"As higher speeds progressively disentitle all others, the TGV and the ultrasonic aeroplane will not change anything. The time-reducing machine is no longer the motor-car but audiovisual and real-time technologies." Paul Virillio Polar Inertia pg. 16

Everything is growing faster—we stretch and encircle the globe with our digitally mediated hyperpresence.

When screens mediate our experience, the vehicle is the same as information. Speed, then, begins to alter information, and information speed. There is no information without travel, but there is no travel without information. The digital transformation we are undergoing will make it so we can see strange places and things. However, it will not be content to let us see those things. Speed is a jealous master, and we must be transformed as well.

We will replace our eyes with screens, bringing speed as close as possible to ourselves. Our organs are becoming insufficient to the task of speed—we must replace them. Totems fade soon after they are born, sorted into the flotsam and jetsam of cyberspace.

What will this do to us?

Perpetual Presence Vanishes the Self

If I am everywhere, I will not be able to identify my self. I will grasp at anything that resembles identity, be that whatever desires I can sense in my body, or an amalgamation of aesthetic pallets offered to me by cybergods. Speed will spread me so thin I will only find my “self” online in how it is reflected back to me in the funhouse mirror of the algorithm. I will simultaneously be identified by what I perceive of myself and what I perceive of the texture of my aesthetic niche. These are my anchor points, and in the Dromosphere, they never, ever stop changing.

Perpetual Presence summons the Perpetual Accident

Virillo warns us of the Perpetual Accident. Trains made us faster, but made more present the reality of train derailments. Cars made us faster, but made car crashes a more constant reality. Planes gave us 9/11, plane crashes, Lost. These methods of travel may have decreased fatalities in a numerical sense, but they bought disaster closer to our reality. As we enter the Dromosphere, we risk accident never ending. As our speed approaches infinity, so does the accident approach omnipresence. We are oversaturated with disaster, gorged on violence. We do not know how to handle the constant stream of misery given to us by cyberhyperspace. We call it compassion fatigue, empathy-overload, being “too online.” We make it a personal and rare condition. But it is undeniably becoming the generic state of the digital human to be soaked in calamity.

We need to be rung out like a rag.

We must learn to stop, to enter into rest, but that is impossible unless we bind ourselves to something larger, and outside of, our selves and our humanity. We must unite our fates with the one who has suffered and conquered the perpetual accident of humanity. The Dromosphere leads us to an eternity of hell, an eternity of torment. But that torment has been endured already by Christ, who suffered all of the speed of evil upon the cross.

We must bind ourselves to Him, become knights of Christ, Holy Knights. Swear an oath of fealty to the King of Heaven, and emerge from the perpetual accident.