The village without a sanitary and medical infrastructure is just as far or as little removed from the most up-to-date computer system as is the latter from the terminals connected with it. Making an approximative simultaneity possible with the aid of modern electronics has by no means led to a social simultaneity. On the contrary, new inequalities are arising from non-simultaneities. Paradoxically, the gap which separates developing countries from the industrial nations with their technological and economic advantage is growing to the same extent that temporal and spatial distances are shrinking.
The discovery of simultaneity as a phenomenon of the perception of time and its real, economic and technological implementation are at the centre of the first chapter. They lend the connection between power and time a qualitatively new dimension. Whoever governs simultaneity controls the temporal dependences derivable from it. Yet despite the attainment of ever higher speeds in the networking of information technology, despite the continuing expansion of the technological infrastructure which installs simultaneity, it remains an illusion. In a certain sense it replaces the horizon of the future which has sustained the belief in progress over the last two hundred years, as the discrepancy between experience and the expectation of constant improvements which keeps on renewing itself and strives towards an open future. The greater the approximation to simultaneity, the more the little temporal differences count. As in sport, where tenths and hundredths of a second have long decided victory or defeat,in the international competition for markets and advantages in technological innovation it is the little temporal discrepancies which bring profit and further advantages. Such a simultaneity institutionalized world-wide, with its discrepancies calculated to produce dependences by means of non-simultaneity, also has consequences for the quality of time itself. While in the phase of industrialization it was above all the equation of time and money which resulted from the industrial capitalist logic of production and made time a scarce commodity, timie is now being speeded up itself: it is becoming accelerated innovation.
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Introduction