If the machine age is approaching its end today, or to put it a better way, if machines and technological artefacts have changed so much that they also contain other temporal norms than those which were fed into the old production technologies, then the newly added temporal norm is that of flexibility. It finds its technological equivalent in the temporal availability that information-intensive technologies have made possible, but also presuppose. Information-intensive technologies have attained a new quality of speed, which far exceeds that of human perception and the human ability to keep up. The moment it has become technologically possible to carry out operations and processes in 'nearly no time', the additional gain in time becomes of marginal use. Through informationintensive technologies, another law of the machine age is also abolished, according to which worker and machine, producer and consumer, transmitter and receiver had to be simultaneously present. With the aid of new techniques of preservation and processing as well as storage, it has become possible largely to uncouple the acts of production and consumption not just in terms of place, but also in terms of time. Video recorders and stereo systems aid the consumption of cultural products independently of the moment of production, just as the techniques of preserving food have long since made it possible to eat fruits out of season. In the meantime, biotechnology is preparing the next preservation technique of temporal uncoupling: that which refers to the production and the use of living cells.
Cronos's Fear of the New Age
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