A mobile people entirely victims of the set, a democracy that had had its head turned by the optical illusion of the ever-changing skyline. The dynamics of the landscape glimpsed are a mere sham, a very deliberate and elaborate sham. All media basically form one single medium, from the telega in the Ukrainian steppes to the transcontinental rail and the cinema motor city, where cars already outnumber people and where anyone strolling about on foot is suspect.

Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor

Virilio, writing in the early 1990s about Hollywood (and America) as it was perceived by Blaise Cendars in the 1930s. From here Virilio moves to discuss the industrialization of perception, specifically the industrialized perception of time. “A new materialism was clearly at work here,” he writes, “one arising from a dromological (or dromoscopic) conception of the World.” Virilio’s work is prescient of course.

So let’s play the etymology game for a second. It’s not surprising that the use of the word “set” in mathematics shares a root with the film set (as Virilio means it above). They share a root in the Old English settan (to place, arrange, put in order). And here we can do a little translation game and remind ourselves that arrangement is the word translated as assemblage in Deleuzian assemblage theory. Then the disciplinary rope-a-dope and note arrangement as one of the canons of rhetoric.

Also, arrangements are negotiated.

So what are we the victims of again? The industrialization and now the virtualization of time: a new dromology. So that queasiness that you feel when you think about AI is motion sickness. Stop the ride. I want to get off. In our control society, we are victims of different sets, machine-learned sets that might make no sense to us (and those that are all too familiar). Virilio’s concept of the motor resonates nicely with other work I’m drawing on. I think it has legs. This takes us eventually to Virilio’s information bomb, which, like atom bombs, is not necessarily a one-time event (as we know).

Finally, we must consider the Egyptian god Set, who had many victims. A central figure in Egyptian beliefs for centuries, there’s much to say (duh), but I’ll stick with Set as the trickster and god of foreigners, outsiders, including nonhuman outsiders: storms and shifting sands. Over the centuries and dynasties, Set moves from being the outsider to the patron of pharaohs and then back out again. He is know as the “divine foreigner,” the necessity of an outside. He is the Derridean “remark of belonging that does not belong.” We can also think of Set as the outside that is circumscribed by the construction of a community a la inoperative and unavowable communities. Then there is the other other. Set is once the outsider and the defender of the community from the greater outside, the unknown unknowns.

Now the task is to hold all this in my head and write with it.