Temporal uncoupling, which extends from the older technologies of preservation in the case of food, via large areas of the production and consumption of services and cultural products with the aid of techniques of storing and processing information, to the biotechnological processes of the uncoupling of living organisms, helps the temporal norm of flexibility to attain a new, powerfully enlarged area of influence. As with other temporal norms, it is to be expected that it will also be culturally and socially diffused beyond the original area of production. Temporal flexibility, as well as the decentralization within the area of production which often goes along with it, will realize neither the utopian hopes nor wholly the fears, however, which are connected with the introduction of new technologies and a changed organization of work.
Every local decentralization presupposes a renewed form of centralization at a higher level. Every temporal flexibilization requires, with increasing complexity, new mechanisms in order to hold the seemingly loosening temporal connections together. Flexibility becomes possible against the background of a previously unattained degree of constant temporal availability, as the prerequisite and consequence of which it functions. Only the availability of people and their substitutes, technological artefacts, opens up the testing of new temporal patterns of uncoupling and coupling that can be optimized, which need the temporal norm of flexibility to legitimize them.
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Cronos's Fear of the New Age