Paul Virilio’s writings provide an interesting contrast to those of the cybernetics, specifically Safford Beer. Two sides of the same coin, Beer sees speed as a societal savior while Virilio is reluctant to embrace a society whose culture is ever so influenced by the speed. One of Virilio’s notions I find particularly applicable to contemporary culture is a society based on rhythmology. In the world of the instantaneous. it’s often hard to step and remind oneself that every object, person, place or action has a temporal nature. Virilio is quick to point out that a society who embraces the contrasting and accenting differences in temporal relationships could use these interconnections for societal building blocks. This contrasts quite nicely with Beer’s information hunger, where speed creates excess, which in turn allows for more feedback and allows for greater degrees of productive change.

Byproducts, the (un)expected outcomes of progress, it is often hard to overlook Virilio’s pessimism towards technoculture, however I believe it important to note what exactly Virilio is criticizing. I would argue that Virilio is not necessarily against new technologies as they are merely a substance, rather he is against the representation of said technologies within the discourse of culture. A TV is not inherently detrimental to society, but when a twenty hour news cast transforms the living space into a kind of global broadcast studio for world events it enhances the anxiety created from the resulting globalization that forces one tragedy to be experienced by everyone, a hubris of emotion, thus contributing to the age of collective madness. A simpler analogy is when the plane was invented, so was the plane crash.