The intoxication with time resulted first of all from the directly perceptible increase in speed, hastened and mediated by technology, but absorbed into the life of society as a whole, an increase which individuals could not evade. Technological change means nothing other than the accelerated sequence of social changes. The speed with which a good deal of social distance was reduced, and how quickly habits could change or a good deal of social distance could shrink, caused people to overlook to begin with how little other, invariable power structures were changing. Only from today's standpoint does it become clear that technologies do not always bring the promised liberation, but that they definitely can be used to perpetuate existing inequalities.
The intoxication with speed came to Europe from the United States after a time-lag. There was hardly an account of a journey from the twenties and thirties by Europeans who had returned from the USA which was not fascinated by the hectic pace prevailing there and the cult of speed, commented on by the Europeans with a mixture of admiration and the forebodings of cultural pessimism. Quite a few practitioners of the new psychology were confronted in their analytical sessions with the anxiety and the neuroses of those of their patients who could not cope with the temporal demands. A kind of 'cultural hypochondria' broke out, which gave warning of the disastrous consequences of the intoxication with speed and causally connected many ills of the period with it.11 Conversely, it was this very cult of speed which was emphatically celebrated in the futurist manifesto. The dynamics of the machine age, as the futurists saw it, was energy translated into speed up to the final consequences of selfdestruction – war.
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The Illusion of Simultaneity