Virilio’s highly original vision of the world provides a healthy antidote to overly economistic analyses of contemporary capitalism. He is rare among social theorists in giving war and military technology due weight, identifying the key role of rapid movement in military power as well as the significance of the military for the development of technology.27 However, in the end, his military paradigm overwhelms all other modalities and experiences of speed. We are left with a rather one-sided account of a world now out of control and a reductionist view of modern scientific knowledge.28 Perhaps this partially accounts for his dire prognosis that the ceaseless increase in acceleration is leading to nothing other than the “liquidation of the world.”
Such cultural pessimism besets much writing about the efects of digital technology on the contemporary contours of time. Barbara Adam, Britain’s leading social theorist of time, writes in a similar vein:
Control is lost due to massively increased speed, instantaneity, and networked connections. Instantaneity means “real-time” processes across the globe coupled with the elimination of linear cause-andefect relations (in a context of continued linearity). This brings with it loss of time to reflect and act in the intervening period between cause and efect. It turns masters into slaves, designers and operators into the weakest links.29
So too does Robert Hassan, who argues that digitally compressed network time, oriented toward pure speed, colonizes all other realms of life, leaving no time for reading, reflection, and resistance. It even robs us of sleep, according to Jonathan Crary’s 24/7, down from eight hours a generation ago to approximately six and a half hours for the average North American adult.30 Continuous connectivity begets more connectivity, as the devices used to coordinate the constant inflow of networked stimuli actually have the efect of stretching the individual even more taughtly over time and space. “The more we become connected and dependent upon interconnectivity in our jobs and other aspects of our lives, the more we will live in an accelerated mode.”31 Accordingly, this ever-quickening quest for speed becomes a pathology, an inescapable addiction, driving us (like Alice in Wonderland) to run ever faster just in order to stand still.
Hig h-Speed Society
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