There are transport accidents, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Concorde crash. And then there are “transmission accidents” or failures of electronic media and information technology. The most extreme transmission accident to date is the Flash Crash of May 6th, 2010. This financial crash saw the biggest single day fall of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index – a 600 point down-spike which threatened a trillion dollar write-off. High-frequency trading algorithms had automatically responded to a large sell order at 13 seconds after 2.45 pm (EDT) and, for the next 14 seconds, there was a potentially catastrophic downward spiral of prices. Only the Stop Logic Functionality of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, with its failsafe delay of 5 seconds, was able to reserve enough time for human traders to fix the problem. Here is a prophecy of the Total Accident, whose time is measured in millionths of a second and whose origin may never register in the archive. Or, as Virilio puts it, here comes the “unstoppable offensive of the NANOCHRONOLOGIES.” For more on the Flash Crash, see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/high-speed-trading/