Robots on spheres

This film of a short demonstration is probably the mark of some incoming surveillance technology. Why surveillance? This thing has no footprints, a very quiet sound, and an almost ethereal grace to its teetering presence. As Virilio points out in Speed And Politics, the energies of the urban space in all their techno-scientific wonder are marshalled by the theo-political as speed. The urban environment hastens not because it is inherently fast, slow, measured, or what have you, but precisely because it is a politicised space. Counter-cultures (punk cultures?) emerge from these spaces with the resistance to politicisation, as those who don't want to be politicised attack the very form the urban space because they recognise in this morphology of speed the virtual symbolic order of the political. In his A Paper House, Mark Thompson notes as much of the emergence of Laibach and the NSK with the secession of Slovenia from Yugoslavia. But is this what Lukács called "augenblich," the acting at the right time so the system cannot contain you? Doesn't the very phrase 'counter-culture' term something like the cyberpunk fiction that emerged in the 1980s or Laibach in Slovenia an object of discussion within the pre-existing framework of symbolic signs and signifieds?

This little gizmo that can independently hover on its ball is no Event in the sense of Badiou's work, or Augenblich in the tenor of Lukács. It is another piece of the haste, but stripped of its political support this robot merely teeters atop the upper crust of a sea of gomi. Soon this robot will be outdated. Already it is.