Along with spatial control, the temporal kind is also established, but it still completely follows the imperatives of the organizational needs of the central powers: the temporal control of the bureaucracies, which is based on the punctuality that was necessary for maintaining discipline in the army, at school, and later in the factories. The process of diffusion of temporal control breaks away from the static system of time of the big bureaucracies only with the economic boom of capitalism and its expansion. Temporal control is symbolized by the idea of progress, of economic boom. The gap between the capital city and the village which still has no asphalt road or is not yet connected to the national grid is a temporal-economic one. Economic dynamics causes new centres to arise which are ahead of their times, and peripheries which are backward, wherever they may be geographically located. The primary distributive mechanism of this temporal control becomes the market. Calculated to surmount spatial limits, it seems to negate time in the act of buying and yet profits from the small temporal difference, from the advantages over competitors which a few hours, days or months bring in buying or selling. They are what decide on profit and loss. Extending and using these temporal advantages, applying them to many transactions, also became possible spatially over the entire world with the aid of communication technologies. It was not by chance that the first telephones were installed in order to be able to transmit the stock market prices more quickly; the ceremonial opening of the first lines was left to the head of state simply as an act of political courtesy. How extensively the market and technology pervade one another was strikingly expressed by those photographic images sent round the world by the media on the occasion of the stock market crash in autumn 1987. They showed almost identically dressed stockbrokers, holding at least three telephones to their ears, who were trying to save what could be saved in New York and Tokyo. Through the networking of computers, in which contingent conditions of purchase and sale were programmed, the standardization of time had reached a new, provisional peak.
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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