Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

Abstract

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called "weak event". Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's..