Lenny Nero: I can get you what you want. You just have to talk to me. I'm your priest, your shrink, your main connection to the switchboard of souls. I'm the Magic Man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you even think it, you can have it . . .
~~ Strange Days (1995)

And it begins: the journey centres around perception as the new organizing commodity of society. The seizure of the means of perception does not merely complement financial capital but renders capital, and capitalism itself, utterly irrelevant.

In the new millennium, society spins headlong into the very brink of a dark vortex of digital virtuality. The contemporary instant can, and will, vanish entirely into that vortex.

The Agricultural Revolution initiated a seizure of the means of organic production. The Industrial Revolution absorbed the means of mechanical production. The Information Revolution integrated the means of symbolic production. But the post-symbolic Virtual Revolution is far more profound than any of these earlier disruptions, for it seizes the means of perception itself - the very means of cognition.

It now becomes possible to actually interrupt the stream of human consciousness, indeed to divert the enormous power of that stream to our own specific ends. The deepest reservoirs of human perception and consciousness can be diverted at will, changing the traditional patterns of consciousness with the "McLuhanesque" abruptions of a channel-break for commercials - or the finger on the remote control.

The human mind does not perceive, and never has perceived, "reality" to its ultimate extent. Perceptual tests reveal that the human mind derives its impression of so-called "reality" through an astonishingly narrow and data-poor series of quick retinal impressions. This very limited visual tracking - commonly only ten to fifteen percent of our environment is ever subjected to a direct flow by the eyeball - is assembled into a seamless perception of reality by the optic centre of the brain (assisted by neural-net subprocessing in the retina and optic nerve). These human organic, wet-ware visual processors like all processors, could be "hacked".

With fractal compression techniques it is entirely possible to cram more detail into an image than was present in the original image itself. There is no "image degeneration" with fractal compression - quite the opposite, the more the image is fractally manipulated, the more apparently "real" it becomes. Fractal imagery of this type possesses a virtual and perceptual "density" that a natural object cannot match. Fractal generated imagery/detail is not "accurate" detail, in the sense that it is not “true to the original”. The density of fractal detail is mathematically generated on location.

The virtual image is "better" than the real - and the human mind senses this on an entirely unconscious level. The assisted digitalized image carries a "neural impression" of authenticity that overwhelms the human brains perceptual centres. Doubts fade into the algorithm on an entirely unconscious, organic, cellular level.

Beyond judgement - this is in some sense the last revelation. The entire ontological structure of Cartesian doubt has been rendered irrelevant by neural-implant science. The fundamental cosmic constants of life and thought can now be directly engineered. Philosophy’s despotism with its predilection for Platonic-fascist top-down solutions is subverted. With the capacity to enhance the effect, our physical command over the means of perception and cognition are complete. Here wet chemical and dry computer digital engineering converge.

The contemporary condition is one of fragmentation, disintegration, malaise, meaninglessness, a vagueness, the absence of moral parameters - a societal chaos. Ahead lie overpopulation, atomic destruction, and an apocalypse, environmental devastation.

Reality itself is effaced by the fragmented complex that characterizes a core condition of the present "world space".

ALPHA 60: There are times when reality becomes too complex for oral communication. But legend gives it a form by which it pervades the whole world.

Exterior. Night. The suburbs of Alphaville, the Capital City of a distant Galaxy.
A lone car is being driven along one of the boulevards, ablaze with flashing lights, neon signs: the city is a complex of light against the night, huge illuminated buildings, a busy metropolis buzzing with an atmosphere of electronic energy.

Close Up: Lenny Caution at the wheel of his white Ford Galaxie. He lights a cigarette as he waits at a traffic signal and transfers his gun from the glove box into his pocket. A train is silently crossing a long bridge, a bead of light against the darkness, as Lenny's narration commences.

Lenny: It was 24 hours 17 minutes Oceanic Time when I arrived at the suburbs of Alphaville.
~~ Jean-Luc Godard, Alphaville

Heat: This is what cities mean. You get off a train, walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It’s always fifteen degrees hotter in cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately consuming heat, breeding more heat. The ultimate heat-death of the universe that scientists predict is already underway; you can feel it happening all around you.

The modern city is no longer a living space filled with human characters. It is now an inorganic, anti-scenic two-dimensional space of information flows and signs. Instantly, junks of information flash across screens. The so-called "living reality" is becoming more sparse day by day. The city is an abstract space where all types of symbols and signs intersect and co-exist.

The over-expansion of the information circle verses the over-contraction of the living circle forms our daily experience. Home, shut up in a narrow space we consume information, T.V/ P.C./24 hr streams. "Living reality" is getting thinner, while information flies, swarms, proliferates. Information about war in the Middle East has the same value as those in commercials of instant noodles and financial services.

We lack experience in direct contact with others. Only in the consumption of information can we get "existential" experience.

The horrors felt by urban cities are not derived from the bloody murders frequently occurring in reality. Though such events happen everywhere at every-time. What people get in touch with are not living facts, but cool information?

We are necessarily answering spatial questions when constructing present urban knowledge.

The city is an active force in constituting bodies, and always leaves its traces on the subject’s corporeality. Correspondingly the dramatic transformation of the city as a result of the information revolution has direct effects on the inscription of bodies. In "The Overexposed City", Paul Virilio elaborates the tendency in cities today towards hyper-reality: the replacement of geographical space with the screen interface, the transformation of distance and depth into pure surface, the reduction of space to time, of the face-to-face encounter to the terminal screen.

“On the terminal’s screen, a span of time becomes both the surface and the support of inscription, time literally…surfaces. Due to the cathode-ray tube’s imperceptible substance, the dimensions of space become inseparable from their speed of transmission. Unity of place without the unity of time makes the city disappear into the heterogeneity of advanced technology’s temporal regime".
~~ Paul Virilio