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Wednesday, 29 October 2025

1. The Experience of Distance: The Colonial Moment

For the colonizer, conquest was fundamentally spatial. It required crossing oceans, traversing deserts, enduring slowness, risk, and delay.

The colonizer’s power was a function of movement through space.
Distance—the separation between home and colony—structured not only geopolitics but also perception, imagination, and desire.
There was a tangible experience of elsewhere: the sights, smells, and textures of “foreign” places, which entered the colonizer’s consciousness as confirmation of difference.

This was the phenomenology of geographic expansion—a world still organized by distance, in which control was mediated by travel, transport, and time.
Even domination required delay: one had to move, occupy, establish presence. The world was large, and control was always partial, deferred, mediated by geography itself.

2. The End of Geography: The Dromological Condition

Virilio’s “end of geography” is not a metaphor for globalization—it’s a literal transformation in the conditions of experience.
With the rise of instantaneous communication, high-speed transport, and real-time data, the mediating function of distance collapses. The world is “available” all at once.

Virilio calls this condition polar inertia:

a state in which movement and immobility coincide.

We are constantly in motion without going anywhere: our consciousness traverses global distances instantly through screens and networks, while our bodies remain static.
Every place is “present” to us simultaneously; therefore, no place is truly experienced as distinct.
The event of travel, once a confrontation with otherness, is now a spectacle consumed without displacement.

In short, the colonial experience of distance (where the world was large, slow, and differentiated) gives way to a dromological experience of collapse—the simultaneity of everywhere, which is also the experience of nowhere.

3. Polar Inertia: Motion Without Journey

Virilio coined “polar inertia” to describe the paradox of the high-speed age:
the faster we move, the less we experience movement.

This inversion follows from his principle that every technology invents its own accident.

The invention of speed produces the accident of immobility.
The conquest of distance produces the loss of place.

The colonizer’s journey across oceans is replaced by the digital traveler’s journey through networks—a pure circulation of images, commodities, and data.
This is not movement but circulation: motion stripped of encounter, of slowness, of friction.

Hence “polar inertia”: a life in constant transmission but without trajectory—motion that circles back upon itself.
We are all “mobile,” yet our lives are locally paralyzed by logistics, screens, and infrastructures of instantaneous access.

4. The Political and Psychological Reversal

In the colonial era, distance justified domination: it made the world appear as an object to be reached, conquered, possessed.
In the postcolonial/dromological era, distance is abolished, but domination persists through other means:

Surveillance replaces exploration.
Instantaneous visibility replaces spatial control.
The colonization of place becomes the colonization of perception.

What was once external conquest becomes internal saturation.
The imperial gaze no longer extends outward—it floods inward, through devices, interfaces, and screens.

The colonizer’s ship has been replaced by the satellite, the drone, the live feed. The “elsewhere” once encountered through travel now collapses into a seamless, flattened global image—a regime of pure immediacy without duration.

5. Experience After the End of Geography

Virilio’s point is not nostalgia for the old world of slow travel but a phenomenological warning:
when distance disappears, so does orientation.
Without mediation—without the interval of slowness that gives perspective—experience itself disintegrates.

In the colonial world, distance was both a vector of violence and a structure of perception; in the dromological world, both are replaced by exposure.

We no longer move through the world; the world moves through us.
We no longer arrive anywhere; we are perpetually “connected.”
The colonial map, once divided by borders and oceans, has become a single, glowing surface.

And yet, as Virilio notes, this does not produce freedom. It produces claustrophobia at planetary scale—a collapse of the outside, a condition in which the world has no remainder, no horizon, no delay.

6. Summary Table

Colonial Experience	Dromological Experience
Movement through physical distance	Instantaneous transmission through networks
Encounter with foreign place	Collapse of place into global simultaneity
Mediation through geography and time	Elimination of mediation through speed
Partial presence	Continuous presence (and thus, no presence)
Expansion and delay	Compression and paralysis (polar inertia)
Conquest as spatial domination	Control as informational and perceptual saturation

In short:
The colonial age was defined by distance experienced and overcome; the postcolonial, dromological age is defined by distance abolished and therefore lost.
Where the colonizer once moved through space, the contemporary subject is moved through by information.
We no longer inhabit places but rather are inhabited by the infrastructure of speed.

Virilio’s “polar inertia” captures this paradox precisely: a humanity that has conquered movement so completely that it can no longer move at all.