#ctheory

Paul Virilio: SPEED & INFORMATION: CYBERSPACE ALARM!

Screen shot from "Vanishing Surveillance: Securityscapes and Ambient Government"—excellent short lecture by Professor David Murakami Wood, Canada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies (how's that for a job title) of Queen's University.  

In the talk Murakami Wood covers millennia of security measures built on landscape manipulations and other naturalistic techniques to lead into a theory of immanent "ambient government"—sensorial presences of the State so ubiquitously and subtly embedded into the environment that they are almost indistinguishable from nature.  

Strong stuff via CTheory from the Pacific Centre for Technology and Culture at the University of Victoria, thanks to Arthur and Marilouise Kroker.

French discourse on technology begins with the violent exteriorization of the self, actually producing an eerie and disturbing account of cynical technology. Of technology, that is, in its fully aestheticized phase where speaking means the rhetoric machine, where living means simulation, where the self is a desiring-machine, and where feeling is a rhizomatic network...