Virilio is preoccupied throughout his work with the situation of the human body within the environment and with the history of its physical and social sedentarisation: the sedentariness of the body upon the seat of a moving vehicle, the transition from warrior nomad to sedentary urban civilian, and the mutating patterns of sedentariness in times of accelerated modernity.

In Polar Inertia (2000a [1990]), Virilio contends that our ‘civilised world’ has been intent on extending urban sedentariness from the fi xed habitat and the means of ‘seated’ transport to technological sedentary living aided by remote control and the telepresence of communications. Ultimately, Virilio points out, sedentariness will be extended towards the ‘stationary vehicle’ in which the personality of an individual will be ‘fi xed forever’ and from which that individual will be able, without actual movement, to command the actions of other actor- bodies in remote locations (PI, 85). This is a condition where it is possible to ‘transfer over distance sight, sound, smell, and tactile feeling’ and in which the physical journey becomes obsolete, since ‘one has already arrived’ (Virilio and Armitage 2001a: 31).

The shifting of human civilisation from the original sedentariness of the agricultural–mercantile model of settlement onto the global technoindustrial model of transience and transhumance is also at the core of Virilio's The Futurism of the Instant: Stop- Eject (2010b [2009]). He argues that in times of ubiquity and instantaneity, the right to sedentariness in one's place of origin is compromised by telecommunications’ prioritisation of real time over real space and the ensuing eff ects of globalisation, and by the multiple environmental, political and social consequences of advanced technologies.