In the machine age, the notion of the linearity of time prevailed because time, following the laws of economics, was equated with money for the first time and thus made into a scarce resource. Time = money was at work in the motions of the machines, and these produced incessantly towards an open horizon of the future. In the nineteenth century, science, technology and industry had become an empirically redeemable substratum for the idea of progress. The general empirical theorem of scientific and technological inventions was that they promised further progress without being able to calculate it exactly in advance. Indeed, it was precisely the fact that future progress could not be experienced which was empirically verified, as it were; its calculable unknownness secured the conclusiveness of its actual occurrence.32
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From the Future to the Extended Present