Paul Virilio was obsessed with vision. Not just with what we see, but with how technologies of seeing transform the world itself. In his 1994 book The Vision Machine, he argued that cameras, satellites, and screens had created a new regime of perception—one where images replace experience, and where the act of seeing is increasingly automated.
For Virilio, vision was never neutral. It was always tied to power, to speed, and to war. The question was not only “What do we see?” but “Who controls the apparatus of seeing—and what do they see on our behalf?”
From Optics to Automation
Virilio traced a long history of vision as a tool of domination. From Renaissance perspective in painting to military reconnaissance, sight has been linked to control. But the 20th century brought a radical shift: the automation of vision. Machines now see faster, further, and in ways no human eye can. Satellites orbiting the planet, night-vision goggles, drone cameras, AI recognition systems—all extend perception, but also take it out of human hands.
The result is what Virilio called “vision machines”: systems that produce, circulate, and interpret images without human mediation.
The End of Geography
When vision is instant and global, distance collapses. A war fought in Iraq appears in real time on living-room televisions in Paris or New York. Surveillance cameras watch a street corner from hundreds of miles away. Satellites beam back weather, military, and resource data in seconds. Geography no longer protects or conceals; everything is potentially visible, everywhere.
This shift also reorganizes politics. Power lies with those who can see (states, corporations, militaries) and those who are forced to be seen (citizens, workers, consumers). To be visible is increasingly to be vulnerable.
Case in Point: The Age of Drones
The drone epitomizes Virilio’s “vision machine.” It is not just a weapon—it is a flying camera, a machine that fuses vision and violence. Warfare is conducted not by soldiers on the ground but by operators watching screens thousands of miles away. Vision here is not passive; it is lethal.
Similarly, in civilian life, smartphones and CCTV feed into a permanent regime of visibility. To live in a city today is to be constantly documented—by machines that never blink.
Why It Matters
Virilio’s vision machine feels more relevant than ever in an era of facial recognition, livestreamed violence, and algorithmic feeds. The danger, he warned, is not only surveillance but substitution: that images will replace reality itself. Events happen “live,” but they arrive already mediated, edited, framed. We don’t witness the world; we witness its broadcast.
The politics of the 21st century, then, is inseparable from the politics of vision. Who gets to look? Who is forced to appear? And what disappears when our experience of the world is reduced to images moving at the speed of light?
Know More:
The Politics of Speed: Paul Virilio’s Dromology Explained
The Invention of the Accident: Paul Virilio on Technology’s Shadow
The Aesthetics of Disappearance: Paul Virilio on Time, Memory, and the Instant
