Keeping the image of that reality in mind, all the while looking askance at the idiot predicaments of today, we can well wonder if our current faculties of analysis and making, our hideous languages, are capable of authoring any lasting alternatives. Perhaps ours is not a world of information but a wall of noise, a screeching m é lange of incompatible equations into which we have no real choice but to enter into directly: scrambled territories, institutions, constitutions, sovereignties, citizenships, hardwares, softwares, protocols, interfaces, databases, patterns, platforms, cities, muscles, skins, organs, failing presumptions, exotic refrains, domains, settlements, penultimate boundaries — or, better yet, directly into the forms-to-come, for which each of these legacies is just an ancestral ante-image. There is less forward and backward than entropy and negentropy, oblivion and not oblivion, imminent or deferred utopia. As such, any design authorship must understand that the dynamics at work now are — for better and worse — simultaneously and interchangeably both futuristic and archaic, at once both technocratic and theocratic. The Westphalian-Kantian diagram of the nation-state is attacked from both the front and the rear (another blurring). At the same time that we ponder oceanic financial archipelagos that would game the speed of light by locating offshore trading sites that optimize the movement of pulses between trading centers, and through which the incremental value of a commodity is determined literally by its location in the earth ’ s light cone, <sup>16</sup> we also watched, back in 2008, religious fundamentalist groups attacking Mumbai with Google Earth maps, satellite phones, stolen SIM cards. As some would launch the secular alter-cosmopolitanism-to-come, others lay the groundwork for a cloud-based neofeudalism: Visigoths with iPads, barbarian theological microstates with thriving biotech and nanotech industries (like California, perhaps). Supercomputing does not inoculate us from feudalism and from superstition, but it can perhaps provide for their opposite, that is, a futurity, and a futurism, without guarantees, only plasticity. <sup>17</sup> And so the accidents keep piling up. The jurisdictions are more interwoven. The geometry of political geography is only more complex, especially in that it seems to have no outside, no “ free space, ” to delimit itself against. Our accidental megastructure is more plural, more contradictory, more composite, and more polyscalar. But if so, then while Virilio ’ s axiom holds, and the invention of any new kind of technology is also necessarily and simultaneously the invention of a new kind of accident, it is true that the opposite holds as well: the accident also produces a new technology.
16
Introduction