Introduced into Virilio's conceptual repertoire in the 1990s, the term ‘information bomb’ denotes a form of ‘integral’, ‘general’, or ‘global’ accident generated by the speed and connectivity of contemporary information and communication technologies. Virilio uses the term to refer both to particular, individual, ‘explosions’, in which data radiates across the planet's networks at near- light speed, and to the ongoing, everintensifying, ‘blast’ of signs, images and code tearing through the environments of everyday life in an age of ubiquitous real- time interactivity.

The ‘information bomb’ is, of course, so named in reference to the atomic and, latterly, nuclear bomb – a rhetorical move that Virilio borrows from Albert Einstein, the German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity and who, in the wake of the US attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War, spoke of ‘the second bomb’: ‘the electronic bomb after the atomic one’ (Virilio 1995: par. 13). The information bomb, Virilio explains, is ‘[a] bomb whereby real- time interaction would be to information what radioactivity is to energy. The disintegration then will not merely aff ect the particles of matter, but also the very people of which our societies consist’ (Virilio 1995: par. 13). The information bomb, he remarks elsewhere, ‘is similar to the atomic bomb but only to the extent that it is a device based on energy […] Whereas the atom bomb was triggered by the energy of the atom, the information bomb is triggered by the energy of information and communication technologies’ (Virilio and Armitage 2001b: 168).

In Virilio's elaboration of the concept, the information bomb takes various forms and has various consequences – some quite immediate and concrete and others more abstract and philosophical. Insofar as it entails the growing computerisation and automation of industrial production, the information bomb is implicated in the immiseration of swathes of ‘the poor and the weak’ (Virilio and Kittler 2001: 99), who, dispossessed of traditional outlets for their labour, and lacking the skills and resources to participate in the new ‘information economy’, fi nd themselves eff ectively excluded from the mainstream of society.