The twenty-first century technologies - genetics, nano-technology and robotics - are so powerful because they spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.

• Bill Joy, chief scientist of Sun Microsystems

Data is a natural cynic. Knowing no codes other than the software ordinals of its own artificial
universe, signifying nothing other than its own telemetry, data streams in a weightless medium of
zero-intensity.
Flowing invisibly, but no less violently, through the light-arrays of the wireless world, data is
the elemental material of the will to technology.
Pooled in gigantic vats of cybernetic information, databasing is what we mean now by history. Our
electronically traceable past, our digitally monitored present, empty data is the destiny of our
artificial future.

We, the first citizens of the twenty-first century, are privileged witnesses to the empire of
(technological) spatialization as it extends its ocular coordinates into deep space and deep flesh.
Nietzsche might have spoken of “vivisectionist thought” but it is our curious fate to live in a
culture of almost surgical-like deconstructions of the social body. Heidegger intimated that
‘profound boredom’ would be the dominant sign of completed nihilism, but, in this epoch, boredom
falls upward from concept into the daily experience of the distractions of speed culture and the
streamed emptiness of the new bourgeois ego. Marx wrote out a prolegomena to the age of the
circulating commodity, but it is our peculiar technological destiny to experience the speed of
circulation as the image matrix within the ecstatic signs of which we are only humiliated flesh.

Sources

University of Toronto
Delft University