It is easy to see how Virilio can be viewed by critics as the fatalist who leaves us without hope or — as Timothy Luke and Gearóid Ó Tuathail suggest — a writer whose ‘rhetoric tends toward overstatement and hyperbole as he spins out observations on speed and violence’.1 In this chapter I want to examine Virilio’s concept of endo-colonization, attempting to negotiate a set of positions that can lead the reader into a ‘hyperbolic’ vision of society and security: the aim of the chapter is to unpack the concerns that underpin Virilio’s ‘negativity’ about security, technology and the liberal world order.
Virilio suggests that in a ‘chronopolitical’ time — when weapons of destruction appear to have put an end to war between great powers — the ‘military elite’ turns its attention inwards, toward the individuals, ‘mobs’, networks and failed/rogue states that pose a threat to the order and security of liberal capitalist society. This can lead to an interpretation of his position — fuelled by some of his comments — in terms of an ‘all-powerful’ military class that constantly finds new threats and enemies to maintain its position in society. I suggest that Virilio’s position points to many sources that push for the endo-colonization of society: the endo-colonization of society is also driven by the citizenry’s desire for security, by the ‘ideology of security and health’ in what he calls a ‘trans-political’ condition (a time when politics is increasingly obsessed with the ‘basic instincts’ of security, health and consumerism); and endo-colonization is driven by the technologists and protection sciences that design new technologies of security.
Virilio suggests that endo-colonization is made possible by a degraded political culture, a ‘democracy of emotion’ that is obsessed with dangerous otherness and difference, distorting our perception of insecurity. His comments on the democracy of emotion — and the ‘synchronization of affect’ — can be easily misinterpreted: Virilio could be interpreted as suggesting that politics and security is increasingly driven by basic emotional responses that are circulated by all the media that surround us; on this view, the Bush administration was driven by emotion (anger, revenge) in its response to 9/11 — and we were carried along with emotion, our desire for revenge. I suggest that while this ‘synchronization of affect’ can ‘capture’ us — and there have certainly been moments when I have been captured by this synchronization of affect, the standardized responses to events circulated by different media— there are limits to this interpretation: states and militaries, simply put, might create policies that respond to the fears and emotions of the citizenry but there can be strategic, economic and ethical limits. I suggest that Virilio’s lines of inquiry on the synchronization of affect and the democracy of emotion require some clarification: as I suggest through an encounter with Félix Guattari’s writings on fascism and capitalism, capitalist states do not want collective emotions to get out of control, to descend into the desire for unending war and fascism. What Virilio is suggesting is that a culture of fear dominates our sense of living with otherness and difference (the poor, immigrants, minorities): and this fear permeates our lives, our being-in-the-world.
What Virilio is suggesting though his use of the concept of endo-colonization is this: states might not be concerned with conquering territory or distant populations but they are concerned with policing the messiness of a world order that is generating what Zygmunt Bauman calls the human waste of the global economy.2 And while we might have a fear of terrorists that can result in wars and the endo-colonization of society, the pervasive ‘background noise’ of post-Cold War societies is a fear and anger toward those who are viewed as the mess and waste of contemporary life: this concern with policing the circulation of human waste and the ‘dangerous classes’ is one of the enduring ethico-political concerns in Virilio’s writing since the 1970s. Virilio has never bought into the optimistic liberal story of progress, of a world where technological innovation and the expansion of capitalism will improve the human condition on a global scale: it might create more and more spaces of the ‘good life’ around the planet but it will continue to produce populations that will pose problems for increasingly paranoid citizens/consumers. These fearful citizen/consumers will desire more endo-colonization, more technological solutions to the insecurity they feel. Endo-colonization is not simply a response to ‘imaginary’ fears (although fear and insecurity is distorted in the public sphere); endo-colonization responds to the fragility and insecurity produced by the globalization of neoliberal, networked societies in the post-Cold War world.
This chapter introduces these themes with an optimistic story about the future of security, technology and global politics: the story provides a way of introducing and explaining the logic of Virilio’s negativity about tendencies that underpin the propaganda of progress about the future of society.
The transparent global society
In a technicians’ version of an all-seeing Divinity, ever ruling out accident and surprise, the drive is on for a general system of illumination that will allow everything to be seen and known, at every moment and in every place.
Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception
There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of speed, technology and global politics: one optimistic vision of the future of global politics is found in an episode of an ‘online’ graphic novel — Patrick Farley’s The Spiders: Surprise Inspection3 — which was published in an issue of Wired magazine.
The Spiders: Surprise Inspection begins with a young woman — her username is Crazy_Diamond — sitting at her computer in what looks like her comfortable suburban bedroom. She has logged on to SpiderNet: she is asked ‘Where would you like to go?’ The choices are: Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Ireland or the West Bank/Gaza. Crazy_Diamond is also asked what she would like to do: ‘Monitor a Dual-Use Facility’, ‘Interact with Civilians’, ‘Tail Secret Police’ or ‘Assist UNMOVIC Inspections’. She chooses UNMOVIC Inspections and then chooses the type of robot/drone she wants to pilot, a standard Spider Bot XM5. Her message window is activated and she begins to participate in the inspections. We then see an image of the ‘Spider bots’ falling out of what looks like a surveillance plane.
As we see the Spider bots falling to the earth below, Crazy_Diamond receives an announcement from ‘Swarm Mind’: ‘Good morning, SpiderNet users! Your mission objectives: (A) infilitrate primary building, (B) watch all exits for fleeing suspects. GOOD LUCK!’ We then follow Crazy_Diamond and the other participants as they — or their vision machines — descend into what they suspect is a bioweapons lab. Once the bots are on the ground they crawl to the buildings (whilst soldiers attempt to stamp on them or burn them with flame flowers as they descend from the sky). A next wave of ‘Hover bots’ is deployed that enter into the labs: Crazy_Diamond has been allowed to pilot one of the bots into the lab, where we see what looks like scientists or technicians in lab coats. We are informed that there are ‘currently 6,423,983 viewers looking through your device’.
It is then announced that the inspection team has landed; we see futuristic blue UN hovercrafts land and we are introduced to the operation supervisor, Inspector Celicia Miller (we are shown a cover of a Time-looking magazine called Era which presents Miller as Woman of the Year). Her career highlight was: ‘January 18, 2003: Physically blocked a truck hauling a hydrogen bomb toward the Rumaylah oil fields. Event witnessed in real time by more than 500 million viewers (internet/live television).’ The Arabic/English translation is switched on and we hear Miller tell the guards: ‘No point keeping me out of the lab now, is there? There are already 100 million people in there.’ A man has been spotted preparing to attack Miller. As the man approaches, he says: ‘Always the same performance. You sweep into a weapons laboratory with your toy cameras … And the scientists, under the accusatory gaze of millions, always wither with shame and beg the world to forgive them.’ Miller holds up a camera on her arm and 300 million people are now looking at the face of her potential murderer. The man breaks down; another ‘threat to humanity has been contained’. Crazy_Diamond says goodnight to her friends: ‘It’s been real.’ We are informed that: ‘there are other weapons labs out there, around the world. Not to mention sweatshops, secret police dungeons, terrorist training camps … We’ll find them eventually.’
Farley’s Spiders — and the longer story that it is part of — is an intriguing visualization of many of the buzzwords that are used to described life in a networked society: swarms, hive intelligence, collaborative consumption, the wisdom of crowds, flash mobs. Spiders is an exploration of many of the tendencies that are evident in contemporary life, the democratization of surveillance (sousveillance, surveillance from below); the emergence of technologies that enable us to become more than paranoid and passive consumers (with iPad ‘apps’ to track our cars, tagging devices for children and pets, tracking devices that allow you to track the movements of your backpacking offspring wherever they are on the planet), citizens able harness the collective power of the digital multitude through new technologies or vision machines. From this perspective, there will be no place for police or militaries or warlords to hide in what Virilio terms the ‘overexposed city’.
The Spiders: Surprise Inspection creates a position on the future that is both seductive and convincing: this is the future we are heading toward, a future based on the ‘miniaturization’ of technologies designed to protect us. We see similar machinic ‘spiders’ in Steven Spielberg’s thriller Minority Report (2002) during a scene where police use mechanical spider-like vision machines to search a building. Yet whereas Minority Report presents us with a dystopian vision of the future, the events depicted in this episode of Spiders present us with a positive vision of the future, a move which is unusual in contemporary science or speculative fiction on surveillance and politics.
The ‘overexposed city’ is produced by the devices — digital cameras on mobile phones, social networking sites, drones — that are becoming ubiquitous in everyday life around the planet. Virilio first pointed to the significance of this tendency in Speed and Politics (1977) when he wrote about the ‘immense revolutionary battles’ in Japan ‘that come down to simple collision, to the provocation of a clash with the urban police, in which the mass of overtrained militants is armed with audio visual machines: movie cameras, tape recorders, etc.’4
Now there are attempts to produce a global surveillance architecture from below created by civil society, projects such as the Satellite Sentinel Project, funded with the help of celebrities like George Clooney and Brad Pitt (with a tagline that sounds like it could come from a Hollywood movie: ‘The world is watching because you are watching’ and ‘We’re the anti-genocide paparazzi’).5 The intentions behind the project point to the possibility of the type of world visualized in Farley’s Spiders:
The unprecedented collaboration between Not On Our Watch, the human rights organization co-founded by actor and Sudan advocate George Clooney; the Enough Project, an anti-genocide group; UNOSAT (the United Nations UNITAR Operational Satellite Applications Programme); the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; Google; and internet strategy and development firm Trellon, LLC, will provide an early warning system to focus world attention and generate rapid responses on human rights and human security concerns.
‘We want to let potential perpetrators of genocide and other war crimes know that we’re watching, the world is watching,’ Clooney said. ‘War criminals thrive in the dark. It’s a lot harder to commit mass atrocities in the glare of the media spotlight.’
The project works like this:
Commercial satellites passing over the border of northern and southern Sudan are able to capture possible threats to civilians, observe the movement of displaced people, detect bombed and razed villages, or note other evidence of pending mass violence. UNOSAT leads the collection and analysis of the images and collaborates with Google and Trellon to design the web platform for the public to easily access the images and reports. Harvard Humanitarian Initiative provides system-wide research and leads the collection, human rights analysis, and corroboration of on-the-ground reports that contextualizes the satellite imagery. The Enough Project contributes field reports, provides policy analysis, and, together with Not On Our Watch, puts pressure on policymakers by urging the public to act. Not On Our Watch has funded a six-month start-up phase.
The Satellite Sentinel Project marks the first sustained, public effort to systematically monitor and report on potential hotspots and threats to security along a border, in near real-time (within 24–36 hours), with the aim of heading off humanitarian disaster and ...
