I n these very early years of the third millenni urn, the polar inertia produced by the instantaneity of in teractive CONNECTIONS (LIENS) is actually poised to supplant the fixed-property inertia of PLACES (LIEUX) <sub>-</sub> including the most representative places of legislation and the law. The whole of historicity will then find i tself shattered by this 'disto rtion of competition' between the p ast and the future that is so detrimental to the present, with the NANOTECHNOLOGIES of the infinitely short term already taking the place of the traditional chronologies of the medium and long term of past days, years and centuries .
All of this undermines the sovereignty of History - and the sovereignty of all an teriority, with i t . S o , following the age of terri to rial insecurity, 1 comes the age of the insecurity of H isto ry and i ts trip artite divisio n , PAST - PRESENT - FUTURE.
This reversal of values, we might note, has already afected space. At the close of the last century, geopoli tical strategists were, in fact, turning reality inside o ut like a glove and asserting that, forever after, the exterior was to prevail over the interior. Today, it is in the order of time that this turnaround is being accomplished, as posterity is primed to dominate all anteriority. Hence the sudden insecurity of History that now complements and co mpletes the i nsecuri ty of a terri torial sovereignty now threatened on all sides - from above, by its expansion, and from below, by its regional fragmentation. Hence the 'repeat delocalization' we are currently witnessing under the pretext of globalization, along with the impact of a process of externalization - outsourcing - that is increasingly untethered to any p ractical reali ty.
THE GREAT ACCELERATOR
1 Paul Virilio, L 1nsecurite du territoire. Paris: Galilee, 1993.
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