Virilio is a rare theorist: he produces poetic polemic which in its restless and passionate flow cares less about being "right" at all times than enabling a world view. His concept of light speed functions not as scientific theory but as index of the role of science and corporate technology and its struggle to produce social interaction pushed to limit values; mastery of limit-values on life, simultaneity and power.

With the convergence of media devices, his notion of television can be expanded into any network technology. Your fridge may soon be gathering information about your habits and kitchen requirements and sharing it with suppliers and marketing research agencies, for example. And for Virilio, what’s at stake is not commerce. It’s warfare on the idea of the meaningful relation to the world.

Fragments for a history of the human attention span

"What do the components of the new image infrastructure have in common? Attention. It’s all designed for capturing, tracking, quantifying, manipulating, holding, buying, selling and controlling attention. If the digital age is a revolution, it is sadly also its opposite- a totalising, predatory regime, an infrastructure built to channel our own desires and ambitions, to further extend its own reach. Where do I want to go today? Never mind. It’s none of your business.The old infrastructure can be characterised by one quality that is notably lacking in the new: its civic visibility and presence. It stood as the rendering of a collective project- however politically problematic- and a projection of shared values. The new image infrastructure presents a real challenge to those of us who would imagine a collective project or at least a life made richer by commitment and access to something other than shopping and the market."[…]"Surveillance is the logical, even inevitable, outcome of a system with an unlimited capacity to record … On the internet, cookies and intelligent agenting technology gather massive amounts of data on patterns of attention. ("If you bought this book you probably like that book, etc.")This information, or consumer DNA, is ostensibly captured with the best of intentions- to improve service, to improve a product, to give us more of what we want, to enhance convenience. Yet, as the recording systems become increasingly responsive to our interests, as expressed by our purchasing patterns, we may only encounter things that we are told should interest us. Picture a world that rolls out in front of us like a red carpet of our own design, a projection of our own desires."

Bruce Mau is one of the major book designers of the late twentieth century, and it’s natural for him to promote the role of the book and of the graphic designer in an era of change. Will history place his work opposite that of Jan Tsischold as the endpapers of book design?