In contrast to the bourgeoisie, for whom the wasting of time was of course detestable, but was still an open option, the subjection to the time discipline of the machine was inconceivably harsh for the workforce.
The machine offered a previously unknown availability for purposes of industrial production and for the accumulation of profit, but equally demanded a previously unrequired adaptation of the workers, who had no choice. As a living appendage of the machine, they were tied to it, initially without socio-political protective measures; indeed even the originally planned breaks were rigorously suppressed. Increases in productivity, which become constant towards the end of the nineteenth century, essentially resulted from an improvement of technologies and of the organization of the whole production process, but also from an improved tuning of the behaviour of human beings to the rhythms of the machine. Only gradually, and always in a manner charged with conflict, were the temporal norms of working-time regulations established in a precarious balancing act between the internalization of the work habit and the external necessity of social existence in an industrial society.
Today, the social norms which refer to the time discipline of human beings are largely internalized and are developing in dynamic interdependence with the temporal norms built into technological artefacts. Acceleration, in its continuing social transformation, does not just mean an increase of speed in all social processes. It presupposes a temporal norm of generally increased mobility, which is at the same time the result of technologically and economically established processes of the conveyance of goods, people, energy and information, which have to overcome spatial and temporal distances. Thus mobility does not remain confined to a technological specific, which can be optimized, i.e. realized in technological and economic terms. Instead, mobility is elevated to a socially dominant temporal norm, an assumed and striven-for social condition which is presupposed and hence expected, but is also to be regarded as the result of previous acceleration. Goods, people, energy, money and information are to change their position with increasing frequency, in order – in a comprehensive economic and cultural sense - to circulate. Being mobile has, in its social valency, assumed the meaning of mental and physical fitness for many people. The willingness for professional mobility is regarded as a prerequisite for remaining in the labour market and, skilfully handled, as a prerequisite for advancement in a successful career.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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