"On one hand, the construction of future orbital space stations already necessitated improvement in TELEROBOTIC technology; on the other, the very design of space probes meant new technologies of TELEPRESENCE had to be fine-tuned. NASA turned to the elders of the MIT team centered on Nicholas Negroponte in the early 1970s, particularly Scott Fisher, to produce the goods. But at the end of the day, the issue was primarily one of ensuring preparations for an identical exodus, beyond Earth and Earth’s concrete reality. It was not enough for the audiovisual “unreality” created by the media just to do a cut- and- tuck job on our daily life. Infonauts had to prepare right now for abandonment of the material supports of immediate experience in order to exile us tomorrow in the immateriality of a new otherworld—the goal being to colonize the void of a viewless horizon in the next century, by deporting whole populations of consumers. Besides, collusion between the two absences of space involved in cybernetics and astrophysics was to be further accelerated by the role played by space probes in astronomers’ imaginary. Skeptical about the usefulness of “manned missions” into sidereal space, cybernauts promptly backed the idea of sending “remote- control robots” as a more rational and economic approach. Everyone agreed that TELEEXPLORATION would soon replace manned flights, and NASA even envisaged feeding its computers the flow of images the probes sent back to allow the experts to explore the galaxy virtually."

Art of the Motor, Paul Virilio