These authors correctly identify the profound dangers posed by developments in technoscience, such as instruments for control and surveillance, and the penetration of informatics and bioscience into every corner of our lives, including, literally, our bodies. However, they only see the dark side. For example, Hassan’s depiction of the accelerated “technologic” of the network society evokes an image of “a technologically closed system that allows for no real choice or real freedom of technological expression.”32 As such, it unwittingly legitimates a passive, defensive attitude to technological change. While it is evidently true that we live our lives in a technologically infused environment unimaginable only thirty years ago, these societal theories do not provide much detail as to how, why and even if using ICT inexorably leads to the acceleration of everything.
An implicit antipathy to science and technology forecloses appreciation of the scope that digital technologies might aford for control over time, enabling people to have not only more time but time of their choice. This stance is out of step with the widespread recognition that technoscience is a feverishly contested political field. Indeed, the plea for a slow down brings to mind the ecological feminists whom Donna Haraway chided over a quarter of a century ago for wanting to return to nature rather than becoming impure, hybrid cyborgs. A leading critic of technoscience, Haraway insisted on the liberatory potential of science and technology: “The issue is no longer whether to accept or oppose technoscience, but rather how to engage strategically with technoscience while, at the same time, being its chief critic.”33
In this spirit, I want to argue that a more well-rounded understanding of the relationship between temporality and technology must inform an emancipatory politics of time. This involves the democratization of technoscience, deciding what sort of technologies we want and how we are going to use them. Resisting technological innovation and calling for deceleration or a digital detox is an inadequate intellectual and political response. Indeed, wistfully looking back to an idealized slower time and mourning its passing has long been the preserve of conservative political theory. Ironically, today, as William Connolly notes, the most virulent attempts to slow things down take the form of national and religious fundamentalism. Rather than rejecting modern speed, trying to turn the clock back, we should embrace the positive possibilities that speed contains for thought, judgment, human connection, and cosmopolitanism.34 And, to do this, we need to direct our analytical gaze beyond the dialectics of speed to encompass the politics of technology itself.
Chapter One
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