Mass individualism describes the diminishing subjectivity and emotional synchronisation of individuals temporally and spatially compressed within today's globalised environment, individuals who have been transformed into paranoid and compliant consumers of the ‘free market’. The conceptual foundations of mass individualism are formed by Virilio in numerous texts including The Information Bomb (2000d [1998]), City of Panic (2005b [2004]) and The University of Disaster (2010a [2007]) where he outlines how the time- space compression resulting from globalisation has led to claustrophobia and incarceration. While the globe was once vast and undiscovered, and societies were comprised of collective masses, nowadays, global information technology and transportation networks have encircled and captured the world, thereby reducing critical refl ection upon it and the apparent dwindling of existential space. With world geography conquered and regulated, now begins the urbanisation, domination and, above all, synchronisation of the mass individual.

The results, according to The Information Bomb, are ‘pseudoindividualism’ and ‘liberal hedonism’; both far removed from the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan's (2001 [1964]) idealised citizens of the ‘global village’. City of Panic, meanwhile, focuses on the media driven conformity and loss of freedom that mass individualism ushers in. For, despite the appearance of individual liberties and endless ‘options’, the actual scope of ‘free choice’ only exists within the emotionally synchronised limits prescribed and regulated by the ‘free market’. Consequently, mass individuals become detached from one another while simultaneously becoming ever more attached to the cybernetic and synchronised systems of regulation.