What were the Jetsons’ besides the wet dream of acceleration uninterrupted? The year is 2062. From the opening credits, it’s obvious that all the problems of nuclear annihilation, resource scarcity, and overpopulation have been solved through harmonious technological growth. Everyone gets along. Maybe the environment is still a thorn in this society’s side, what with all the buildings raised on poles high into the air, safely above sea levels.
Nevertheless, what defines the world of the Jetsons’ is how fast everything has become. Paterfamilias George Jetson works an hour a day, two days a week, and still manages a comfortable middle class paycheck. He drops his kids, Judy and Elroy, off like a space shuttle jettisoning so much cargo. It takes no time at all. See ya, kids! Jane Jetson heads off to the aptly named ‘Shopping Center’ after swiping Mr. Jestson’s wallet. Really, this all takes seconds. They even have a robot maid (hi, Rosie!) to do their dirty work quickly and efficiently.
The future is all about progress and progress is about making things faster, better, stronger. Weighing in on this trend, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa is concerned with progress but doubly so for its speed. In his latest book, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, he examines modernity as something inherently concerned with time. This makes sense, perhaps. After all, there is the old maxim: ‘time is money.’ Modernity, for all its cultural and economic appendages, is inherently, above all, about things coming to us faster.
“Everything is constantly in flux, and the future is therefore completely open and uncertain and no longer derivable from the past and the present.” Rosa begins his argument with this flung gauntlet. Modernity is about speed. So things are getting faster. But are they really? All things?
If you’re looking just at, as Rosa calls it, ‘technical acceleration,’ then sure, yeah: “the period from the invention of the radio at the end of the nineteenth century to its distribution to 50 million listeners lasted 38 years; the television, introduced a quarter of a century later, needed only 13 years to achieve this, while the Internet went from the first to the 50-millionth connection in barely 4.” When you consider that the typewriter, from its invention in 1714, took 174 years to elicit wide use, this ongoing acceleration is quite clear.
But there’s a flipside to acceleration. Not everything accelerates at equal rates and that can lead to desynchronization between the individual, her tools, and her culture. Beyond the technical, Rosa cites numerous sources that encapsulate an ultra-modern weltschmerz. “People speak here of a ‘crystallization’ of the cultural and structural formations of their own age, of it appearing to be an ‘iron cage’ in which nothing essential changes anymore and nothing new occurs. In this view of contemporary society, the current epoch is characterized precisely by the way all motion seems to come to an end: utopian energies are exhausted because all the intellectual and spiritual possibilities appear to have been tried, and this threatens to expand into an uneventful boredom.”
But Rosa isn’t the only contemporary author to sound the alarm about an increasing dualism in the accelerated pace of life. Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock strikes a similar cord. In his estimation, modern society has become so fast that the present is the future. Essentially, “We may not know where we’re going anymore, but we’re going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice.”
Both authors are attempting to diagnose the times, to understand, as Rosa believes, why “We are constantly ‘putting out fires’ that flare up again and again in the wake of the many-layered coordination imperatives of our activities, and no longer get around to making, let alone pursuing, long-term objectives.”
I’m not a Luddite but I don’t own a smart phone. I don’t own a tablet. I rely on an antenna for broadcast television and have never read an e-book. Twitter doesn’t do anything for me and I’m, at 26, dead center in the demographic it should appeal to. By many accounts, I stand outside the ongoing technical acceleration described by Rosa. Nevertheless, I feel constantly hurried, rushed, pressured to get more done in the unchanging amount of time I have available in the spinning of our globe. Who hasn’t felt this? Even though I am far from my friends in terms of how plugged in I am, the tempo of life remains high, very high, for most in modern society. Our tools aren’t the only things accelerating. People are being made to accelerate.
Rosa points out, in addition to technical acceleration; modernity is also a process of societal and individual acceleration. People change jobs, when they can get them, with a frequency unheard of in decades past. The guarantees, such as political affiliations or retirement benefits, given to past generations are nonexistent. Institutions are either failing or are becoming hopelessly slow and impotent, highlighted by the failure to protect and prosecute financial wrongdoings. Marriages are hardly stable, as the course of personal relationships become less “until death do you part,” and more of a chain of relationships with different partners, “serial monogamy,” as Rosa says.
Change happens quickly, “that means—and this is the point I am driving at—that the biographical course of life as a whole loses its direction. It can no longer be understood as directed motion and narratively reconstructed in the sense of a history of progress or development. Life doesn’t head anywhere; in the end, it goes nowhere (very fast).”
How have we arrived here? If the now, as Rosa and Rushkoff highlight, means going in circles for the very sake of movement, there must have been some sort of inaugural event that sped the current condition. The watchword for this development is progress.
What is modernity? If you agree with Rosa and other sociologists, modernity is simply the human reaction to modernization. It’s the human push back to when we started rationalizing the world around us. And while it’s hard to really say when, if ever, modernization began, for a lot of layfolk (me included) modernization really kicked into high gear with the Industrial Revolution.
We all remember that from school, right? Images of smoking factories, steaming trains, and piles and piles of coke and coal that indicated progress? Think of the Soviet 5-Year Plans or Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the countless other ways societies around the planet have been kicked forward, made to produce more things at a faster pace. That’s the key: pace. It’s not just enough to smelt hundreds of tons of steel or lay thousands of miles of fiber optic cables. The key is to do it all at an accelerated rate so that returns can be capitalized on, thereby increasing how much more steel smelted or fiber optic cable laid in the future, ad infinitum.
The Industrial Revolution is the starter’s pistol that drove society, its people, and its tools, to move forward at an ever accelerating pace. Rosa cites Paul Virilio, a French theorist, as the originator of the idea that the Industrial Revolution was just an echo of a far greater revolution, a revolution in dromology.
Dromos is the Greek noun for road. Yet, Virilio took the concept to mean the activity of a race. Dromology is Virilio’s study of speed and timekeeping. Without this ‘dromological revolution,’ the much better known Industrial Revolution could never have transpired. This is the revolution of time and the subordination of natural rhythms to the ticks of the clock.
Rushkoff, using some Greek of his own, identifies this as the supremacy of chronos, the measure of mechanical quantitative time, over kairos, quality time: “Kairos is a more slippery concept. Most simply, it means the right or opportune moment…It is usually understood as a window of opportunity created by circumstances, God, or fate. It is the ideal time to strike, to propose marriage, or to take any particular action.”
Rosa, channeling Virilio, says that the root of our current time crisis, “time starvation,” as he calls it, is tied to the capitalistic colonizing of time. Before the clock, the factory, and the floor manager, work was largely performed in a regime dictated by kairos. Work was colored by the season or the weather. You sowed when it was right, reaped when the crop was full, and picked up arms when the weather improved. When chronos, embodied in the pocket watch, clock tower, shift whistle, or in the appropriately styled maritime chronometer, lapped the naturalistic kairos in profitability and accountability, human rhythms were subdued.
Before this ‘dromological revolution’ work and life were entangled like so much pasta in a bowl. Afterwards, the two were divorced and occupied separate spheres of the day. You went to work regardless of the weather, time of year, or where the sun hung in the sky. You went to work despite its conflict with human rhythms of illness or age. You went along or found yourself out of work. This was all done to streamline production and to accelerate the rate and pace of widgets, to grow one’s business to be faster, better, stronger. As Rosa notes:
“it is the compulsions and promises of growth and acceleration inherent in the capitalist economy that shape modern society and its form of life in an ever intensifying way. These two principles of escalation, which converge in the capitalist economic of time, have endured through every historical transformation of capitalism. They shape culture and are formative aspects of social structure in liberal capitalist societies…They exert an enormous influence on which forms of life and which societal projects are conceivable and feasible.”
Within this statement can be found a rationale why people increasingly feel that they are caught in a “frenetic standstill,” as Rosa says. Our speed has increased but the number of possible outlets has dwindled, or exploded, until every available option becomes the Ouroboros, the ancient emblem of a snake swallowing its own tail.
This ever accelerating friction between chronos and kairos leads to increasing social problems as diagnosed by Rushkoff. “College students and younger professionals now use Ritalin and another form of speed, Adderall, as ‘cognitive enhancers.’ Just as professional athletes may use steroids to boost their performance, stockbrokers and finals takers can gain an edge over their competitors and move higher up on the curve. More than just keeping a person awake, these drugs are cognitive accelerators…”
Or, more worryingly for the future:
“Intelligence is equated with speed, and accomplishments with the volume of work finished. The elementary school where I live puts a leaf on the wall for every book a child reads, yet has no way of measuring or rewarding the depth of understanding or thought that took place—or didn’t. More, faster, is better. Kids compete with the clock when they take their tests, as if preparing for a workplace in which their boss will tell them ‘pencils down.’ The test results, in turn, are used to determine school funding and teacher salaries. All children left behind.”
The compulsion to speed up, to do more with the time given, as Max Weber identified many, many moons ago as the Protestant work ethic-cum-secularized ethos of labor, leads to multitasking. But humans can’t function this way without suffering from desynchronization or Rosa’s “time starvation.” Like the speed of light, there is a certain upper limit to how fast a human can function effectively. According to Rushkoff the seduction of multitasking is foolish, even dangerous.
“It’s much more difficult, and counterproductive, to attempt to engage in two active tasks at once. We cannot write a letter while reconciling the checkbook or—as the rising accident toll indicates—drive while sending text messages…The more choices are on offer, the more windows remain open, and the more options lie waiting. Each open program is another mouth for our attention to feed…Every second we spend with just one thing running or happening is a dozen market opportunities lost.”
So full steam ahead until our future resembles the Jetsons’? Not exactly. Though our processes and tools accelerate, some things just can’t be made to go any faster. Human gestation will always hover–regardless of some dystopian, tube birth, fantasy—at nine months. Despite the best efforts of geneticists, geologists, and GMO croppers, the natural world has a host of built-in speed limits. This growing lag holds a potential catastrophe of desynchronization.
Speaking of a forthcoming abyss contingent on our acceleration, Rosa remarks, “the abyss will be embodied in either the collapse of the ecosystem or the ultimate breakdown of the modern social order and its values under the pressure of growing acceleration pathologies and the power of the enemies these foster. It stands to reason that modern society will have to pay for the loss of the ability to balance movement and inertia with nuclear or climatic catastrophes, with the diffusion at a furious pace of new diseases, or with new forms of political collapse and the eruption of uncontrolled violence, which can be particularly expected where the masses excluded from the process of acceleration and growth take a stand against the acceleration society.”
Doom awaits us. Bummer, George Jetson. No wonder your home was on stilts. You melted your ice caps and poisoned the continents with your flying nuclear powered cars. You even mutated your pets into spouting pseudo-intelligible English vis-à-vis Astro the dog and forced your sentient robots into vaguely human simulacra by wearing household aprons. Perhaps this is why, like the original Star Trek, then a contemporary, The Jetsons were a Western vision of a future when endless growth was seen as a good thing: the consequences had yet come home to roost in our living rooms.
Rosa, like Rushkoff, is troubled envisioning a way that the forces of the eternal present, the fast now, can be tamed. Aside from understanding these forces as they unfold, Rosa humbly quotes sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and acknowledges the problem, one with billions in its grasp both alive and yet to be born, is beyond solving by any single person.
“’When it is profound and consistent, sociology is not satisfied with a kind of mere observation that could be deemed deterministic, pessimistic or demoralizing.’ He goes on to say that it does not rest until it can offer means ‘to work against the immanent tendencies of the societal order. And whoever calls that deterministic should recall that the law of gravity must first be known by those who build the flying machines that effectively overcome it.’ Today, however, the challenge lies in overcoming the laws that made the invention of flying machines possible: a no less difficult task.”
I feel sympathy for George Jetson. Not because he simply calls out for his wife Jane to get him off whatever crazy, high speed device he’s embroiled in. I’m routinely entrapped in technological thingys I need help disentangling myself from (hi, Leslie!) I feel a kinship because I know he, and me by extension, will be entrapped in another technological conundrum visited on the slow, goofy creatures called humans by our own devices.
—
James Orbesen is a writer and adjunct living in Chicago. His writing has appeared in Salon, Midwestern Gothic, Jacobin, The New Humanism, Bookslut, The Collagist, 215 Ink’s Ignition anthology and elsewhere. Work is forthcoming in TriQuarterly and the Cosmic Outlaws anthology.
