Advocacy statement: Jesse and I defend that we imagine that the United States federal government

lifts the Cuban Embargo and analyze the accidents that can occur from that policy.

Contention 1: The Accident

The plan is an attempt at globalization a lifting of the embargo would lead to a
massive increase in Foreign Direct Investment.
CETIM 3

(As a not-for-profit organization, the CETIM deals with topics That Often the media neglect. Convinced That some social actors in Both global and national power Struggles Decided start with a handicap, as

the publisher CETIM countries to careful attention to the myriad conflicts That daily endanger peace and to the search for alternatives That Could Ensure egalitarian and lasting development. The effects of the US embargo against
Cuba and the reasons of the urgent need to lift it http://www.cetim.ch/oldsite/2003/03js04w4.htm. 2003)

If it affects negatively all the sectors3, the

embargo directly impedes - besides the exportations - the driving forces of the Cuban
economic recovery, at the top of which are tourism, foreign direct investments (FDI) and currency transfers. Many
European subsidiaries of US firms had recently to break off negotiations for the management of hotels, because their lawyers anticipated that
the contracts would be sanctioned under the provisions of the "Helms-Burton law". In addition, the

buy-out by US groups of
European cruising societies, which moored their vessels in Cuba, cancelled the projects in 2002-03. The obstacles
imposed by the United States, in violation of the Chicago Convention on civil aviation, to the sale or the rental of
planes, to the supply of kerosene and to access to new technologies (e-reservation, radio-localization), will lead to a
loss of 150 million dollars in 2003. The impact on the FDI is also very unfavourable. The institutes of promotion
of FDI in Cuba received more than 500 projects of cooperation from US companies, but none of them
could be realized - not even in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry, where Cuba has a very attractive potential. The
transfer of currencies from the United States is limited (less than 100 dollars a month per family) and some European banks had to restrain
their commitment under the pressure of the US which let them know that indemnities would be required if the credits were maintained. In
Cuba, the embargo penalizes the activities of the bank and finance, insurance, petrol, chemical products, construction,
infrastructures and transports, shipyard, agriculture and fishing, electronics and computing, but also for the export sectors (where the US
property prevailed before 1959), such as those of sugar, whose recovery is impeded by the interdiction of access to the fist international stock
exchange of raw materials (New York), of nickel, tobacco, rum.

And, this massive increase in capital causes a collapse of the Cuban economy.
The Economist, 2011, Some like it hot: Which emerging economies are at greatest risk of overheating? June 30th,
2011, http://www.economist.com/node/18895150?story_id=18895150&CFID=173052931&CFTOKEN=76541139
Our interactive index ranks these 27 emerging economies across all six individual indicators The

fourth symptom of overheating,

and one of the most important, is excessive credit expansion, which can lead to asset bubbles as well
as inflation. The best measure of excess credit is the difference between the growth rate in bank
credit and nominal GDP. It is normal for bank lending to grow a bit faster than GDP in an emerging economy as the financial sector
develops, but credit is outpacing GDP by an alarming margin in Argentina, Brazil, Hong Kong and Turkey. Lending to the private sector has
increased by around 20% more than nominal GDP over the past year in both Turkey and Hong Kong. But not all emerging economies are awash
with liquidity. In ten of the 27 countries, including Russia, South Africa, Egypt and Chile, credit is growing more slowly than GDP. The growth
rate in China's bank lending has halved over the past year or so, and is now broadly in line with GDP growth. Our

fifth indicator is the

real rate of interest, which is negative in over half of the economies. That may be appropriate where demand is weak but in
rapidly growing economies, such as Argentina, India, Vietnam and Hong Kong, negative real rates are fuelling faster
credit growth and inflation. At the other extreme, Brazil's real interest rate of almost 6% is among the highest in the world. China's
benchmark lending rate is slightly positive but this understates the extent of its recent monetary tightening: the central bank has also sharply
raised banks' reserve requirements and capped credit growth. Mercury rising Our

final temperature gauge is the external

balance. A widening current-account deficit can be a classic sign of overheating, as domestic demand
outpaces supply. Turkey looks particularly worrying, with its deficit expected to jump to 8% of GDP this year, up from 2% in 2009. Rising
current-account deficits in Brazil and India also suggest domestic demand is growing too fast.

An instability in Cuba spills over to the global sphere causing bioterrorism and
threatening US security interests.
Mastrapa 99 Armando F. Mastrapa, Department of Government and Politics, St. John's University,
1999, "Evolution, Transition And The Cuban Revolutionary Armed
Forces,"www.ascecuba.org/publications/proceedings/volume9/pdfs/mastrapa.pdf
However, the FAR may utilize biological warfare as an offensive capability and deterrent. DIAs (1998) assessment
states, Cubas current scientific facilities and expertise could support an offensive BW *biological
weapons] program in at least the research and development stage. Cubas biotechnology industry is
one of the most advanced in emerging countries and would be capable of producing BW agents. The
potential for such an offensive weapon would be utilized in an extreme threat to the Cuban regime. Ken
Alibek, a former colonel of the Red Army, reveals in his book Biohazard Cubas development of biological weapons. It could not be said that
Cuba is an under- developed country in this discipline; in

reality Cuba possesses a highly sophisticated molecular and

bio- technology program that has for the last 10 years produced bacteriological armaments (Fabricio
1999). Fidel Castro forewarned the possibility of using biological warfare . In a speech to the Central Committee of
the Cuban Communist Party, Castro (1997) stated: With the most absolute conviction we are able to tell the dragon: You cannot ever devour
this lamb in spite of your rockets, your airplanes, your so-called intelligent arms, because this lamb is more intelligent than you and this lamb in
its blood has and would only have poison for you.

This threat is a possible reality in the event of a crisis of power

and stability of the regime . Alberto Coll (1997) describes the Gtterdammerung scenario whereby if Castro ever faced
internal revolt and the very possibility of losing power, he might be tempted drawing on the
megalomaniac and Nietzchean elements of his personality to go out with one final grand gesture,
preferably directed against the object of his seemingly implacable hatred: the United States. For instance he
might order an air strike against the United States, either using biological weapons (which some
intelligence analysts believe Cuba might have) against Miami, or an air attack against South Floridas
nuclear power plant at Turkey Point . Cubas armed forces still possesses the capability to create
havoc. It remains to be seen that in the event of a threat to the regime, the FAR would be willing to act as an irrational
actor by implementing an offensive warfare that would directly threaten U.S. national security and
insure a detrimental response. CONCLUSION The FARs conflict with other political institutions, e.g. the Cuban Communist Party
(PCC) and the MININT, is an expected reality within the Cuban political system. The hierarchy recognized the potential threat posed by the
institutional independence of the MININT. The challenge to power was quickly dealt with, limiting the potential growth of institutional conflict:
by severing the realized threat and substituting the existing personnel with FAR officers loyal to the regime elites, thus neutralizing future instability within the institution. Cubas economic crisis or special period created a new mission for the FAR. The militarization of the economy
created sectors where FAR officers directly control segments of the Cuban economy, e.g., agriculture and tourism, benefiting economically the
officer corps. These military enterprises have given wealth to the FAR hierarchy and secured their loyalty to the regime. As a result of the
drastic downsizing of the FAR as a consequence of the special period, Cubas armed forces have become a constabulary force, charged with
the domestic guardianship of the Revolution and state. However, the

decline of the FAR does not eliminate their potential

for engaging in offensive warfare. The potential threat of biological armaments is a serious scenario one
should be vigilant of. In conclusion the FAR have evolved from within the purview of institutional conflict and succeeded in asserting
command of institutional conflict. They have assisted the Cuban economy, benefiting themselves from it, and proactively dominated sectors
producing substantial wealth. Finally, the

FAR remain a potent military force domestically able to engage in

offensive operations that can potentially pose a serious risk if faced with an external challenge to its
governing elites.

This is the problem with globalization linking the world together means that even
the smallest accident spills over, and has the potential to destabilize the entire world.
Redhead 2009 (Steve Redhead, Professor of Sport and Media Cultures at the University of Brighton

in the UK, MOBILE ACCELERATED NONPOSTMODERN

CULTURE, Working Papers in Mobile Accelerated Nonpostmodern Culture (MANC), 2009, Pg 5-8, JK)
Paul Virilio, the French urban theorist of speed and catastrophe is responsible (Virilio, 2007b: 68) for the
development of the 0 of claustropolis (which in his thinking has replaced cosmopolis). Dromomania is
Virilios term for those obsessed with speed and a society where everyone has to keep moving and
accelerating a fitting label for our finance capitalism driven twenty-first century descent into global
chaos. Virilio, too, spotted the potential future integral accident in globalisation; the linking together
of the worlds stock markets in the 1980s. He told Philippe Petit, prophetically, in interview in 1996,
twelve years before the 2008 crash: The speed of circulation has supplanted money. The production
that resulted from this three-dimensional money is itself eliminated in favour of pure speculation, in
other words a pure electronic game. The movement of dematerialisation which I analysed in
reference to the city and the neighbour reappears in the case of money. The logic is exactly the same,
in other words, the aesthetics of disappearance, and what is disappearing now is production and the
money referent. We exceeded the limit of the speed of exchange with the Trading programme that
combined the stock markets into one. Wall Street, London, Frankfurt and Tokyo are now just one stock
market. (Virilio with Petit, 1999: 107) Virilio also told Petit in the same interview that the 1987 stock
exchange meltdown was an accident waiting to happen (again): With the acceleration following the
transportation revolution of the last century, the number of accidents suddenly multiplied and
sophisticated procedures had to be invented in order to control air, rail and highway traffic. With the
current world-wide revolution in communication and telematics, acceleration has reached its physical
limit, the speed of electromagnetic waves. So there is the risk not of a local accident in a particular
location, but rather of a global accident that would affect if not the entire planet, then at least the
majority of people concerned by these technologies. On this subject, consider the stock market crash
of 1987that resulted from the implementation of the Programme Trading of automatic stock quotations
on Wall Street. It is apparent that this new notion of the accident has nothing to do with the Apocalypse,
but rather with the imperious necessity to anticipate in a rational way this kind of catastrophe by which
the interactivity of telecommunications would reproduce the devastating effects of a poorly managed
radioactivity think about Chernobyl. (Virilio and Petit, 1999: 93) For Virilio the stock market crash of
1987 was a sign of whats to come (Virilio and Petit, 1999: 91). In June 2007 he predicted that the
stock marketis in danger of crashing far more seriously than it did in 1929, since all the stock
markets are now interconnected (Virilio and Lotringer, 2008: 230). Paul Virilio, arguably the most
provocative French cultural theorist on the contemporary intellectual scene (Armitage, 2001: 1) has not
yet spawned his own online journal of Virilio Studies unlike his compatriot, the late Jean Baudrillard (2).
If it ever did exist it is a safe bet that the International Journal of Virilio Studies journal would feature
strongly Virilios idea of the accident and that the notion of catastrophe would be a dominant theme.
So would bunker archaeology. In the late 1950s a young Paul Virilio (Armitage, 2000, Armitage, 2001,
Redhead, 2004a, Redhead, 2004b) first put pen to paper about the German bunkers he had begun
photographing along the Atlantic coast. The work went on until 1965. The bunkers along the Atlantic
Wall totalled 15,000 and were designed to repel Allied attack against occupied France. These bunkers
had fascinated Virilio since he was a ten year old boy evacuated to Nantes in the Second World War. He
always saw himself as a blitzkreig baby or war baby where he studies at the university of disaster
(Virilio, 2009b) and later was himself conscripted into the French army during the Algerian war of
independence. Virilio subsequently published the very short piece Bunker Archeologie (see translation
in Redhead, 2004a: 11-13) and eventually a book called Bunker Archeology (Virilio, 2009a, English
translation) following an original French edition and the exhibition of his collection of text and images on
the bunkers at the Decorative Arts Museum in Paris in 1975. Sociologist Mike Gane has written,
convincingly, of Paul Virilios bunker theorising (Gane, 2000) and I have proposed a bunker
anthropology (Redhead, 2009a). In these twenty-first century media heavy times we have all to some

extent or other become historians of Virilios instant present where immediacy, instantaneity and
ubiquity rule. For Virilio it was with globalisation, in the 1990s, through what he refers to as the new
technologies, that we began to inhabit a world that is foreclosed: Globalisation is a major
catastrophe, it is the catastrophe of catastrophes. In the same way that time, like Aristotle said, is the
accident of accidents, geographic globalisation is by essence a major catastrophe. Not because of bad
capitalists, but because it is the end, the closing of the world on itself through speed, the velocity of
images, the rapidity of transportation. We live in a world of forclusion (Virilio and Lotringer, 2005: 77)
For Virilio the globe we inhabit is actually what he sees as a world closed off and closed in. In Virilios
self-conscious reflection he has been working for some thirty years on this condition, on the
shrinking of the world that is on what he has called the worlds old age (Virilio and Depardon, 2008b:
8).

Our ignorance of local accidents has caused the unchecked proliferation of

technology. This has allowed us to destroy nature; the accumulation of human capital
has led to a tradeoff with natural capital, destroying the environment far quicker than
it can hope to repair itself.
Bark et al. 06(Peter, TFK Transport Research Institute, Kaj Elgstrange was a researcher in work
physiology and ergonomics in Stockholm 1964-1968, then worked as an associate expert in ergonomics
at the University of Cauca, Colombia, OSH &Development,
http://s3.amazonaws.com/zanran_storage/www.ufa.se/ContentPages/43517666.pdf, November 2006
pg. 29-30, accessed 1/30/13, JK)
The concept of time is closely related to velocity, (i.e. the speed of an object in a particular direction,
such as how far can we travel in a specific time). In 1873, Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty
Days where a scientist named Phileas Fogg made a bet with his friends at the British Academy of
Science that he could travel around the world in 80 days, a trip that can now be done in less than 24
hours. The main factors that contributed to the speed up of transportation systems were aviation
technology, information technology and cheap fossil fuels. Modern Information and Communication
Technology (ICT) and the Internet have made information available at the speed of light anywhere on
earth. This has created world wide competition between companies where fast adaptation is the key
to survival. The concept of competition implies that those competitors who can successfully
differentiate products and services required by their individual costumers will grow and be profitable
because they give customers what they want, when they want it. The time pressures exerted on
companies are also exerted on individuals. Electronic calendars and planning software are part of
everyday life in industrialised countries, even in family life. A growing restlessness and discomfort is
being experienced in societies where the pace of life is too fast. The Slow Cities movement is a group of
towns and cities committed to improving the quality of life of their citizens by proposing that people
consciously seize control of time rather than being dictated by it. People should find a balance between
using time-saving and appreciating what is important in life. However, proponents believe that a slower
tempo involves activity rather than passivity. The faster tempo of life and the dependence on
technology has also created criticism of science and technology as the fundamental elements behind
industrial development and globalisation. The author Paul Virilio has focused on speed and the rapid
development of technology as one of the most important threats to humans. In an interview he says:
This means that history is now rushing headlong into the wall of time. As I have said many times
before, the speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalisation is
the speed of light. And it is nothing else! Globalisation cannot take shape without the speed of light. In
this way, history now inscribes itself in real time, in the 'live', in the realm of interactivity. But we

must engage in resistance first of all by developing the idea of a technological culture. 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. This is also why society as a whole has no control over technological developments. And
this is one of the gravest threats to democracy in the near future. It is, then, imperative to develop a
democratic technological culture. In highly industrialised societies, people experience a gap between
their personal ambitions and real life - there is not only less time available to fulfil ambitions but
ambitions are also steadily growing. The industrial revolution that gave rise to modern capitalism
greatly expanded the possibilities for the material development of humankind. It continues to do so
today, but at a severe price. Since the mid-eighteenth century, more of nature has been destroyed
than in all prior history. While industrial systems have reached pinnacles of success, able to muster
and accumulate human-made capital on vast levels, natural capital, on which civilization depends to
create economic prosperity, is rapidly declining, and the rate of loss is increasing proportionate to
gains in material well being.

Globalization does not benefit everyone equally, the speed caused by globalization
makes us feel as if we have a right to speed, and anyone who gets in the way of that
right, the unemployed and disabled for example, are overlooked, and trampled on by
our fast society.
Parkins 04
(Wendy, Murdoch University, Out of Time : Fast Subjects and Slow Living, Time Society, 13: 363,
http://tas.sagepub.com/content/13/2-3/363 - oliver g)
Despite the insidious spread of both speed and work culture, however, not everyone experiences the
same acceleration of temporality in late modernity. The relationship between social inequalities and
temporal inequalities is an important one to explore in an analysis of slow living, in order to consider
the difference between choosing to live slowly choosing nonsynchronicity, to use Ernst Blochs term1 and having
slowness thrust upon one, through being physically or economically unable to keep up with the speed
of global culture (see Nowotny, 1994). As Simon Gottschalk (1999) has argued, speed significantly distorts our
engagement with and experience of those others who/which cannot follow, who/which dare delay or
resist speeds compelling momentum, or who/which frustrate our new (and regressive) sense of
entitlement for absolute immediacy (p. 315). The unemployed, children, the elderly and women at
home comprise a significant section of the population who are outside fast time for much of the time
and may hence be overlooked by the fast. The result of such divisions, according to Nowotny, is that
society runs the risk of moving at two speeds (p. 32) which may not only perpetuate social inequities
but exacerbate them

Contention 2: Politics
Weve begun to move beyond globalization, to virtualization virtualization has
created a one-time system real time, where our decisions have to be instant in order
to keep up with a fast-paced world.
Virilio 1995 (Paul, emblematic French theorist of technology, Speed and Information: Cyberspace
Alarm!, 8/27/1995, http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=72#bio, accessed 10/1/13, JK)
The dictatorship of speed at the limit will increasingly clash with representative democracy. When
some essayists address us in terms of "cyber-democracy", of virtual democracy; when others state that
"opinion democracy" is going to replace "political parties democracy", one cannot fail to see anything
but this loss of orientation in matters political, of which the March 1994 "media-coup" by Mr. Silvio
Berlusconi was an Italian-style prefiguration. The advent of the age of viewer-counts and opinion polls
reigning supreme will necessarily be advanced by this type of technology. The very word "globalization"
is a fake. There is no such thing as globalization, there is only virtualization. What is being effectively
globalized by instantaneity is time. Everything now happens within the perspective of real time:
henceforth we are deemed to live in a "one-time-system"1. For the first time, history is going to
unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times,
local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are
inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny. If history is so rich, it is because it
was local, it was thanks to the existence of spatially bounded times which overrode something that up
to now occurred only in astronomy: universal time. But in the very near future, our history will happen
in universal time, itself the outcome of instantaneity - and there only. Thus we see on one side real time
superseding real space. A phenomenon that is making both distances and surfaces irrelevant in favor of
the time-span, and an extremely short time-span at that. And on the other hand, we have global time,
belonging to the multimedia, to cyberspace, increasingly dominating the local time-frame of our cities,
our neighborhoods. So much so, that there is talk of substituting the term "global" by "glocal", a
concatenation of the words local and global. This emerges from the idea that the local has, by
definition, become global, and the global, local. Such a deconstruction of the relationship with the
world is not without consequences for the relationship among the citizens themselves.

Acceleration of information has overloaded humanity, preventing cognitive conscious

thought. The loss of thought and autonomy has resulted in imperceptive political
mistakes, irrational economic decisions, and a loss of the collective community.
Bifo, 2009 Professor at the University of Bologna, professor of social history of communication at the academia di belle arti of milan (franco, precarious
rhapsody, pdf found online) //BZ
The mediascape is the universe of transmitters that send to our brain signals according to the most varied formats. The

info-sphere is the interface

between the media system and the mind that receives the signals, the mental ecosphere, that
immaterial sphere in which semiotic fluxes interact with the reception antennae of the minds
scattered on the planet. The mind is the universe of receivers that are not naturally limited to receiving but process, create and in their turn put in
motion new processes of transmission and provoke the continuous evolution of the mediascape. The evolution of the info-spheres
activation of always more complex networks of information distribution has produced a leap in the
power, speed and the very format of the info-sphere. There is no corresponding leap in the power and format of reception. The
universe of receivers, human brains of real people made of flesh, fragile and sensual organs, is not

formatted according to the same standard as the system of digital transmitters. The functional
paradigm of the universe of transmitters does not correspond to the functional paradigm of the
universe of receivers. This asymmetry is manifested by various pathological effects: permanent
electrocution, panic, over-excitation, hyper-mobility, attention disturbances, dyslexia, information
overload and saturation of reception circuits. At the origin of this saturation, there is a real and proper deformity of formats. The format
of the universe of transmitters has evolved, multiplying its powers, while the format of the universe of receivers has not been
able to evolve in as rapid a manner, for the simple reason that it is based on an organic support (the
human brain-body) that has evolutionary times completely different from the evolutionary times of
machines. That which is being determined could be defined as a paradigmatic discrepancy, a schism between the paradigm that models the universe of
transmitters and the paradigm that models the universe of receivers. In a situation like this, communication becomes an asymmetrical disturbed process. We could
speak in this regard of a discrepancy between cyberspace in unlimited and constant expansion and cybertime. Cyberspace is a network that includes mechanical and
organic components whose processing power can be accelerated without limits, while cybertime is an essentially lived reality, linked to an organic support (the human
body and brain) whose processing time cannot be accelerated beyond relatively rigid natural limits. Since the time when, in 1977, he wrote the book Speed and
Politics, Paul Virilio has maintained that speed

is the decisive factor in modern history. It is thanks to speed, Virilio

wars are won, both military and commercial ones. In many of his writings, Virilio shows that the speed of
movements, of transportation, of motorization has allowed armies to win wars in the course of the
last century. Since then, it has been possible to substitute objects, goods and people for signs. By virtual,
electronically transferable phantasms, the barriers of speed have been broken and the most
impressive process of acceleration that human history has ever known has erupted. In a certain sense we can
say that space no longer exists, given that information can cross it instantly and events can be
transferred in real time from one place to another on the planet, becoming virtually shared events.
But what are the consequences of this acceleration on the human mind, on the human body? To understand it we must make reference to the capacity of
conscious processing, to the capacity for affective assimilation of signs and events on the part of the
conscious and sensitive organism. The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is
producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the
collective mind. Individuals are not in a position to consciously process the immense and always
growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens,
their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognize, evaluate,
process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. The practice of
multitasking, the opening of a window of hypertextual attention, the passage from one context to
another for the complex evaluation of processes, tends to deform the sequential modality of mental
processing. According to Christian Marazzi, who has concerned himself in various books with the relations between economics, language and affectivity, the
latest generation of economic operators is affected by a real and proper form of dyslexia, incapable
of reading a page from the beginning to the end according to sequential procedures, incapable of maintaining
concentrated attention on the same object for a long time. And dyslexia spreads to cognitive and
social behaviors, leading to rendering the pursuit of linear strategies nearly impossible. Some, like
Davenport and Beck , speak of an attention economy. But when a cognitive faculty enters into and becomes part of
economic discourse this means that it has become a scarce resource. The necessary time for paying
attention to the fluxes of information to which we are exposed and which must be evaluated in
order to be able to make decisions is lacking. The consequence is in front of our eyes: political and
economic decisions no longer respond to a long term strategic rationality and simply follow
immediate interests. On the other hand, we are always less available for giving our attention to others
gratuitously. We no longer have the attention time for love, tenderness, nature, pleasure and
compassion. Our attention is ever more besieged and therefore we assign it only to our careers, to
competition and to economic decisions. And in any case our temporality cannot follow the insane speed
of the hypercomplex digital machine. Human beings tend to become the ruthless executors of
decisions taken without attention. The universe of transmitters, or cyberspace, now proceeds at a
superhuman velocity and becomes untranslatable for the universe of receivers, or cybertime, that
cannot go faster than what is allowed by the physical material from which our brain is made, the
slowness of our body, the need for caresses and affection. Thus opens a pathological gap and mental
illness spreads as testified by the statistics and above all our everyday experience. And just as pathology spreads,
so too do drugs. The flourishing industry of psychopharmaceuticals beats records every year, the number of packets of Ritalin, Prozac, Zoloft and
claims, that

other psychotropics sold

in the pharmacies continually increases, while dissociation, suffering, desperation,

terror, the desire not to exist, to not have to fight continuously, to disappear grows alongside the
will to kill and to kill oneself. When, towards the end of the 1970s, an acceleration of the productive and communicative rhythms in occidental
metropolitan centers was imposed, a gigantic epidemic of drug addiction made its appearance. The world was leaving its human epoch to
enter the era of machinic posthuman acceleration: many sensitive organisms of the human variety
began to snort cocaine, a substance that permits the acceleration of the existential rhythm leading
to transforming oneself into a machine. Many other sensitive organisms of the human kind injected
heroin in their veins, a substance that deactivates the relation with the speed of the surrounding
atmosphere. The epidemic of powders during the 1970s and the 1980s produced an existential and cultural devastation with which we still havent come to
terms with. Then illegal drugs were replaced by those legal substances which the pharmaceutical industry in a white coat made available for its victims and this was
the epoch of anti-depressants, of euphorics and of mood regulators. Today psychopathy

reveals itself ever more clearly as a social

epidemic and, more precisely, a socio-communicational one. If you want to survive you have to be
competitive and if you want to be competitive you must be connected, receive and process
continuously an immense and growing mass of data. This provokes a constant attentive stress, a
reduction of the time available for affectivity. These two tendencies, inseparably linked, provoke an effect of
devastation on the individual psyche: depression, panic, anxiety, the sense of solitude and existential
misery. But these individual symptoms cannot be indefinitely isolated, as psychopathology has done up until now and as economic power wishes to do. It is not
possible to say: You are exhausted, go and take a vacation at Club Med, take a pill, make a cure, get the hell away from it all, recover in the psychiatric hospital, kill
yourself. It

is no longer possible, for the simple reason that it is no longer a matter of a small minority
of crazies or a marginal amount of depressives. It concerns a growing mass of existential misery
that is tending always more to explode in the center of the social system. Besides, it is necessary to consider a decisive
fact: at the time when capital needed to suck in physical energy from its exploited and from its slaves, psychopathology could be relatively marginalized. Your psychic
suffering didnt matter much to capital when you only had to insert screws and handle a lathe. You could be as sad as a solitary fly in a bottle, but your productivity
was hardly affected because your muscles could still function. Today capital needs mental energies, psychic energies. And these are exactly the capacities that are

The economic crisis depends for the

most part on a circulation of sadness, depression, panic and demotivation. The crisis of the new
economy was provoked in a large part by a crisis of motivations, by a fall the artificial euphoria of the
1990s. This has led to effects of disinvestment and in part even to a reduction of consumption. In
general, unhappiness functions as a stimulus to consume: buying is a suspension of anxiety, an
antidote to loneliness, but only up to a certain point. Beyond this certain point, suffering becomes a
demotivating factor for purchasing. There is therefore an elaboration of conflicting strategies. The
fucking up. Its because of this that psychopathology is exploding in the center of the social scene.

masters of the world certainly do not want humanity to be able to be happy, because a happy humanity would not let itself be caught up in productivity, in the
discipline over work or in hypermarkets. However, they try out useful techniques to make unhappiness moderate and tolerable, for postponing or preventing a suicidal
explosion, for inducing consumption. What strategies will the collective organism follow in order to escape this fabric of unhappiness? Is a strategy of deceleration, of

human society, potentialities cannot be

definitively canceled out, even when they are revealed to be lethal for the individual and probably
even for the species. These potentials become regulated and kept under control for as long as
possible, but in the end are inevitably used as happened (and will happen again) with the atomic
bomb. A strategy of the upgrading of the human organism is possible of the mechanical
adjustment of the human body and brain to a hyperfast info-sphere. This is the strategy that is used to define the
post-human. Finally a strategy of subtraction is possible, of distancing from the vortex, but this is a type of strategy that only small communities can follow,
the reduction of complexity possible and able to be hypothesized? I dont believe so. In

constituting spheres of existential, economic, and informatics autonomy with respect to the economic world.

Speed shapes our political forum; it has caused the traditional political structures to
implode. Speed has corrupted politics. In order to create any form of political change,
we must first free politics from speed.
James, 07
(Ian James, Lecturer in French and Fellow of Downing College at the University of Cambridge. He works
in the area of modern French philosophy and literature. Rutledge Critical Thinks Paul Virilio, Chpt. 2 PG
29. Published 2007. CSmith)

Virilio is perhaps most widely known as a thinker of speed and as a practitioner of the science of speed, that is, dromology. Dromology and
other terms such as dromoscopy and dromosphere are neologisms coined by Virilio himself and derive from the Greek dromos, meaning race
or racecourse. The term science here should not, of course, be confused with natural or physical science but should be taken in the sense of
science as a body of knowledge, discipline or methodological activity. Dromology, then, is that body of knowledge concerned specifically with
the phenomenon of speed, or more precisely, with the way speed determines or limits the manner in which phenomena appear to us.

According to Virilio we cannot properly approach the reality of social, political or military history
unless we first realize that social space, political space and military space are, at a decisive and
fundamental level, shaped by vectors of movement and the speed of transmission with which these
vectors of movement are accomplished. The emphasis placed on movement and on speed of
transmission as key forces which shape social and political space leads Virilio to make sometimes startling claims. In
Speed and Politics, for instance, he asserts the following: there was no industrial revolution, but only a dromocratic revolution; there is
no democracy, only dromocracy (Virilio 1986: 46). He has insisted in works such as Negative Horizon that movement governs the
event and that the ever increasing speeds which have determined movement in modern society have
caused the traditional political structures to implode (Virilio 2005a: 105, 60). However startling or peremptory such
assertions may at first appear they are made within the context of a more general argument which is developed in a fairly systematic fashion
across the range of Virilios writing from the 1970s to the present day. In an interview with the media theorist Friedrich Kittler he summarizes
his view that contemporary

global society has hit a wall of acceleration (Armitage 2001: 978). The argument runs as
follows: societies have hitherto developed according to a logic of ever increasing acceleration of the
speed of both transport and communication; we have moved from the age of horseback or horsedrawn locomotion to that of
the railway, from the age of the telephone to that of radio transmission and then to television and digital or information technology. The
progress of each age in relation to that preceding it has implicitly been defined by the accelerated transmission afforded by new technological
means: train travel exceeds that of horse-drawn locomotion, the aeroplane that of the train, the digital transmission of data outstrips the
speeds of transmission accomplished by the technologies that came before. Virilios contention is that contemporary society is reaching a
critical point at which further acceleration may soon no longer be possible. If, in the age of the internet or digital and satellite communication,
information can be transmitted quasi-instantaneously worldwide, or if, as planners and aviation engineers expect, hypersonic aeroplanes will
soon be able to traverse the globe in around two hours, will society not reach a point where any future progress of acceleration is impossible?
What are the broader implications for a society which has reached such a stage? This, at least, is the state of affairs Virilio is referring to, and
the question he is posing when he talks about our society standing at a limit or at the wall of acceleration.

Contention 3: Our Method

Our method is that of eschatology: A studying of the end of the world. Our advocacy
creates a break in the cycles of invention and destruction that has characterized the
21st century by inventing the accident and recognizing its inevitability, we can
refocus politics to exposing accidents implicit in our policies.
Virilio 07 (Paul, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
The original accident, trans. by Julie Rose, Polity, available online DH)
Faced with this state of affairs in an accelerated temporality that affects customs and moral standards and art every bit
as much as the politics of nations, one thing stands out as being of the utmost urgency: to expose the accident in
Time. Turning on its head the threat of the unexpected, the surprise, becomes a subject for a thesis and the
natural disaster, the subject of an exhibition within the framework of instantaneous
telecommunications. As Paul Valery explained in 1935: 'In the past, when it came to novelty, we had hardly ever seen anything but
solutions to problems or answers to questions that were very old, if not age-old ... But novelty for us now consists in the
unprecedented nature of the questions themselves, and not the solutions, in the way these questions
are asked, and not the answers. Whence the general impression of powerlessness and incoherence that
rules our minds. This admission of powerlessness in the face of the surging up of unexpected and
catastrophic events forces us to try to reverse the usual trend that exposes us to the accident in order
to establish a new kind of museology or museography: one that would now entail exposing the accident,
all accidents from the most banal to the most tragic, from natural catastrophes to industrial and scientific disasters, without avoiding
the too often neglected category of the happy accident, the stroke of luck, the coup of foudre or even the goup de grace!
Apart from the historic terrorist attack of 11 September 2001 and its broadcasting on a continuous loop on the television screens
of the entire world, two recent events deserve to come in for some harsh analysis on this score. On the one hand,
we have the revelation, sixteen years too late, of the damage done to eastern France through contamination
from Chernobyl, about which those running the services tasked with sounding the alert in France through contamination from Chernobyl
declared in April, 1986: If we do detect anything, it will just be a purely scientific problem. On the other hand, we have the very
recent decision of the Caen Memorial Peace Museum to import from the United States, as a symbolic
object, an atomic bomb an H-bomb emblematic of the balance of terror during the Cold War between the East and West.
Apropos, and reworking the dismissive remart of the French experts who covered up the damage done by the Chernobyl accident, we might
say: If

we exhibit an atom bomb it will just be a purely cultural problem, and on that note, throwing
open the doors of the first Museum of Accidents. They say invention is merely a way of seeing, of
reading accidents as signs and as opportunities. If so, then it is merely high time we opened the museum
to what crops up impromptu, to that 'indirect production' of science and the technosciences constituted
by disasters, by industrial or other catastrophes. According to Aristotle, 'the accident reveals the substance.' If so,
then invention of the 'substance' is equally invention of the 'accident'. The shipwreck is consequently the
'futurist' invention of the ship, and the air crash the invention of the supersonic airliner, just as the
Chernobyl meltdown is the invention of the nuclear power station. Let's take a look now at recent history. While
the twentieth century was the century of great exploits- such as the moon landing- and great discoveries in
physics and chemistry, to say nothing of computer science and genetics, it would seem, alas, only logical that the twenty-first
century, in turn, reap the harvest of this hidden production constituted by the most diverse disasters, to the
very extent that their repetition has become a clearly recognizable historical phenomenon. On this score, let's hear it again
from Paul Valery: 'The tool is tending to vanish frorn consciousness. We commonly say that its function has

become automatic. What we should make of this is the new equation: consciousness only survives now as awareness
of accidents.' 3 This admission of failure then leads to a clear and defmitive conclusion: 'All that is capable of
being resumed and repeated is fading away, falls silent. Function only exists outside consciousness. Given that the declared objective of the
Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century was precisely the repetition of standardized objects (machines, tools, vehicles, etc.), in other
words, famously incriminated substances, it is only logical today to note that the twentieth century did in fact swamp us with rnass-produced
accidents one after the other, from the sinking of the Titauic in 1912 up to the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986 to say nothing of the Seveso
chemical plant disaster of 1976 or of the Toulouse fertilizer factory disaster of 2001. And so

serial reproduction of the most

diverse catastrophes has dogged the great discoveries and the great technical inventions like a shadow,
and, unless we accept the unacceptable meaning allow the accident in turn to become automtic, the urgent need for
an intelligence of the crisis in intelligence is making itself felt, at the very beginning of the twenty-first
centry an intelligence which ecology is the clincal symptom of, anticipating the imminent emergence of
a philosophy of post-industrial eschatology.

Our method is in part to affirm the accident modern structures try and ignore the
accidents inherent in our political action, instead, we create an accident in order to
study it in educational spaces, pointing out catastrophes is the best way to evaluate
production.
Kuswa, 2004 (Kevin, P.h. D. in Rhetoric from UT, Department of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at Richmond, Machinic Rhetoric, Highwa ys and
Interpellating Motions, http://www.rhizomes.net/issue8/kuswa.htm)

Assuming that failure is not built-in or programmed into the mechanism may be a mistake. We cannot
separate life and death and we cannot separate the machine from the accident. For Virilio (1993, p212), the
accident itself can be attached to "the product from the moment of its production or
implementation." Production interpellates destruction. The mode of production cannot stand without the mode of destruction. The
highway machine may generate traffic and the possibility of managing that traffic, but such
production brings destruction: the decimation of the earth's ecology through rapid fossil fuel consumption as well as the
demolition of vehicles and desolation of human bodies that arrive in an endless stream of road fatalities. Moving the modern away
from structure and more toward vectors and trajectories, Virilio (1993, p212) inverts the substance of
accidents: Since the production of any 'substance' is simultaneously the production of a typical
accident, breakdown or failure is less the deregulation of production than the production of a specific
failure, or even a partial or total destruction.... One could imagine a fundamental modification in the direction of research toward a
prospective of the accident. Since the accident is invented at the moment the object is scientifically discovered
or technically developed, perhaps we could reverse things and directly invent the accident in order to
determine the nature of the renowned 'substance' of the implicitly discovered product or mechanism,
thereby avoiding the development of certain supposedly accidental catastrophes.

And, our incorporation of critical analysis is uniquely key to solve politics alone
cannot resolve the accident, a combination of ontological questioning and politics is
key to revive our political systems.
Virilio 12
(Paul Virlio, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. The
Administration of Fear, Book 7 of 10 Pg 55 Published February 24th 2012, CSmith)

I know that I am a critical theorist. I am not a man of expedients. All I can say is that political

hope will come from a deeper

awareness of the crisis. Thus my wish for a university of disasters and a collective reflection on limits. We have
reached the limit in the sense that the Earth is too small and the world is foreclosed. If there is any
hope, it resides in the collective and universal intelligence of the real state of the world. We cannot
stop at only the economic and political dimensions of the crisis. You can hear some people saying that the economic
crisis of 2007 signed the death warrant of capitalism. Of course not! We need to stop this fractalization of reality. The true
heart of the problem lies in becoming aware that managing the economy cannot come from the use of
politics alone. A philosophical intelligence of state of the world needs to be developed to regain
control over the major social choices that we have to make; from this point of view, it is necessary to
rediscover the original force of philosophical discipline in the polis. Where is being-in-the-world in
the era where speed is at the limit? this is the question we should be asking and the question we
must answer. Only from that point can we begin to imagine taking paths that might offer something
new in social and economic terms. But we cannot get out of it with a basic anarcho-syndicalism, even
if it is strong and dedicated. And not with a logic that makes anti-progress its alpha and omega. I also have my reserves about the
notion of degrowth. I do not believe that local solutions exist: this reflection must take place on the global scale, where something like the birth
or rebirth of the University (a major intellectual collectivity in History) must take place. Marxists know the intellectual collectivity of socialism.

The intellectuals I am talking about are the human race. At the time of the Sorbonne, Salmanca, and Bologna, universities
were an incontrovertible collectivity (Greco-Latin, Judeo Christian and Arab). We need to rediscover this authority and depth
of field, this intelligence of the state of the world, the lack of which explains the lifelessness of current
political proposals.