Though shades of fear and bureaucratic paranoia emerge through the intonation of lines like "timetables and graphs/sorrows and laughs," the choreography remains more cartoon than nightmare, signalled by the arrival of a miniature dancing Megatron controlled by the shape-throwing wheelchair-bound antagonist, who comes across as somewhere between a leering Hawking and a Virilio-inspired "citizen-terminal."

That is not to make light of the impact of these technologies, which are, as every book reviewed here reminds us, profound. For Virilio, technological change presents the spectre of the "citizen-terminal," soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive devices. He believes the information age mutilates us all, replacing our real body with the prosthetics of computers and virtual reality.

The urbanization of real space is thus being overtaken by this urbanization of real time which is, at the end of the day, the urbanization of the actual body of the city dweller, this citizen-terminal soon to be decked out to the eyeballs with interactive prostheses based on the pathological model of the ‘spastic’, wired to control his/her domestic environment without having physically to stir: the catastrophic ?gure of an individual who has lost the capacity for immediate intervention along with natural motricity and who abandons himself, for want of anything better, to the capabilities of captors, sensors and other remote control scanners that turn him into a being controlled by the machine with which, they say, he talks.