Paul Virilio Quotes

Virtuality will destroy reality.

Many people question their religious identity today, not necessarily by thinking of converting to Judaism or to Islam: it’s just that technologies seriously challenge the status of the human being. All technologies converge toward the same spot, they all lead to a Deus ex Machina, a machine-God.

How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?

Cyberspace is an accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality itself.

It will no longer be war that is the continuation of politics by other means, it will be what I have dubbed ‘the integral accident’ that is the continuation of politics by other means.

Speed now illuminates reality whereas light once gave objects of the world their shape.

Television exposes the world to the accident. The world is exposed to accidents through television.

We are entering a world where there won’t be one but two realities, just like we have two eyes or hear bass and treble tones, just like we now have stereoscopy and stereophony: there will be two realities: the actual, and the virtual. Thus there is no simulation, but substitution. Reality has become symmetrical. The splitting of reality in two parts is a considerable event which goes far beyond simulation.

The body is extremely important to me, because it is a planet. For instance, if you compare Earth and an astronomer, you will see that the man is a planet.

Globalization cannot take shape without the speed of light.

For example, we have developed an artistic and a literary culture. Nevertheless, the ideals of technological culture remain underdeveloped and therefore outside of popular culture and the practical ideals of democracy.

To someone like Zurbaran, who paints still lifes, lemons and pears are the objects of art. But to the electronics engineer who works on the technologies of virtual reality, the whole reality has become the object of art, with a possibility to substitute the virtual with the real.