SAARUTU · Critical Media Theory Library · Brief
The thesis the title carries: after the atom bomb, which used the energy of radioactivity to smash matter, a second bomb is detonating at the end of the millennium. This is the information bomb, which uses the interactivity of information to wreck the peace between nations. Virilio sets the two as a paired sequence, and by the final chapter folds in a third, the genetic (demographic) bomb, attributing all three as a trio to Einstein.1 The book’s organizing wager is an analogy held with absolute consistency across fourteen chapters: interactivity is to information what radioactivity is to energy.2 Everything else, globalization, tele-surveillance, the supermodel, the clone, the infantile citizen, is a deduction from that single equation.
The argument moves by a recurring rhetorical engine. Virilio takes a news item (a euthanasia machine, a cult suicide, a chocolate poster, a satellite outage) dated to the month, and reads it as a symptom of a structural reversal already underway. The brief preserves these anchors because they are what travel: Virilio almost never argues in the abstract for long, he argues from a datelined fact toward a structural claim and back. The chapters are not titled in the original; the labels below are this brief’s, and Virilio’s own sequence and emphasis are preserved as found.
One feature worth flagging up front, because it shapes how the book reads: the prose runs on coinages that Virilio treats as already established (globalitarian, endocolonization, trans-appearance, grand-scale transhorizon optics, the integral accident, world time). He rarely defines them on introduction; the meaning accretes by repetition across chapters. The brief tracks the recurrence rather than supplying a definition Virilio withholds.
Opens on a definition of truth as the verifiable, then turns it against contemporary science:
Page 1“If truth is what is verifiable, the truth of contemporary science is not so much the extent of progress achieved as the scale of technical catastrophes occasioned.”Science, after half a century in the East–West arms race, has pursued limit-performances rather than coherent truth, and in doing so has become techno-science, which Virilio defines in apposition:
Page 1“Modern science, having progressively become techno-science — the product of the fatal confusion between the operational instrument and exploratory research — has slipped its philosophical moorings and lost its way, without anyone taking umbrage at this, except for a few ecological and religious leaders.”The chapter’s lone cited ally against this drift is Pope John Paul II, footnoted as criticizing the militarization of science and its “culture of death” from the late 1980s (page 1n).
The move-structure: science abandons truth for immediate effectiveness (page 2); the analogy to doping in extreme sport is deployed, so that as anabolic steroids destroy the meaning of athletic effort, extreme science moves “away from patient research into reality to become part of a phenomenon of generalized virtualization” (page 2). The Rabelais tag carries the weight of the indictment:
Page 3“‘Science without conscience is mere ruination of the soul’ (Rabelais), and a techno-science without a consciousness of its impending end is, however unwittingly, merely a sport.”Science, which with Copernicus and Galileo was the science of the appearance of relative truth, becomes the science of the disappearance of that truth, cybernetic rather than encyclopaedic knowledge, “a knowledge which denies all objective reality” (page 3).
The chapter’s anchor case: the Bob Dent–Philip Nitschke affair. On Thursday 26 September 1996 Bob Dent, a cancer patient in his sixties, became the first person to use the Northern Territory’s “Terminal Act” (in force from 1 July 1996; the translator notes it was overturned 27 March 1997, page 4n). Linked to a computer managing his IV, Dent said “yes” once, then after the legally required nine days clicked “yes” a second time, with a lethal injection administered within thirty seconds. Virilio extracts the structural figure:
Page 5“From these facts taken as a whole — nine months to be born without any choice in the matter, nine days to die voluntarily, thirty seconds to change your mind — there arises the question of the limits of science, of a science which is here akin to therapeutic extinction.”The doctor’s role is confined to a machine that launders responsibility:
Page 5“There is much to be said about this ‘decisional death’, in which the doctor’s participation is confined to developing a buck-passing machine, the cause of active euthanasia advancing behind the mask of a cybernetic procedure for inflicting sudden death.”Nitschke is “no more responsible than a dealer in firearms or knives” (page 5), and the case is set parallel to Kasparov playing the machine built to beat him, a “new ‘fatal’ couple” (page 5). The chapter closes by routing all of it back to MAD, the doomsday machine deciding “the passive euthanasia of humanity” (page 6).
The interrogation of globalization: is the word a substitute for “internationalism” (too close to communism) or a reference to single-market capitalism? Virilio: “Either answer is wide of the mark” (page 6). What is revealed instead is not the “end of history” (Fukuyama, footnoted, page 6n) but the beginning of the end of the space of a small planet held in the electronic ether. The Aristotle tag does load-bearing work: “excellence is a completion,” and “perfect accomplishment a definitive conclusion” (page 6).
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Theory Underground · SAARUTU — internal production standard. Not a brief; not for third-party distribution. This document reconstructs the source by its own lights; comparative and contrastive work is reserved for the Critical Media Theory master reference (Postman, McLuhan, Mumford, Ellul, Baudrillard).
