Paul Virilio and the Speed of War

As made clear in his works, Virilio has convinced me with his theory of dromology long ago, but with the advent of drone warfare, his wisdom seemed even more salient today than ever. He derived most of his cases from the first Iraq war, when CNN and modern cable news transformed the perception of contemporary war and he called it the "world war in miniature". I believed he'd be happy that he was absolutely right about the direction of development of war production, but he'd be even more sad that his prediction was right.

The electronicization of reality into video images and the light speed of surveillance have further evolved into a ubiquitous weapon that inserts technicians/analyst/non-combatants directly into the integrated battlefield. The "all seeing EYE" from the sky links Afghanistan with control rooms anywhere around the globe, making real battles more and more indiscernible from computer games and real killings more and more like wiping out a zombie. Though nothing new or unpredicted for us, the intensity and realness and the speed of such weapon system are still shocking enough.

Speed is power, Virilio says. No wonder apps online with the speed of light sooner or later will be converted into military techs. Or maybe they are military invention/with military implication from the very beginning. Like twitter that's capable of destabilizing a country, Facebook now is used to converse soldiers out of danger or into a counterinsurgency action, let alone Google's power to ignore the warning from the world's no.2 power. Very soon, we'll see 3D becomes the new toy of the military, enabling troops to fight a detached warfare and yet maintaining all visual or even more sensation from the field. Casualties will decrease. As long as the military spending keeps up, less and less understanding of the local human society is required. So in order to look at your enemies in High Definition, you don't see them anymore.

Virilio believes in technology only in the sense that that forces the course of history more and more into the wrong direction. We throw a new tech into an old tech's mess without even contemplating the full ramifications of either one. We blindly applaud all technological advancements in a global race ( dromo )track. That being said, ironically, the reality is we're already in the war era of socially networked drones.