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Accidentology: A Critical Assessment of Paul Virilio's Political Economy of

Speed

Article · December 2013

DOI: 10.1215/17432197-2346982

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ACCIDENTOLOGY: A CRITICAL ASSESSMENT of PAUL VIRILIO’S POLITICAL ECONOMY of

SPEED

STEVE MATTHEWMAN

ABSTRACT Despite being in existence for several decades, scholarly study of accidents

remains underdeveloped. Critics within this field point out various flaws: it is piecemeal,

isolated from other subfields, and, most significantly, it lacks theoretical sophistication

(Tierney 2010). This is particularly problematic given that accidents are increasing in scale,

cost, frequency and severity. This article critically surveys the work of the most prominent

theorist on accidents today, Paul Virilio, to see what he might contribute. Particular focus

is given to the May 6, 2010 Flash Crash. This is used as a measure of the worth of Virilio’s

accidentology. He views the Flash Crash as a harbinger of the integral accident, a

catastrophic incident which is experienced simultaneously and universally.

While Virilio is to be supported for drawing attention to the technologically-mediated

accidents that threaten hyper-connected societies, his method and focus are found

wanting. His preference for suggestion over qualification means that he eschews empirical

elaboration and his fixation on the political economy of speed proceeds without reference

to a political economy of wealth. This asymmetry results in grand theorising about general

conditions which do not exist.

KEYWORDS: Paul Virilio, accidentology, accidents, dromology, Flash Crash, virtualization

Daily life is becoming a kaleidoscope of incidents and accidents, catastrophes and

cataclysms, in which we are endlessly running up against the unexpected, which occurs out

of the blue, so to speak.

- Paul Virilio, Unknown Quantity.

INTRODUCTION

While social theorists have always been attuned to accidental events – interest in the

unintended consequences of social action is as old as social theory itself (Merton 1936: 894)

– the study of accidents remains underdeveloped. Leading figures within this field criticize

work on accidents for being piecemeal, isolated from mainstream social theory and for

ignoring questions of power (Tierney 2007, 2010; Vaughan 1999). According to Kathleen

Tierney (2010: 660) it is in the theoretical realm where the most work is needed; the only

“progress” to note being a move from functionalism to mid-range theory. In short, we await

a fully-blown “accidentology” (Virilio 2007: 10).

The task of developing a project bearing Paul Virilio’s title is pressing. In 1999 the President

of the American Sociological Association dedicated his address to accidental outcomes,

calling them “the principal challenge for our discipline” (Portes 2000: 3). In 2004 the

Economic and Social Research Council (UK) urged that the project for 21 st century social

science theory should be to reckon with the accident: urban vulnerability, network failures

and states of emergency (Redhead 2006). The requirement for more sophisticated theory is

easily justified: the need to understand accidents is critical. All available evidence suggests

that accidents are increasing in scale, cost, frequency and severity. These findings come

from sources as diverse as the International Risk Governance Council (Kröger 2007), the
Swiss reinsurance industry (Bevere, Rogers and Grollimund 2011), chroniclers of “disaster

capitalism” (Klein 2007: 415) and scholars of “normal accidents” (Perrow 2007:1). Accidents

and disasters appear to be syndromes of our times.

This helps us answer the question: why develop an accidentology? It does not answer the

question: why use Virilio to do so? In order to answer the latter question we survey Virilio’s

oeuvre. This necessitates discussion of the political economy of speed which undergirds his

project on accidents. We then elucidate his “dromology” with reference to the Flash Crash

of May 6, 2010, which Virilio invests with special import. The Flash Crash is a “transmission

accident” par excellence, serving as a prophetic warning for life in a hyper-connected world

running at hyper speed. Virilio argues that financial panics have replaced the nuclear-

fuelled panics of yesteryear. He suggests that of all the risks that assail us – terrorist attack,

environmental ruin and so forth – we are particularly threatened by “a tyrannical political

economics” (Virilio 2012c: 62). While Virilio sees all technologies as accidents waiting to

happen, when those technologies are instant, interconnected and interactive they threaten

something of an entirely different order: the accident to end accidents (Virilio 2012c: 14).

Such an event will be globally simultaneous and universally disastrous.

LIFE IN THE FAST LANE

Virilio (2003) affirms Marc Bloch’s observation that modern society is distinguished from its

predecessors by its speed. This distances us from past social formations. Consequently any

attempt to reckon with our times must analyse acceleration “as a major political

phenomenon” (Quoted in Armitage 2000: 35). Virilio calls his proposed analysis of the

science of speed dromology. This is the core of his work (Virilio 2001: 113). The neologism is
derived from the Greek, dromos, denoting both rapid movement and races (Liddell and

Scott 1996: 450). Without this, he argues, we cannot make sense of modernity. “In fact,

there was no ‘industrial revolution’, but only a ‘dromocratic revolution;’ there is no

democracy, only dromocracy; there is no strategy, only dromology” (Virilio 2006b: 69). This

project which directly deals with the consequences of acceleration is christened

accidentology.

In characterising the world dromologically Virilio notes three revolutions in speed, each with

their exemplary technologies (Virilio and Lotringer 2002: 95). The first is a transportation

revolution, movement across territory. Here the exemplar is the engine. This first revolution

has a geo-political strand. The second revolution complicates standard notions of time and

space. This is the transmission revolution, movement independent of territory made

possible by communication technologies. This moves us from localized real space to

globalized cyberspace. These transmission technologies are getting smaller all of the time

(Virilio 2005b: 162-3). This leads us to the third revolution, that of transplantation,

movement into the body. Nanotechnologies are exemplary. We are still in the early stages

of augmentations, implants and stimulators, but Virilio (2012a: 61) sees the prospect of

emergent “biomachines”, “hyperstimulated” people and new bio-elites who may oppress

the “naturals.”

Virilio (2003) adds that we can neither understand our history nor the technology which

propels it without coming to terms with a related phenomenon of speed and acceleration:

the accident. “The progress of speed is nothing other than the unleashing of violence”

(Virilio 2005b: 45). Virilio (Virilio and Lotringer 2008: 47) argues that the accident should be
to social sciences as sin is to human nature. The goal of accidentology is to give the accident

its proper ontological status. When we invent a new technology we also always invent the

possibility of unintended and unfortunate outcomes. The ship’s invention creates the

shipwreck to come, the railway’s the collision and derailment, the airplane’s that of the

plane crash. In mapping our plight Virilio reaches back to the mythology of classical antiquity.

He calls the accident the Medusa of modernity (Lotringer and Virilio 2005: 103). The analogy

is only partly apt, as Virilio makes plain, for this time there will be no Perseus.

Older technological accidents disappeared into the elements; the ship sank into the sea.

With the proliferation and acceleration of technologies we have new catastrophes, collisions

of traffic in which technologies disappear into each other. This “amounts to the shipwreck of

speed” (Virilio 2005b: 113). Indeed, qualitative achievements in science are accompanied by

a quantitative logic: the greater the intensity of technoscientific progress the greater the

catastrophes (Virilio 2002b: 10). For this reason Virilio absented himself from the

celebrations surrounding the launch of the Airbus A380 aircraft. “An 800-seat plane is 800

deaths” (Quoted in Geisler and Doze 2009: 96).

This proliferation of disaster, as well as its spread from the real world to the virtual, creates

conditions of deep unease. We find ourselves in a situation in which fear is constant and

ambient (Virilio 2012a: 14). The twentieth century was marked by mass-produced disasters,

with signal events like the sinking of the unsinkable Titanic (1912) and the meltdown of

Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor (1986). Industrial accidents continue. These are compounded by

new postindustrial accidents in information and genetic technology. Accidents of substance

are accompanied by accidents of distance and knowledge (Cited in Armitage 2011a: 41).
Such events move us towards what Virilio variously calls the “full-scale”, “generalized” or

“total” accident. This is a shift from “in situ” accidents to the “integral” accident (Lotringer

and Virilio 2005: 100) which will be experienced everywhere by everyone. The various

catastrophes and disasters which assail us will assume the level of a system (Virilio 2010: 4,

15). Here we enter into uncharted terrain, to technology’s ultimate negation.

THE ACCIDENT REVEALS THE SUBSTANCE

To understand our world we need to understand velocity, to understand velocity we need to

understand accidents, and to understand accidents we need to recalibrate philosophy.

Virilio says that there are two typical ways of thinking about the accident, a scholarly,

philosophical one which denotes the inessential and a common sense one which speaks to

the unexpected. Virilio thinks that both beliefs are mistaken. Accidentology seeks to correct

these errors.

Accidents are neither trivial nor should they be unanticipated, they are “programmed” into

every technology, yet ever since Aristotle accidents have been relegated to a residual

category of analysis. Aristotle’s Metaphysics reasoned that they are not to be taken as a

proper object of knowledge as they are singular events with unique causes, not amenable to

generalization. The consequence of this was to make accidents “relative and contingent”

whereas “substance is absolute and necessary” (Virilio 1999: 92). But, says Virilio (Quoted in

Ruby 1998) “[a]s soon as something is well established (a substance), it is necessarily

accompanied by something unreliable, which can trigger off forces difficult to contain at any

moment.” The invention of any substance always involves the invention of its accompanying
accident. The accident therefore reveals the substance of technology. This leads Virilio

(2000b: 53) to call for symmetry between substance and accident.

Since accidents reveal things that would otherwise be hidden Virilio regards them as “a

profane miracle” (Lotringer and Virilio 2005: 63). In regarding them thus Virilio (1999: 89)

channels a connection between accident and revelation which first emerged in the early

modern period. Natural philosophers like Francis Bacon identified parallels between

accidents and experiments. Both involve unusual sets of circumstances presenting breaks in

the habitual order of things, in each case there opens up the possibility of new ways of

seeing, and as a result of this, the potential to produce new forms of knowledge (Witmore

2001: 3). That there is a value to accidents, that they are freighted with philosophical import,

is also recognized by contemporary social theorists who make the connection between

accident and revelation. For Jean Baudrillard (2005b: 133) the accident reveals the fatum of

technology, for Bruno Latour (2005: 81) the agency of objects, for Harvey Molotch (1970:

138) the mobilization of bias, for Slavoj Žižek (1989: 70) the symptom of society and for

Frank Trentmann (2009: 69) the politics of everyday life.

To deny the dual nature of technology, the substance/accident dyad, is, says Virilio, to

fundamentally misconstrue the object. “To censor evidence, as is so often the case, is to

practice dissimulation, ensure disinformation, and so contribute to a loss of confidence in

the effects of science, analogous today only to what happens in politics” (Virilio 1989a: 81).

It also means reality is only partially grasped. This is the confusion lying at the heart of

today’s technological crisis. Discovery and creation beget catastrophe. As noted, this is not a

general tendency, it is an absolute rule: “everything that constitutes the world has
experienced an accident, and this without exception” (Virilio 2005a: 34, emphasis in original).

This realization explains Virilio’s passion for the subject. Virilio’s (1993: 213) drive to restore

the symmetry between accident and substance also stems from his mindfulness of the

politics of accidents: they can be used to advance particular policy positions. Thus a national

electricity blackout in France was manipulated into a call for accelerated nuclear power

plant construction, “giving the accident primacy in political and economic discourse.”

VIRILIO AND VIRTUALIZATION

The opening premise of Virilio’s work is that we must deal with acceleration in modernity.

This includes the acceleration of technological innovation and obsolescence. The rate of

invention is outpacing engineering technique while the pressures to get to market have also

increased. Under such conditions, designing and testing for safety becomes ever more

challenging. Digital technologies present additional difficulties. The standard safety

approach from an engineering perspective is to incorporate redundancies; replicating parts

to guard against individual failure. But this is ineffective in the digital realm. An attendant

issue is the standard interpretation of accidents. Most accident models assume that they

are the product of unrestrained and unanticipated releases of energy, or flows thereof.

Virilio notes that our pre-eminent threats may come from distortions of (or disruptions to)

information flows. Software is not always seen as being “safety-critical” when it is, in fact,

an increasing cause of accidents (Leveson 2011: 3). Indeed, these codes influence ever-more

aspects of social life. This global spread of digital technologies also signals an increase in

interactive complexity: systems are designed to connect to and synchronize with yet more

systems. Software makes the link, providing the ability for numerous systems, components

and people to network. The potential consequences of this are not easy to predict, control
or correct, even for those deemed most expert. This will be particularly problematic in

tightly coupled systems where processes are rapid, intimately linked and hard to stop. In

these systems accidents will be “normal” (Perrow 1984). Part of this difficulty stems from

another aspect of modern socio-technical systems, the ceding of multiple control and

decision-making functions to automated systems (Leveson 2011: 3-5). Here Virilio adds his

voice to those warning of the dangers of substituting human-controlled processes for digital

ones.

Thanks to information and communication technologies everything arrives everywhere at

once, including that which is least expected (Virilio 2002c: 111). To privilege the present is to

therefore privilege accidents (Virilio 2006a). While the problem with speed is always the

problem of accidents, the very rapidity of technologies that stress immediacy and ubiquity

bring problems over and above their continued control. We also face the prospect of losing

control of our own emotions and of ourselves (Virilio 2005a: 98-99). These technologies

operate so quickly that they leave us little time to judge. In fact the key decisions seem to be

ceded to the machines and devices that transport us, our goods and information. When life

runs in real time democracy dies (Virilio 2012c: 2). Politics simply fails to keep

pace.

Contemplation, even cognition, become casualties in this culture. Debate and cooperation

also become difficult. This means that the very basis of humanity is then threatened (Virilio

2005b: 113). Living is replaced by mere existence (Armitage 2012: 88). Here Virilio’s

concerns mirror those of his compatriots Jacques Derrida and Jacques Ellul. Virilio’s

argument raises the spectre of Derrida’s (2000) ultimate ethical nightmare of the machine
that runs without us, while Ellul (1992) argued that powerful technologies diminish our

humanity. Like Virilio, he believed that technological acceleration increased existential risks

and that collateral damage necessarily accompanies life’s new velocities. All are in accord:

with rapid technologies reflexes replace reflection.

In Lost Dimension Virilio offered a broad contemplation of virtualization. Technological

developments mean that we no longer live in real time or real space. We dwell in accidental

space. Reality has been replaced by technologically-mediated “reality effects.” Here Virilio

finds an ally in Baudrillard (2005a: 128), who observes the “tendency of the rate of reality to

fall” with the rise of virtual hyper-exchanges. Reality effects tear at the social fabric such

that physical dimensions (including human) lose their meaning. As such all of our grids of

intelligibility – norms and values, anchors, standards and reference points – cease to serve

or guide us. Instead we live in a perpetual present in which tradition, memory and collective

sentiments offer no comfort. Disorientation prevails. “We must at least resolve ourselves to

losing the sense of our senses, common sense and certainties, in the material of

representation”, Virilio (1991: 48) wrote.

This inevitably makes for a much riskier existence: our inability to access concrete reality

means that what we sense and what we comprehend are out of kilter. Mistakes and

miscalculations result (Virilio 1991: 31). In displacing accidents from matter to light and

image new forms of pollution are also created; that of space-time, as past, present and

future are conflated (Virilio 1997: 22). Thus, in addition to ecological concerns about the

depletion of biodiversity and the plundering of finite planetary resources we must also
contend with the end of “chronodiversity.” This takes us from event-based history of various

durations to accidental history (Virilio 2010: 71; Virilio 2012b: 62).

In Polar Inertia, Virilio (2000: 84) points out that virtual technology does not just alienate us

from time and place; it also estranges us from our own bodies. Here he assents to Donna

Haraway’s (1991: 152) observation in her Cyborg Manifesto, that “[o]ur machines are

disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.” This is because action at a distance,

that mediated by technological structures, trumps immediate unmediated agency. Our

technologies move for us, and do so far faster than we ever could. We can stay where we

are, although there are profound phenomenological implications for us. Since we can

extend our actions across time and space our precise location is open to question. Where

are we present? And how do we experience our place in the world? Technological speed,

then, has deleterious effects on living, over and above the obvious accidents and the

damage it does to territory and chronology:

As a racing driver must first master acceleration, keep his car straight and pay no
heed to the details of the surrounding space, so too will it doubtless be for every
human activity, both at and away from home. We will no longer admire the
landscape but only watch our screens and monitor our interactive trajectory – that
is, a “journey” with no distance, a “travelling time” with no actual passing of time
(Virilio 2000: 76).

THE ACCIDENT OF FINANCE

Having outlined Virilio’s broad concerns – speed, accidents, and virtualization – here we

bring them to bear on a single event, the Flash Crash of May 6, 2010. This will give us a

measure of his theory’s utility.

Virilio’s (2012c) The Great Accelerator is dedicated to Wall Street’s traders and CERN’s

particle-splitting scientists. His habitual concerns about technology are also raised here:

exhaustion and deprivation, paralysis and inertia, risk and disaster, crisis and insecurity,

hysteria and fear. Virilio once more addresses those modern hazards that are delivered by

digital technologies. The financial sphere is dominated by automated trading programs.

Human action has been ceded to software, modelling replaces meditation. Just as the

automation of production created mass redundancies, its spread into other realms

threatens the worst redundancy of all, that of humanity. Progress is anything but; “digital

civilization” is actually “a return to numerological paganism and its cults of yore” (Virilio

2012c: 16) as today “the irrational is becoming more and more prevalent in the world’s

various financial markets” (Virilio 2002c: 111, emphasis in original).

The “Big Accident” will come when virtual reality triumphs over actual reality, when the

infosphere dominates the geosphere. We have yet to experience this integral accident

although in Virilio’s (2010: 152) estimation it is “not too far off now.” But we have had

intimations of what it might be like: the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11,

2001, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and various financial panics and meltdowns. Indeed,

one of Virilio’s (1995) consistent messages across the last two decades has been that

financial rather than nuclear meltdown now fuels our fears: “watch out as you hear talk

about the “financial bubble” in the economy: a very significant metaphor is used here, and it

conjures up visions of some kind of cloud, reminding us of other clouds just as frightening as

those of Chernobyl” (quoted in Crosthwaite 2011: 181).

Virilio’s point is corroborated by leading financial journalists and investors. The Russian

financial crisis of 1998 caused the government to devalue the currency and default on debt.

This had major ramifications for the global economy and was a contributing factor in the

destruction of the US hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. As Paul Blustein wrote,

this crisis “with no malice intended, created a threat more devastating to the West than

anything the friends of communism had ever concocted during their decades in the Kremlin”

(quoted in Crosthwaite 2011: 179). Similarly, in 2003 Warren Buffet referred to financial

derivatives as “financial weapons of mass destruction” (Quoted in Crosthwaite 2011: 179).

In reckoning with Virilio’s many accidents, then, we must also pay attention to what Paul

Crosthwaite (2011) calls “the accident of finance.”

Virilio argues that each technological invention spawns its own accident. With computer

keyboard work, for example programming or trading, there arises the specific accident

known as “fat finger” syndrome. We have all been guilty of hitting the wrong key. Fat finger

syndrome begins with this, but it only manifests when the typographical error results in

unintended consequences of a spectacular nature, a systems accident as when a broker for

Mizuho Securities sold £1.6bn shares in the recruitment agency J-Com on the Tokyo stock

exchange when the company only had a total market value of about £50m. A sell order for

600 000 shares in J-Com was placed when it had only 14 000 in issue. The company had just

been floated. In a period of hours its ownership shifted hands almost 50 times. The Tokyo

market, unaware of the error, continued to trade the stock. This had a rippling effect on

other listed companies. The Nikkei 225 experienced a 301-point fall. At the time

commentators suggested that it could be the world’s most expensive trading mistake

(McCurry 2005).
The original accident of this technology is dated as 19 October 1987, although other

competing causes include overvaluation, liquidity and market psychology. Better known as

“Black Monday”, this was computerized trading’s first crash. Since then the market – Virilio

(2012c: 13) does not suppose that it is free – has been “subject to the excessive speeds of

hyperactive flash trading.” Basically, it set in train “the alarm bells that have been ringing

steadily for a quarter of a century” (Virilio 2012c: 81). The Flash Crash of May 6 2010, which

saw the biggest single day fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, was also a consequence

of computerized trading. US stocks lost about one trillion dollars of their value before

bouncing back. According to one version of events a trade was erroneously entered on the

Nasdaq stock market as “b” for billions when it should have been “m” for millions. Other

rumours were more specific: a Citigroup trader had sold 16 billion Procter and Gamble

shares instead of 16 million.

Donald MacKenzie (2011) offers us insights into this world in which the machines (almost)

run without, highlighting potential fallout from the information bomb. He also considers the

Flash Crash which has so fixated Virilio (Armitage 2000: 41; Virilio 2000: 78; Virilio 2010: 153,

Virilio 2012c: 78-80). Stock market trading was once a person-to-person activity, then

person-to-screen or phone, now it is terminal-terminal. Software speaks to software. This

activity is typically measured in milliseconds. Purchases and sales, their arrival and

cancellation, spur significantly higher levels of activity in the millisecond after such events,

about 300 times greater than is normal. There follow periods of inactivity and great spikes in

trades for a minute or so thereafter, then they end as quickly as they began. Economists Joel

Hasbrouck and Gideon Saar identified the periodicity of the spikes. They are separated by
about 1000 milliseconds. “Little of this has to do directly with human action” (MacKenzie

2011). These speeds are beyond us. This activity has to be co-ordinated by computer

systems with matching engines which enable them to trade when they find corresponding

buy and sell orders. The New York Stock Exchange’s computers reside in Mahwah, New

Jersey.

Big corporations use these programs but they have a problem. The volumes they wish to

trade may not be available for immediate processing. Traders may be alerted to this and

alter their prices accordingly. If large orders are lodged and only partially executed rivals

may change their own orders and pricing structures. For example, they will obviously raise

their prices when they see substantial purchase orders. The larger institutions use execution

algorithms to try to alleviate this. These compartmentalize large orders into smaller units

and pay close attention to the timing of trades. Two basic motivations inform them: to make

transactions look as “regular” as possible so as not to bring undue attention from others,

and to not lose money. Execution algorithms are responsible for the spikes that Hasbrouck

and Saar identified. Another set of algorithms devoted to statistical arbitrage look to exploit

disturbances in price patterns. Then there are algorithms that exploit other algorithms. They

can detect the presence of execution algorithms, buy shares before they do and on sell

them at a profit. While other programs are reluctantly accepted as playing the game, these

“algo-sniffers” are seen as cheating the system.

Different algorithms work at different speeds, but acceleration defines the times. Processing

speeds are continually increasing. As MacKenzie (2011) notes, the data of Hasbrouck and

Saar was drawn from 2007 and 2008. Those operating speeds now look tardy. Trades are
currently measured in microseconds (1/1 000 000th of a second). Virilio (2012c: 63) bemoans

this “unstoppable offensive of the NANOCHRONOLOGIES.” The London Stock Exchange

claims to process orders through its new platform in 124 microseconds. While Virilio would

not be surprised to hear that this has consequences for the meaning of space, counter-

intuitively high-frequency trading means that he was wrong to announcing its obituary.

Space is more significant than ever. It matters greatly where your matching engine is placed.

It is pointless having it in Chicago because you are about 16 milliseconds away from the

action on the New York Exchange. “That’s a huge delay: you might as well be on the moon”

(MacKenzie 2011). Technical enhancements only offer a partial solution. The final barrier

that Virilio identified remains: the speed of light. Even light takes about 4 milliseconds to

travel from New York to Illinois.

In a twenty minute window on May 6, 2010, share prices and index futures controls tumbled

at unparalleled speed. Wired magazine referred to this afternoon as one of “the strangest in

economic history” (Keim 2012). This event became known as the Flash Crash. Prices

recovered, but enormous variations were reported. MacKenzie (2011) notes that

Accentures shares fell from US$40.50 to 1 cent and Sotheby’s rose from US$34 to

US$99999.99. “In the 14-second period following 2.45 and 13 seconds, more than 27,000

futures contracts were bought and sold by high-frequency algorithms, but,” as MacKenzie

(2011) writes, “their aggregate net purchases amounted to only around 200 contracts. By

2.45 and 27 seconds, the price of index futures had declined by more than 5 per cent from

its level four and a half minutes earlier. The market had entered a potentially catastrophic

self-feeding downward spiral.”

That it did not end in crisis owes much to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s Globex system

which includes something called Stop Logic Functionality. This imposed a temporary halt to

trading (a “Reserve State” of five seconds in all), commencing at 13:45:28 EST. Insiders

suggest that this was sufficient time for human traders to assess the situation and prevent

prices further declining. Many programs also cease operating when significant price shifts

occur, and traders can manually stop machines trading, although others note that adaptive

software and human intervention can actually exacerbate events (Cliff and Northrop 2010:

4). Bids could not be stopped but they were priced as low as possible (1 cent) and offers

were made as high as possible ($999999.99), hence the share prices for Accenture and

Sotheby’s. This makes prices as unappealing as they can be. Other commentators also note

the good fortune of the event’s timing, speculating that had it occurred at either end of the

day it could have had potentially catastrophic cascading effects in other global financial

markets. If it had happened in the morning the EU markets would be open (and presumably

panicking) and if it had taken place at the end of the day the US market could have closed

before any recovery was possible. Thus there would have been no comeback from a “600-

point down-spike”, making for a “trillion-dollar write-off” (Cliff and Northrop 2010: 7).

A report led by an author from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (Kirilenko et al.

2011) which analysed transactions on the E-mini Standard & Poor’s 500 equity index futures

market from May 3-6, 2010, identifying buyers, sellers, times of trades, their initiators,

orders, order types, prices and volumes concluded that a large sell program was responsible

for initiating events. Instead of spreading it out across time the program executed it at once.

Its size was such that buyers could not accommodate the selling load (Kirilenko et al. 2011:

35). Investigators pointed to an algorithm deployed by Kansas-based investment managers.

It was a reaction to its program to sell 75 000 index futures contracts rather than external

“real world” economic events like the Eurozone crisis that precipitated events. The official

report conducted by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the US

Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) dispelled rumours of terrorist action or fat

finger error. This enquiry also concluded that the stimulus for the Flash Crash was within the

system itself. Other automated trades of higher volumes had passed without instance, but

in this case something dramatic happened.

MacKenzie (2011) notes that automated financial systems are ripe for normal accidents.

They are heavily interconnected and enormously elaborate. Even experts admit they do not

understand them. This has consequences for everyday operations and for potential safety

enhancements. Although there is some agreement that they are needed a gnawing question

remains: will improvements actually improve things? We can but guess. The other problem

with normal accidents is that they are difficult to resolve. Given their speed, the window in

which one can meaningfully act is typically incredibly short. In this case the experts felt that

five seconds was time enough; Mackenzie (2011) notes that it takes the same amount of

time to blow his nose. None of this is news to Virilio. This is the anticipated fallout from the

information bomb. “What exactly is the automation of the quotations on Wall Street?” he

asks. This automated system “poses the problem of decisions no longer being shared, since

it is the machine that decides” (Virilio quoted in Brügger 2001: 93).

DOES THE MACHINE RUN WITHOUT US?

Does the machine run without us? Is technology the source of all evil? It would appear that

Virilio’s exemplar of the integral accident lacks nuance. Financial analysts have noted that,
irrespective of the technological platform from which it is launched, large order executions

will always impact on price. Economists have known this for decades (Black in Kirilenko et al.

2011: 4). Mackenzie (2011) adds that networked computing is not leading to ruination.

Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that automated trading is cheaper, easier and less

volatile. Several basic criticisms can be made of Virilio. First, humans can intervene to stop

trading. Even though it resembles a machine that runs without us, “frictionless capital” is

not without brakes (recall the Stop Logic Functionality). Second, erroneous trades can be

cancelled (or “broken” in market parlance). This has also occurred in subsequent accidents

of finance, as in the case of Kraft Food Group Inc. shares that rocketed up 29% in a minute

of trading because of a bungled buy order from either an aggressive algorithm or a fat finger

error (Nazareth and Regan 2012). Third, arguably one of the problems of the financial

system is not technical but social: there is insufficient human intervention. Corporations lack

external regulation, transparency and accountability. It is not, as Virilio would have it, solely

a question concerning technology, it is also one of governance (David 2010: 3, 6, 10-12).

One suggested brake on light speed trading is the Tobin Tax on financial transcations

(Crosthwaite 2011: 194). Fourth, technological refinements can be made. Virilio (2012c: 67)

himself notes that one of the consequences of the Flash Crash was the installation of a

circuit-breaker system on the New York Stock Exchange, and the Securities and Exchange

Commission has recently acquired the Tradeworx program Midas to give it a real-time view

of the stock market. It is also working on a consolidated audit trail (Popper and Protess

2012). Finally, and most significantly, the Flash Crash was all over within the day. A study led

by an author from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) noted that by

14:06:00 “the market was practically at the same price level where it was at 13:32:00 when

the rapid sell-off began” (Kirilenko et al. 2011: 8). By day’s end it was basically business as
usual (Crosthwaite 2011: 191 notes that Black Friday was also “surprisingly contained”). The

more remarkable point to be made is not that accidents happen, but given that complex

cybernetic systems make millions of decisions at light speed every moment of every day,

they happen so very rarely.

The Flash Crash does not reveal a fatal weakness within capitalism. If anything it provided

yet further evidence of the system’s remarkable resilience. A famous observation, repeated

by Fredric Jameson (2003), is that it is easier to imagine the world’s end than capitalism’s

(see also Harvey 2010: 46). This leads to another criticism; Virilio’s (2001: 161) political

economy of speed has been developed without reference to political economy proper: “I’m

a physiocrat of speed”, he declared, “and not of wealth.” Accidentology advocates

symmetry between substance and accident. It could be further enhanced by observing

symmetry between the political economy of speed and wealth. One of Karl Marx’s (1965:

457) original insights was that capitalism was an intrinsically crisis-prone productive system

operating beyond collective control, liable to cycles of boom and bust, accumulation and

loss, and – for workers especially – freighted with existential anxiety (for ways in which the

accident played into Marx’s own notions of political economy see Schivelbusch 1986: 132-3).

In “Weird and Wonderful Tales of Modern Social Decadence” the Italian communist Amadeo

Bordiga (1956) had already identified many of Virilio’s core concerns: a misplaced faith in

technology and a fetishistic relationship to it, the idea that greater speeds bring greater risks

and that bigger transport technologies deliver larger numbers of corpses. But this analysis

was not abstracted from considerations of political economy. An earlier article, “Murder of

the Dead” (1951) noted that capitalism is a system that uses living human labour to
transform objects into commodities of exchange. For capitalism to survive this process must

be ongoing. As such destruction and obsolescence are central to its continuance (even

advocates of the system acknowledge its “creative destruction.”) The system is nothing

other than “the masterful development of an economy based on disasters” (Bordiga 1951;

for an updated commentary on “disaster capitalism” see Klein 2007). Whether by accident

or design, by humans or nature, capitalism requires that material artefacts (dead labour) are

destroyed so that living labour can replace them. In focussing exclusively on a political

economy of speed Virilio ignores the deep structures that underpin accidents of political

economy (the substitution of living labour by dead labour, increasing rates of exploitation,

immiseration, wealth polarization, monopolization). Had Virilio connected speed to

economy he would see that accidents, crises and disasters can sometimes also be good for

business, virtual business included. Market volatility is an important source of profit for

those using trading algorithms: “What all high-frequency traders love is volatility – lots of it”

(Narang in David 2011: 3).

CONCLUSION

Given the increasing incidence, size and seriousness of accidents Virilio’s work is to be

welcomed. Dromology can certainly make a valuable theoretical contribution to the study of

accidents. Virilio reminds us of the potentially disorienting and dehumanising effects of

technology; he gives us insights into the consequences of living in an accelerated culture

and offers warnings on the Janus-face of progress. His work also alerts us to at least five

related changes in our socio-technical landscape that bear on today’s accidents: the rate of

technological innovation, increasing technological complexity, the shifting form of accidents

in a networked world, the growing density and synchronization of human-machine

relationships and novel types of accident and threat from integral events. For these reasons

there is, he says, a sense in which the accident needs to be exhibited and exposed. To do

this Virilio proposes a Museum of the Accident, although he opts for a University of Disaster

(2010) or Conservatory of the Catastrophe (in Armitage 2011) in later works.

Staging the accident would have an important instructional function. Three arguments are

advanced in favour of it: it would help us become more aware of the risks in our world; it

would move us beyond the idea that we are simply passive victims of progress and it would

help restore symmetry between accident and substance. Virilio sees this as nothing less

than our responsibility. The Museum of Accidents therefore incorporates an important

ethical function. It marks the starting point for a true understanding of technology, and it

perhaps offers our clearest means of averting the impending crisis. In so doing it would also

reinforce the accident’s inevitability (Virilio, 2008: 81, 83). This is advanced in the hope of

developing a “preventive intelligence” (Virilio quoted in Armitage 2011b: 18, emphasis in

original) and in the hope that new wisdom can grow from it: “A wisdom linked to the

grandeur of smallness, linked to the grandeur of humility, to the grandeur of failure” (Virilio

2009: 42). In reflecting on his role as a critical theorist Virilio (2012a: 71) describes himself as

a “revelationary” rather than a revolutionary. Our discussion has shown what accidents

disclose to him. They reveal the substance of technology, the underside of progress; they

also reveal finitude, the world at its limits.

This project, while of recognizable import, is not without its flaws. It can never be said that

detail trumps reflection in Virilio’s work. Grand theorizing always wins out over empirical

research; an event stands in for an explanation. A wealth of potential difference is

concealed behind pronouncements of general conditions. As he puts it: “I don't believe in

explanations. I believe in suggestion, in the obvious quality of the implicit”, “I work in

staircases… I begin a sentence, I work out an idea and when I consider it suggestive enough,

I jump to another idea without bothering with the development” (Virilio and Lotringer 2008:

44-5).

One suggestion worthy of development is a political economy of wealth to complement his

political economy of speed. Even though he condemns “tyrannical political economics” as

our biggest threat it receives no further explanation. If Virilio showed interest in economics

as well as speed he may also have reflected on the consequences of wealth polarization,

which are without historical precedent. A study by the International Monetary Fund showed

“that on a global scale the only group which increased its income share in the 1990s was the

richest national quintile, in high as well as in low income countries” the rest of the quintiles

lost out, albeit not drastically (Therborn 2012). Despite rising prosperity in China and India

the gap between the world’s richest and poorest populations continues to grow (Milanovic

2007). There are also unparalleled disparities within countries. Economists Thomas Piketty

and Emmanuel Saez derived figures from American tax returns to demonstrate that 93% of

the additional income generated in 2010 went to the top 1% of the nation’s taxpayers.

While the rich did well, the super rich excelled. A mere 0.01% of the population claimed 37%

of these additional earnings (Rattner 2012). One of the key revelations of the neo-liberal era

has been to show that policies are systematically skewered towards the privatization of

profit and the socialization of risk (Harvey 2010: 11).

The broad point to be made here is that, contra Virilio, there is no such thing as a general

condition. The world is differentially experienced. This applies to accidents as it does to

everything else. Research by sociologists of accidents reveals remarkably consistent patterns

in which the isolated, weak and less wealthy continually fare worse. This holds for accidents

of nature like prolonged heat waves (Klinenberg, 2002) and severe storms (Squires and

Hartman 2006), it also applies to technological accidents like car crashes (Roberts 2003;

World Health Organization 2009). Landscapes of risk and suffering are vastly uneven. For

this reason there can be no accidentology without a proper victimology. In making this

statement it would seem that the sociology of accidents can also offer something to the

scholarship of Paul Virilio.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am very grateful for the insightful comments and helpful guidance Professor John Armitage

offered on an earlier version of this article, and also for the comments made by the

anonymous referees.

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