The more informed man is the more the desert expands

Man, fascinated with himself, constructs his double, his intelligent specter, and entrusts the keeping of his knowledge to a reflection. We're still here in the domain of cinematic illusion, of the mirage of information precipitated on the computer screen – what is given is exactly the information but not the sensation; it is apatheia, this scientific impassibility which makes it so that the more informed man is the more the desert of the world expands around him, the more the repetition of information (already known) upsets the stimuli of observation, overtaking them automatically, not only in memory (interior light) but first of all in the look, to the point that from now on it's the speed of light itself which limits the reading of information and the important thing in electronic-information is no longer the storage but the display.

Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Semiotext(e), 1991) p. 46