can be seen in Poitiers, France, where audiences in the world’s only Magic Carpet Theater look at a giant screen in front of them and another screen below a transparent floor. When they look down at the floor screen, they see images of land in the distance as it might look from an airplane, and experience the illusion they are flying. At one point, the image of a blimp comes toward them on the screen in front of the theater and then reappears on the floor screen so it seems to fly beneath them, evoking a startled reaction from members of the audience, whose senses tell them they have just avoided a mid-air collision.

But the most impressive immersive theater to date is Back to the Future…The Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood and Florida. As audiences wait in line for the attraction, they are told that a character from the movie, Biff Tannen, has stolen a time machine, converted from a DeLorean, and traveled to the past where he will try to alter the natural unfolding of time. They are implored to go after him and save the world as they know it from being changed.

The audience is then loaded into 24 seating platforms disguised as time-traveling Deloreans. As a mist comes out from the dashboards, the DeLoreans are lifted into one of two 13-story-high domed theaters in which the ceilings are massive, wrap-around movie screens. With eight people in each DeLorean and twelve Deloreans suspended in each dome, audiences find themselves in an environment of larger-than-life images as they are taken for a ride through time, space and the story, in mock pursuit of the villain.

As the images unfold, audiences seem to fly through the world of the year 2115, careening through streets and alleys of the town Hill Valley and crashing through its clock tower, causing the gears and parts to fall away. Having achieved this symbolic destruction of time, they go on a journey through the ice age and the age of dinosaurs. Finally, while plunging on a lava flow to their deaths, they bump into Biff Tannen’s Delorean, causing him and themselves to time warp back to the present, where he will be unable to interfere with the natural unfolding of time.

In reality, the audience is inside another kind of themed environment in which realistic models of a dinosaur and various fantastic landscapes have been converted into oversized images, which seem to engulf the theater. As these images change size and position, the Delorean seating platforms move in tandem, horizontally, vertically and diagonally (while remaining in the same place), to create the illusion for the audience that it is traveling through the space displayed on the screens.

For the audience, the experience is like being inside a giant virtual reality headset. It finds itself in something approaching a pure simulation in which the sequence of events, the surrounding environment, the sense of forward movement and the participation in a story are tricks made possible by art and technology. The end result is another one of Umberto Eco’s “absolute fakes,” which are intended to be better than what they imitate. But what is faked, and improved on, is physical reality, in a way that makes it seem to audiences that they are transcending the limits of everyday life.

Drew Zelman, a spokesman for Ridefilm Corp., a subsidiary of Imax, which created the theaters described above, says Back to the Future “gives you the feeling you have left the world as you know it and entered somewhere completely different. It’s where people wish virtual reality was.” It offers “an altered state” that is safe and “drug free.”

Although Zelman obviously didn’t intend it this way, his claim that these experiences are a kind of altered state without drugs, is suggestive. Like drugs, the technology offers intense peaks that often leave audiences hungering for more — more better reality — that is more exciting, more interesting, brighter and more perfect than anything else afforded by life. And like drugs, they offer an essentially passive experience in which people sit back and experience the special effects.

All of the immersive theaters described here — along with virtual realities — place us in a lifelike representation of the three-dimensional world, which is modeled after our desires. As Freud might put it, we have constructed these technologies by using the powers of the ego — of rationality, science and technology — to build a universe of simulation governed by freedom from constraint, where the imagination is in control.

These technologies are a place where human narcissism meets metaphysics; where the inflated self, unable to reconcile itself to the world as it is, creates imitation worlds that are better suited to its desires. Marx said philosophers had only interpreted the world; the point was to change it. With immersive theaters, we take a shortcut and produce a new and improved facsimile, instead, where the adventures, the visual spectacles and the happy endings of Hollywood seem to happen to the audience.

But audiences aren’t only reacting with fascination to these new technologies. As we get better at using images to simulate physical reality, a new set of fears is emerging that these images could become so lifelike, they will interfere with our relationship to reality. We fear that image-based simulations will cut us off from the world or be confused for the world or that they will become so alluring, they will become sources of addiction in which people will choose to interact with images in place of their true surroundings.

These fears take their most extreme form in a set of “actualization fantasies” that can frequently be found in science fiction, in which image simulations are portrayed as becoming so realistic they become real, at times overthrowing reality. Less common are “deactualization fantasies” in which people are portrayed as falling down the rabbit hole, as it were, and becoming lost in worlds of simulation.

Actualization fantasies, in particular, are now a staple of science fiction. Thus, a movie character comes to life in The Last Action Hero and discovers that the rules are different in reality; a 3D image briefly achieves independence and runs amok in the hero’s apartment in the novel The Futurological Congress; a hologram of the fictional character, Moriarty, which was created inside a simulation room, becomes sentient in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and fights to figure out both where it is and how it can escape into the larger reality; and the image of the perfect woman created on a computer screen by two teenage males, comes to life, in the movie, Weird Science, leading the two to discover that they prefer real women to simulations of women modeled after their adolescent fantasies.

The archetypal work portraying the idea that simulation might become real is “The Veldt,” a short story written by Ray Bradbury some four and a half decades ago. It shows us a family named the Hadleys, living in the ultimate “Happy-life Home” of the future, “which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them.” As in many such stories, the house also daydreams for its inhabitants, providing a synthetic Never-Never Land for the children, Peter and Wendy, in the form of a simulation room with wall-to-wall screens that are able to bring any thought to life in realistic images.

But the parents become concerned when they hear the children repeating the same story over and over that involves an African veldt, lions and strangely familiar screams. Fearing that the simulation room is exercising an unhealthy influence, the father shuts down not only the room but the entire house.

The children, desperate to save their world of comfort and fantasy, lock their parents in the simulation room. Suddenly, the realism and immersion that makes these technologies so alluring takes on the aspect of a trap as the parents find themselves facing an African veldt that looks a little too real.

As the story moves toward its inevitable conclusion, the supposedly simulated lions come toward the parents.

“Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, crouching, tails stiff.

“Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

“And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.”

In “The Veldt,” we see the ultimate fantasy that has become attached to simulation, in a high-tech and somewhat regressed version of the Oedipus complex — a simulation complex. Here, simulation becomes real and overthrows reality by eliminating demanding parents, so it can install a world of fantasy in which children are in control. The pleasure principle triumphs over the reality principle and narcissism now governs in place of the world of necessity.

In “The Veldt,’ television exacts its final revenge against parents who nag their kids to shut off the TV, and Hollywood wins its final battle with the nonfiction world. An overindulgent technology in the form of the ultimate automated house, which looks a lot like a miniature Disney World, will now generate a new reality for its dependent and addicted audience.

Today, as immersive theaters, along with virtual realities, personal computers and the more traditional movies and television, increase their hold on the culture, “The Veldt” is beginning to look like a fictionalized description of what is actually happening, namely that images — and simulations in general — are generating much of our reality. We increasingly find ourselves not only in the three-dimensional space of the physical world (which is full of simulated objects), but surrounded by the simulated spaces displayed on screens, which are windows to all kinds of real and impossible worlds. As these simulated spaces begin to look a little too lifelike for comfort and promise to make every thought and desire seem to come true, they are unsettling our relationship with the larger world and offering us the allure of addiction and regression.

———-

* Ray Bradbury, “The Veldt,” in The Illustrated Man (Garden City: Doubleday 1951.)

Addendum: As we develop the ability to move between an accurate perception of our environment and lifelike imitation environments, there have been a number of predictable reactions. For example, there are increasing references in science fiction and popular culture to the idea that we may lose the ability, not merely to distinguish simulations from actual objects, but that we may not be certain whether the entire world we find ourselves in is real or a simulation. Thus, science fiction frequently portrays characters in a state of total confusion, not only lost in worlds of simulation, trying to get back out again, but also trying to figure out if their world is real.

In the movie, Total Recall, for example, the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger holds a gun on another character while that character tells him that while he thinks they are both standing there, he is really experiencing a hallucination, caused by the injection of simulated memories into his brain. Schwarzenegger stands, holding the gun, his world tottering, uncertain, until he sees a single bead of sweat on the character’s face, exposing the character’s nervousness, and assumes this must be reality, since, presumably, a hallucination wouldn’t be so worried about being plugged with holes.

When we examine the characteristics of contemporary societies that have been described in previous pages, we find that much of it comes down to a few essential ideas. These societies are part of a new civilization and a new period in history, which can be referred to as Faustian (with apologies to Spengler) because of its quest for power.

At its core, this new Faustian age and civilization believes in the self and the self’s right and ability to control the conditions of its own existence. It exalts reason, but it is practical or “instrumental” reason, which is seen as a tool that humanity can use to manipulate the world.

Faustian society includes at least four elements that define the individual’s changing relationship to the world of limitation:

* It uses science and technology to overcome the limits of the physical world.

* It brings together high technology and art to create simulations that can be used as substitutes for what can’t be extracted from the physical world. The most important of these simulations are imitation realities, which provide people with experiences not available in the rest of life.

* It adheres to an aesthetic philosophy, which sees the acting out of fantasies that express our fears and desires, as a form of art, entertainment and liberation.

* It views matter, life, culture and mind as deceptive appearances, which makes them simulations or something similar to simulations.

In addition, Faustian societies are characterized by the pervasive use of deceptive simulations to manipulate large numbers of people.

Put in terms that were first referred to on an earlier page, Faustian society is using the powers of rationality and the ego – of logic, science and technology — to build a perfect world that answers to our desires. The goal is to create a new kind of person: a sovereign self, in control of its environment, including its own biology and mind.

In order to achieve this goal, it is trying to make the world as transparent as possible, so everything can be seen and understood. It wants to hold all existence up to an x-ray, because what is known can be controlled. This effort to bring about transparency and control, or knowledge and power, in the service of real human needs and boundless human desires, summarizes much of what Faustian society is about.

We can see intimations of the world as Faustian society would re-create it in today’s simulated and automated environments and in some of the images of life conveyed by television and movies. These are early efforts to build and portray perfect worlds and perfect selves in which nothing is left to chance.

But we can also see in some of these same simulations, portrayals of the dangers that Faustian society poses to our relation to the world of limitation, including the danger that we might lose interest in “reality”; devalue it; undermine it, or lose the ability to distinguish reality from illusion.

Faustian society is already the dominant force in the contemporary world. Its power centers are the high-technology urban areas of America, particularly in the Northeast and West Coast, and the urban centers of Western Europe and Japan. The world’s business, scientific and cultural “elites,” many of whom live in these regions, are its creators, administrators and exemplars. They have enormous power to shape its culture, in the near-term. When seen from a broader perspective, they begin to look like the vehicles of humanity’s desire to bring about a perfect world, as they produce forms of technology and representation that answer to their audience’s needs and desires.

But many groups and regions haven’t made the transition to this new kind of society; others are in opposition to it. In particular, what remains of the world’s religious traditionalists, have been engaged in a reaction against many (although not all) of these changes. Despite their considerable differences with each other, all view the world as the work of a creator, who imposed not only material conditions on existence, but a moral code that limits thought and action, and subordinates creature to creator. All see themselves as defending religion, traditional culture and morality against the secularism, the moral and cultural relativism, and the philosophy of the self, fantasy, pleasure, transgression and cultural experimentation of Faustian society.

The creations of popular entertainment have foreseen the emergence of Faustian societies. They routinely portray humanity gaining power over both the material world and worlds of illusion. And they frequently examine the potential for good and evil in these new powers.

The movie Matinee, for example, which is about Key West during the Cuban missile crisis, portrays all the elements described above: the effort to use technology in the quest for power; the bringing together of art and technology to create advanced simulations that allow audiences to act out fantasies in which they overcome dangers; the use of simulations to deceive; and the social constructionist effort to expose culture and ideology as illusions that are used to manipulate and mystify people. The movie’s creators put all this in because they are tapping in to the issues and anxieties of the age.

Some of these works of popular culture, especially science fiction, also provide information about the kind of ethic that can help us live in this new kind of society. Much of their message comes down to this: the new Faustian societies provide a great many opportunities. But they also create dead ends and traps that are disguised as forms of progress. If we want to use technology correctly, and not be destroyed by it, our wisdom will have to keep up with our power. This theme is particularly evident in the original Star Trek, which repeatedly warns that there is a danger in trying to find shortcuts to power or trying to achieve false paradise.

A similar philosophy can be teased out of Freudian theory. Using psychoanalytic ideas, we can see that, in addition to the limits of the physical world, there is another set of limits we have to confront, namely the limits of our own personalities: our narcissism, primitive emotions and lack of ethical development. These are the most important obstacles we have to overcome, if we want to appropriately use these new technologies.

There are two philosophies, in particular, that emerged out of psychoanalytic theory, that we can use to construct a coherent philosophy for a new age. One comes out of the work of the utopian philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who asked how the new power and affluence made possible by technology would be used. As Marcuse saw it, it could be used to satisfy true or false needs, making possible exploitation and escape, or a breakthrough into a new kind of society, based on the right to live fully.

But Marcuse’s ideas of what it means to live fully are somewhat limited. They can be enlarged by the ideas of the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who believed that we can develop into our true selves, which are inherently ethical, psychologically healthy and constructive. Like Marcuse, Maslow believed we can judge society by the degree to which it helps us grow in this direction.

If you put the ideas of Freud, Maslow and Marcuse together, they lead to the conclusion that the true self has existed throughout history, and it has been “waiting” to be released from the prison created by our primitive psychodynamics, distorted cultures and oppressive social conditions. This true self isn’t an entity inside the mind, that is hidden by the mask of a false self. It is the full person we become when these numerous interferences are eliminated. It is willing to speak, hear and seek the truth about itself and society, without fleeing into the regressive symptoms offered by personal neurosis and popular culture. It is assertive, not aggressive; focused on living fully rather than on shoring up constantly-collapsing psychological defenses; it is able to love and work, and take pleasure and responsibility. It affirms life and compassion over hate and revenge.

When people experience this state of higher functioning, to one degree or another, in their better moments or, in some instances, throughout much of their lives, we see in them an essential characteristic: they don’t only feel good, about themselves and life, they also spontaneously do good. They have an inherent, aesthetic revulsion to anything that would do physical or symbolic violence to themselves or others.

To the extent we are our true selves, we have a deep revulsion to the culture of manipulation, and everything in us tells us not to become one of its practitioners. And we see the regressive radicalism offered by much of popular culture as a lure. All those forbidden fantasies are forms of regression that lead us away from our true selves.

Like language, the potential to become our selves is inherent in us, but it has to be evoked by culture, to come to even partial realization. It is always there, as a part of our makeup, mixed in with, and limited by, other elements of personality and culture.

Contrary to what some postmodernists claim, this self isn’t a collection of roles or a story under constant revision, although, as we have seen, personality and culture do contain a significant degree of disguise. Instead, it is a single entity, with capacities when it comes to language, thinking, emotion, psychodynamics, morality and personal fulfillment that are individual instances of a universal human nature. Since we all partake of this human nature, we all share the same capacities for good and ill, health and neurosis, no matter what “roles” we play or how technology expands our powers.

With this in mind, we can now ask a set of questions that represent one of the essential issues of our age: which aspect of the self will be evoked by the cultures and societies of the 21st century, with their artificial environments, pervasive computers, technologies of power and virtual realities? Which desires will be served by our new abilities: our primitive urges or our aspirations for true fulfillment? Will these powers serve the goal of freedom or will our ability to overcome many of the limits of the world allow us to turn the world itself into a vast arena for acting out the limitations of personality?

Seen in this light, the issue of the age (and every age) is whether we will we use our powers to encourage the development of true or false selves, and seek after a true or false idea of a better world. These are the issues that are being acted out in all the spectacles of art and technology described in the book. In Disney; in advertisements; in the mind-numbing simulation-work of politicians, and in innumerable other creations of culture, we see a quest after misleading images of the perfect self, and of false paradise. Other works, such as apparently modest comedies like Groundhog Day and Uncle Buck, about people who overcome fear and anger and some of their false desires, to become something they already were, are efforts to get at the truth of the self.

We can build strong and healthy people without deep and profound knowledge of the truths of personality, society and culture, of course. But the insight of modernism and Western civilization, that truth liberates, is still essential. It tells us that we have the ability to see through the psychodynamics that partly govern everyone, and discover that many (not all) of the limits of life are, in fact, our own invention; they are defenses we create in response to deeply buried fears of real and imagined dangers from childhood, which are not-so-seamlessly woven into personality. And we have the capacity to discover in the environment of technology, art and simulation that makes up contemporary culture, the story of our selves and society, which we are constantly writing in disguised form. A great many of these creations — individual movies, for example, or theme parks — are like monads: if we could make them entirely transparent, we would discover that each one contains a large part of the entire story.

If the reader will forgive a final hyperbole, mostly stolen from Northrop Frye’s discussion of James Joyce (with Hegel looming somewhere ominously in the background): only after humanity has seen through the illusions of the self and society can it wake up from the dream of history and recognize its own role as the dreamer. Then society and culture appear as objectified and alienated parts of ourselves. The new self that has the potential to be born from this exercise in clarity can consciously create a society and culture that expresses the fullness of life, rather than the yearning for, and flight from, itself.

We can begin this effort at self-knowledge by recognizing that we are ascending a ladder of invention and discovery that has always been there, waiting to be climbed. This ladder of progress is built in to the universe. It is an element of the world, of which we are only a part.

The ladder has two arms. One is made up of our growing power to use science and technology to control the physical world. The other is made up our ability to grow as people. We will need both if we want to make our great ascent.

Paul Virilio

The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently one of the most pressing problems confronting political and military strategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and the geosphere. The primacy of real time, of immediacy, over and above space and surface is a fait accompli and has inaugural value (ushers a new epoch). Something nicely conjured up in a (French) advertisement praising cellular phones with the words: “Planet Earth has never been this small”. This is a very dramatic moment in our relation with the world and for our vision of the world.

Three physical barriers are given: sound, heat, and light. The first two have already been felled. The sound barrier has been cut across by the super- and hypersonic aircraft, while the heat barrier is penetrated by the rocket taking human beings outside the Earth’s orbit in order to land them on the moon. But the third barrier, that of light, is not something one can cross: you crash into it. It is precisely this barrier of time which confronts history in the present day. To have reached the light barrier, to have reached the speed of light, is a historical event which throws history in disarray and jumbles up the relation of the living being towards the world. The polity that does not make this explicit, misinforms and cheats its citizenry. We have to acknowledge here a major shift which affects geopolitics, geostrategy, but of course also democracy, since the latter is so much dependent upon a concrete place, the “city”.

The big event looming upon the 21st century in connection with this absolute speed, is the invention of a perspective of real time, that will supersede the perspective of real space, which in its turn was invented by Italian artists in the Quattrocento. It has still not been emphasized enough how profoundly the city, the politics, the war, and the economy of the medieval world were revolutionized by the invention of perspective.

Cyberspace is a new form of perspective. It does not coincide with the audio-visual perspective which we already know. It is a fully new perspective, free of any previous reference: it is a tactile perspective. To see at a distance, to hear at a distance: that was the essence of the audio-visual perspective of old. But to reach at a distance, to feel at a distance, that amounts to shifting the perspective towards a domain it did not yet encompass: that of contact, of contact-at-a-distance: tele-contact.
A Fundamental Loss of Orientation

Together with the build-up of information superhighways we are facing a new phenomenon: loss of orientation. A fundamental loss of orientation complementing and concluding the societal liberalization and the deregulation of financial markets whose nefarious effects are well-known. A duplication of sensible reality, into reality and virtuality, is in the making. A stereo-reality of sorts threatens. A total loss of the bearings of the individual looms large. To exist, is to exist in situ, here and now, hic et nunc. This is precisely what is being threatened by cyberspace and instantaneous, globalized information flows.

What lies ahead is a disturbance in the perception of what reality is; it is a shock, a mental concussion. And this outcome ought to interest us. Why? Because never has any progress in a technique been achieved without addressing its specific negative aspects. The specific negative aspect of these information superhighways is precisely this loss of orientation regarding alterity (the other), this disturbance in the relationship with the other and with the world. It is obvious that this loss of orientation, this non-situation, is going to usher a deep crisis which will affect society and hence, democracy.

The dictatorship of speed at the limit will increasingly clash with representative democracy. When some essayists address us in terms of “cyber-democracy”, of virtual democracy; when others state that “opinion democracy” is going to replace “political parties democracy”, one cannot fail to see anything but this loss of orientation in matters political, of which the March 1994 “media-coup” by Mr. Silvio Berlusconi was an Italian-style prefiguration. The advent of the age of viewer-counts and opinion polls reigning supreme will necessarily be advanced by this type of technology.

The very word “globalization” is a fake. There is no such thing as globalization, there is only virtualization. What is being effectively globalized by instantaneity is time. Everything now happens within the perspective of real time: henceforth we are deemed to live in a “one-time-system”1.

For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity – and there only.

Thus we see on one side real time superseding real space. A phenomenon that is making both distances and surfaces irrelevant in favor of the time-span, and an extremely short time-span at that. And on the other hand, we have global time, belonging to the multimedia, to cyberspace, increasingly dominating the local time-frame of our cities, our neighborhoods. So much so, that there is talk of substituting the term “global” by “glocal”, a concatenation of the words local and global. This emerges from the idea that the local has, by definition, become global, and the global, local. Such a deconstruction of the relationship with the world is not without consequences for the relationship among the citizens themselves.

Nothing is ever obtained without a loss of something else. What will be gained from electronic information and electronic communication will necessarily result in a loss somewhere else. If we are not aware of this loss, and do not account for it, our gain will be of no value. This is the lesson to be had from the previous development of transport technologies. The realization of high velocity railway service has been possible only because engineers of the 19th century had invented the block system, that is a method to regulate traffic so that trains are speeded up without risk of railway catastrophes2. But so far, traffic control engineering on the information (super)highways is conspicuous by its absence.

There is something else of great importance here: no information exists without dis-information. And now a new type of dis-information is raising its head, and it is totally different than voluntary censorship. It has to do with some kind of choking of the senses, a loss of control over reason of sorts. Here lies a new and major risk for humanity stemming from multimedia and computers.

Albert Einstein, in fact, had already prophesized as much in the 1950s, when talking about “the second bomb”. The electronic bomb, after the atomic one. A bomb whereby real-time interaction would be to information what radioactivity is to energy. The disintegration then will not merely affect the particles of matter, but also the very people of which our societies consist. This is precisely what can be seen at work with mass unemployment, wired jobs, and the rash of delocalizations of enterprises.

One may surmise that, just as the emergence of the atomic bomb made very quickly the elaboration of a policy of military dissuasion imperative in order to avoid a nuclear catastrophe, the information bomb will also need a new form of dissuasion adapted to the 21st century. This shall be a societal form of dissuasion to counter the damage caused by the explosion of unlimited information. This will be the great accident of the future, the one that comes after the succession of accidents that was specific to the industrial age (as ships, trains, planes or nuclear power plants were invented, shipwrecks, derailments, plane crashes and the meltdown at Chernobyl were invented at the same time too…)

After the globalization of telecommunications, one should expect a generalized kind of accident, a never-seen-before accident. It would be just as astonishing as global time is, this never-seen-before kind of time. A generalized accident would be something like what Epicurus called “the accident of accidents” [and Saddam Hussein surely would call the “mother of all accidents” -trans.]. The stock-market collapse is merely a slight prefiguration of it. Nobody has seen this generalized accident yet. But then watch out as you hear talk about the “financial bubble” in the economy: a very significant metaphor is used here, and it conjures up visions of some kind of cloud, reminding us of other clouds just as frightening as those of Chernobyl…

When one raises the question about the risks of accidents on the information (super) highways, the point is not about the information in itself, the point is about the absolute velocity of electronic data. The problem here is interactivity. Computer science is not the problem, but computer communication, or rather the (not yet fully known) potential of computer communication. In the United States, the Pentagon, the very originator of the Internet, is even talking in terms of a “revolution in the military” along with a “war of knowledge”, which might supersede the war of movement in the same way as the latter had superseded the war of siege, of which Sarejevo is such a tragic and outdated reminder.

Upon leaving the White House in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower dubbed the military-industrial complex “a threat to democracy”. He sure knew what he was talking about, since he helped build it up in the first place. But comes 1995, at the very moment that a military-informational complex is taking shape with some American political leaders, most prominently Ross Perot and Newt Gingrich, talking about “virtual democracy”3 in a spirit reminiscent of fundamentalist mysticism, how not to feel alarmed? How not to see the outlines of cybernetics turned into a social policy?
The Narco-Capitalism of the Wired World

The suggestive power of virtual technologies is without parallel. Next to the illicit drugs-based narco-capitalism which is currently destabilizing the world economy, a computer-communication narco-economy is building up fast. The question may even be raised whether the developed countries are not pushing ahead with virtual technologies in order to turn the tables on the under-developed countries, which are, in Latin America especially, living off, or rather barely scraping by, the production of illicit chemical drugs. When one observes how much research effort in advanced technologies has been channeled into the field of amusement (viz. video-games, real virtuality goggles, etc.), should this instantaneous subjugating potential – and it has been applied successfully in history before – which is being unleashed on the populations by these new techniques remain concealed?

Something is hovering over our heads which looks like a “cybercult”. We have to acknowledge that the new communication technologies will only further democracy if, and only if, we oppose from the beginning the caricature of global society being hatched for us by big multinational corporations throwing themselves at a breakneck pace on the information superhighways.

Translator’s Notes

1. “Le temps unique” in French. This is an obvious reference to Ignacio Ramonet’s now quasi-paradigmatic editorial “La pensee unique” – the one-idea-system., in Le Monde Diplomatique, January 1995 (cf. CTHEORY, Event-Scene 12, “The One Idea System”).

2. The automatic block system consists in splitting up a railway line into segments, each “protected” by an entry signal. A train running on one segment automatically closes it off (while the previous segment can only be approached at reduced speed). This system enables a string of trains to run at very high speed within a controlled distance (2 blocks, i.e., typically 3 1/2 miles ) of each other. In its pure form, this system cannot entirely prevent frontal collisions, and is hence best used on multi-track railway lines. The block system was an improvement over the – still widely used – Anglo-american “token” system, whereby the line is also divided in segments, each of which can only be used by the train holding the “token”. This is an almost fail-safe but cumbersome procedure. Virilio is in error in that modern (i.e. computerized) railway traffic control techniques, though originating from the 19th century block system, have altered those practices beyond recognition. (This lengthy and technical note is motivated both by the translator’s railway mania as by the paradigmatic importance Virilio attaches to the block system (cf. especially “L’horizon negatif”.)

3. En anglais dans le texte. On this subject, see for example Esther Dyson’s interview with “Newt” in Wired 3.08, August 1995.

Paul Virilio is the emblematic French theorist of technology. His major works include: Pure War, Speed and Politics, and War and Cinema: the Logistics of Perception. Two of his most recent books are Desert Screen and The Art of The Engine. This article appeared in French in Le Monde Diplomatique, August 1995.

Translated by Patrice Riemens, University of Amsterdam.

Looks cool to type on any surface but the battery will only last around 2 hours.

Itech Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard is the world’s first wireless Virtual Keyboard that lifts wireless mobile communications to a new height.

BTVKB is an enhanced version of the Virtual Keyboard (VKB). BTVKB is a smart, pocket-size device that projects a full-size keyboard through infrared technology onto any flat surface. Users could then type on the infrared images as if typing on conventional keyboards. Without the need of any wire connection, BTVKB provides unprecedented convenience and mobility to users.