What is a dromologue?
Dromology is Paul Virilio's word for the study of speed as a determinant of social and political form, from the Greek dromos, the racecourse or the run. He set it out in Speed and Politics in 1977: history, he wrote, is not a contest over wealth, territory or ideology but over velocity, and whoever moves faster governs. Wealth follows speed rather than producing it, so a society is read by its mode of circulation. In other words, a society is shaped by how it enables information (be that network packets or people) to flow.
Building architects seem to have a strange sway over software engineering. Virilio was an architect (and other things) and he is now a thinker who has something important to say about how and why we build. Before him though, was Christopher Alexander. Alexander delivered a now legendary keynote at the OOPSLA '96 (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications) conference in San Jose. He challenged software engineers who had adopted his architectural concept of "design patterns", to care about the moral quality and human impact of the code they build, rather than just technical efficiency. You can be the judge of whether we were successful. Virilio, albeit from a different perspective, calls on us to do likewise.
His argument initially runs through a genealogy of vehicles - written in the late 1970s and well before the internet. The mounted knight is a speed advantage before he is a social class. The city wall is a device for arresting movement; the siege engine a device for restoring it. Naval power, in Virilio's reading, is what turns a coastline into an empire, because the sea is a medium of unobstructed transit. Each new vector reorganises power around itself, and the state becomes what he calls dromocratic: an apparatus for regulating who may move, how fast, and in which direction. Passports, customs, traffic law and telecommunications regulation are, on this account, one instrument. So too, today, are industries.
What happens at the limit
At the limit, speed stops producing mobility. When transmission becomes instantaneous, in live broadcast, in real-time markets and now in instantaneous making with AI, it produces what Virilio calls polar inertia: you can go everywhere, and therefore you must go nowhere. Deliberation is the first casualty - If the decision window closes faster than a debate can be held, the debate does not get faster; it is eliminated, and its function passes to automation. Virilio was writing about nuclear launch-on-warning, but the principle generalises without much effort.
A second idea builds on this: the integral accident. To invent the ship is to invent the shipwreck; to invent the aeroplane is to invent the crash. The accident is not a failure of the technology but its unanticipated other half. Accidents scale with the systems that carry them, so a local technology produces local accidents, and a global, instantaneous one produces an accident that is itself instantaneous and general. The implications for AI, and our awareness of its risks, are obvious as people organise to temper its progress.
Why this matters in an enterprise
Here dromology is a frame rather than a theory. Real-time decisioning, straight-through processing, continuous deployment and now agentic execution all increase the circulation of value, and each of them shortens the interval in which a human judgement could have been made. The tradeoff of velocity and values (through deliberation) is often correct and usually value-creating. But it is a trade, and it is usually made implicitly, by whoever ships the next release, which is the condition Virilio was warning about: governance arriving too late to the thing it is supposed to govern, because the thing now runs faster than governance does.
A dromologue is a discussion about how we grow organisations and industries under conditions of near-instantaneous making. When value is created this fast, what has to be in place for judgement to hold, without giving up the velocity that created the opportunity?
That question is the one this practice was named for, and it is the one the nine disciplines exist to answer, one at a time.