{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","uuid":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"pressedfortimetheaccelerationoflifeindigitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","isbns":["9780226196473","9780226196503"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":228,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Pressed%20for%20Time%20The%20Acceleration%20of%20Life%20in%20Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/search"},"page":{"printed_page":47,"pdf_page":59,"physical_index":59,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"baaf53b7b33907dc347a59f21682c2f1fe22fe8ca3788842da9a72b73585892b"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"The Allure of Speed\n\nNo wonder, then, that central to the intellectual projects of many European thinkers of the early twentieth century was a radical questioning of the Newtonian world of calculable, linear time, and space. From H. G. Wells’s classic novel The Time Machine (1895) to Albert Einstein’s papers (1905), many of the questions of the new century were centered around the malleability of space and time.25 Could time be stretched or compressed? Could it be accelerated or reversed? Was time perceived diferently by diferent observers, and, if so, could there be a universal time?\n\nMost commentators agree that there was a maelstrom of creativity in the aesthetic realm during this period. A whole new world of representation and knowledge resulted, which qualitatively transformed what modernism was about. Inventions such as the telephone, wireless telegraph, X-ray, cinema, the automobile, and the airplane led to major material changes in daily life and precipitated new modes of thinking about and experiencing space and time. David Harvey persuasively argues that the simultaneity derived from this rapidly changing experience had much to do with the birth of modernism. And to be modern, Marshal Berman reminds us, is to “find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”26\n\nIt is in relation to speed that I want to examine this distinctly modern experience of living in and with profound ambivalence. Where better to start than with the Futurist Manifesto’s (1909) declaration that: “the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”? This was one of the first documents to celebrate the automobile as an object of beauty and to cite speed and acceleration as aesthetic elements.\n\nFuturism was an artistic, cultural and social movement that passionately embraced the future, exalting speed, power, technology, youth, and violence. As its founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, continues, “Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.” The movement was part of the modernist avant-garde of the early twentieth century whose followers sought to revolutionize everyday life by leading by example. Although they issued party-like manifestos, they did not usually seek change by violent means. The Italian futurists’ protofascist glorification of war was the exception, while the Russian avant-gardists tended to act in support of the Bolshevik Revolution until the suppression of artistic autonomy in the Soviet Union.\n\nTime and Motion\n\n47","previous_page":46,"next_page":48}