Canned Goods

I was scanning Wired this morning and read the story, A Sneak Peak at a Fractured Web, concerning several governments around the world filtering the internet. This is not new news, but I’m a few pages into Virilio’s Speed and Politics and thinking about dromology as it relates to the internet and participatory culture, and in this case internet filtering. Admittedly, I’m wholly unfamiliar with Virilio’s work, so forgive if I misunderstand what he’s saying and mis-apply it.

From the first page, he talks of “the masses” as being a “multitude of passersby” and that the “revolutionary contingent attains it ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed” (3). He asks whether the power of the bourgeois State is (is in) the street and describes rivers, roads, coastlines, and railways as “channels of rapid communication.” It seems that he is arguing that the streets (or paths through a city) and not the city itself is where power lies. And, perhaps, we can make the analogy that the “Information Superhighway” are the “channels of rapid communication” of today. I’m sure someone out there already has, perhaps even Virilio. And as he states that the “doors to the city are its tollbooths and its customs posts are dams, filtering [my emphasis] the fluidity of the masses, the penetrating power of the hordes” (7), I began thinking about these nations’ attempts to control the flow of information coming in and what their citizens can and cannot access, think, and do. The internet moves information so quickly it threatens a government’s ability to control and thus possess its territory.

As I have said many times before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is the speed of light. And it is nothing else! Globalisation cannot take shape without the speed of light.

Again, perhaps, I stretch Virilio for my own purposes, but a fear of globalization is not only economic but also cultural, as in Farmers Branch, Texas and its new anti-immigration measures, “including one that makes English the official language.” So if your tollbooths (borderwalls) aren’t working, and you can’t filter the internet, you pass laws that limit participation.

Do any of you folks out there who are familiar with Virilio find my reading, admittedly limited to a few pages, problematic? And, as I’m mired in prelims reading at the moment, I’m debating whether to continue reading Virilio. So, as part of my Cost/Benefit analysis, do you feel Virilio would be useful as I study online participatory culture for one of my prelims essays?