The disappearance of the future and the extension of the present taking its place are the subject of the second chapter. The drawing up of the boundary between the temporal periods which mark past, present and future is not a universally valid one. Society and its members judge it differently and in each case project into it their hopes and their problems and contradictions unsolved with regard to time. With the end of an age in which, by means of the time-structure of industrial production, both linearity and the belief in progress were sustained, the category of the future is losing much of its attractiveness. A present geared to accelerated innovation is beginning to devour the future. Problems which could formerly be deferred into the future reach into the present for their part, press for solutions which admittedly may not be on the agenda until tomorrow but demand to be dealt with today. The permeability of the time-boundary between present and future is increased by technologies which facilitate temporal uncoupling and decentralization, and which produce different models of time referring to the present that have largely become detached from linearity. But the process of continual 'creative destruction', as Schumpeter called the business of innovation, leads to another problem of civilization: that of obsolescence, the ageing of technologies, the production of waste. The past cannot absorb the waste fast enough. Through the creation of more and more new things, there is an inevitable increase of that which has to be disposed of. Both processes require a changed balance – in an extended present.
But what is it that so relentlessly drives on the civilization of scientific technology in terms of time, that generates the insatiable need for what is new, a need which presses for even more acceleration? This is the question posed in the third chapter. If it is true that the linear continuum, which entered the so-called modern era with the belief in progress from the eighteenth century on, has broken down, if time ‘has died', as some writers and philosophers see it, that time which was based on the continuum at least, what takes its place? Is it the moment which, detached from perpetual continuity, is enhanced into the source of hope that time can be stopped, which makes interim periods possible that are not subject to the flow of the linear continuum? Or is the continuum with its built-in acceleration replaced by a new time-cycle, this time marked by technological recurrence, in the form of the long waves of the Kondratiev business cycle or its variants?
Introduction
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