Administration of fear (Autonomedia)

We are living under the administration of fear: fear has become an environment, an everyday landscape. There was a time when wars, famines, and epidemics were localized and limited by a certain timeframe. Today, it is the world itself that is limited, saturated, and manipulated, the world itself that seizes us and confines us with a stressful claustrophobia. For Virilio, the economic catastrophe of 2007 was not the death knell of capitalism, as some have claimed, but just further evidence that capitalism has accelerated into turbo-capitalism, and is accelerating still. With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable information bomb--live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed. With the nuclear dissuasion of the Cold War behind us, we are faced with a new form of civil dissuasion: a state of fear that allows for the suspension of controversial social situations.