Product Description

How would it be if what we take for human advance were simply a technological progress that literally leaves us out of its equations? What if Progress is not humanity striking out bravely towards the future, but an ultimately destructive force? In a remarkable tour d'horizon, Paul Virilio paints a bleak picture of current scientific, cultural, social and political values. Art has succumbed to the techniques of advertising, while in politics the battle for hearts and minds has become a mere 'synchronization of opinion'. TV ratings have triumphed over universal suffrage. The events of September 11 reflect both the manipulation of a global sub-proletariat and the delusions of an elite of rich students and technicians who resemble the 'suicidal members of the Heaven's Gate cybersect'. And, in this post-humanist dystopia, we are morally rudderless before the threat of biological manipulations as yet undreamt-of. The Anonymity of those who initiated the attack merely signals, for everyone, the rise of the global covert state - of the unknown quantity of private criminality - that 'beyond-Good-and-Evil' which has for centuries been the dream of the high priests of an iconoclastic progress.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270699 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-03
• Released on: 2002-09-03
• Original language: French
• Dimensions: .26 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Paul Virilio was made director of the Ecole speciale d'architecture in Paris in 1975. He has written sixteen books including War and Cinema, Open Sky and The Information Bomb