Politics of the Very Worst

Based upon a 1996 conversation Paul Virilio had with French journalist PhillipePetit, The Politics of the Very Worst summarizes Virilio's speculations about the impact thataccidents will have on the planet now that we operate on one-world time. Virilio argues thataccidents have now lost all particularity. Accidents and events can no longer be confined to markersin history like Auschwitz or Hiroshima. Trajectories once had three dimensions: past, present, andfuture. But now, the hyper-concentration of time into "real time" reduces all trajectories tonothing. Consequently, an accident of time is bound to affect our entire being as well as the entireplanet. And this is the hidden face of technical and scientific progress that Virilio is attemptingto reveal, shrugging off any illusion we may have left about its alleged benefits.Globalizationdoesn't make the planet bigger, it signals the beginning of "the great confinement." Speed pollutesthe distances of the world. After the "green ecology" (the pollution of nature), we are nowexperiencing another, more invisible and mental, kind of pollution: the "gray ecology." Soon,Virilio suggests, we are going to experience the end of the world -- not the apocalyptic end, butthe world as finite. The communication revolution, the attainment of absolute speed, is thereduction of the world to a virtual city in which democracy is no longer possible. Thisextermination of world-space is a cataclysmic event. For the first time, history has hit acosmological limit.