People like Paul Virilio

Paul Virilio (French: [viʁiljo]; 4 January 1932 – 10 September 2018) was a French cultural theorist, urbanist, architect and aesthetic philosopher. He is best known for his writings about technology as it has developed in relation to speed and power, with diverse references to architecture, the arts, the city and the military.

According to two biographers, Virilio was a "historian of warfare, technology and photography, a philosopher of architecture, military strategy and cinema, and a politically engaged provocative commentator on history, terrorism, mass media and human-machine relations."

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an Italian communist father and a Catholic Breton mother. He grew up in the northern coastal French region of Brittany. The Second World War made a big impression on him as the city of Nantes fell victim to the German blitzkrieg, became a port for the German navy, and was bombarded by British and American planes. The "war was his university". After training at the École des métiers d'art, Virilio specialised in stained-glass artwork and worked alongside Henri Matisse in churches in Paris. In 1950, he converted to Christianity.