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# Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

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accelerating world. I will consider this argument in light of research that suggests that timekeeping has been a longer standing practice, and not necessarily a negative one.

While the time discipline involved in capitalist forms of production has played a key role in the shaping of modern time, by itself it cannot explain the changing cultural significance of speed. It is hard to exaggerate the efect of steam engines, railways, and the telegraph on people’s experience of time-space compression. The railway journey, depicted by Charles Dickens and Marcel Proust, is iconic of a transformed sense of the tempo of everyday life. The traveler’s view of landscape as a multitude of swiftly moving visual impressions was unprecedented.

However, it is only with the rapid shift to urban living that speed and change for its own sake have become celebrated as the general condition of modernity. Speed is one of several aspects of modern metropolitan life that becomes culturally valorized by artists and intellectuals, and it remains a key explanation of the time-pressure paradox. Georg Simmel’s depiction of the emergent modern time consciousness as one involving immediacy, simultaneity, and presentism still resonates today. So too does his astute analysis of the alternate responses it would continue to incite, signaling both extraordinary opportunities and the corrosion of moral character. (Richard Sennett would later go on to identify shorttermism as a unique consequence of new capitalism; see chapter 4) In my view, Simmel can well be reclaimed as the first theorist of the acceleration society.

In the twentieth century, the automobile came to symbolize speed, freedom, and liberty. It held out the possibility of change for groups and individuals who wished to escape traditional social confinement. The viability of boundless physical movement undoubtedly had political implications and examples of this will be discussed. However, as with all technology, the automobile’s impact was far from straightforward. The same motorcar that promised unlimited movement also led to gridlock. And while the velocity of machines increasingly came to signify the driving force of progress and economic growth, the euphoria of constant motion also became associated with violence and destruction. These cultural contradictions remain central to the dynamics of acceleration.

Yet, the allure of pure speed continues to seduce. This is evident in the sociological turn to mobility, fluidity, and travel as the key descriptors of our present condition. Speed and perpetual motion are assumed to be universal desires of existence, realizable only through faster, more eficient machines. Accounts of this ilk are tied to linear narratives about the role of technical innovation in making modern times. In reality, technologies evolve through practical use and therefore come to mean quite diferent things to diferent people. Indeed, the ability of some to move fast and frequently can itself cause stasis for others. As such, technological acceleration is always accompanied by various kinds of slow down. It is no wonder, then, that our response to acceleration has always been characterized by profound ambivalence.

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Punctuality and Progress

The need for people to coordinate their activities has been important throughout history, but never more so than today. We take for granted that our lives are shaped by the hours of the day, as measured by the clock. From childhood, we are taught the worth of punctuality, the imperative to be on time and not to squander it. The valorization of speed was central for the development of the industrial way of life. As Jeremy Rifkin remarks, “Eficiency and speed characterize the time values of the modern age. . . . The idea of saving and compressing time has been stamped into the psyche of Western civilization and now much of the world.”2

Yet, what has come to seem natural and normal is the outcome of centuries of technical innovation and the circulation of ideas about time. Chronologies of standard technological history give the clock pride of place. And it is through the lens of Thompson’s essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” that social scientists primarily view modern time in economic terms, as market time.

According to Thompson, prior to industrialization, people depended on “natural rhythms” oriented to a variety of tasks related to an agricultural economy, task-oriented time. These older notations were replaced by a new manufacturers’ time, a commodity measured in monetary terms and regarded as precious. He saw this as the result both of advances in timekeeping and of a Puritan ethic which helped people internalize the idea that time was not to be wasted. By the nineteenth century, according to Thompson, the idea of time thrift had become culturally embedded. Traditional rhythms began to look indolent and even primitive. The division and synchronization of labor became the norm in many manufacturing sites and, over the course of a century, manufacturers’ time came to seem natural.

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Time had become money. And, as Dickens foresaw in his novel Hard Times, while clock time standardizes time, not everyone’s time is of equal worth. As Mr. Bounderby, the businessman, put it to the freedom-loving circus people, “We are the kind of people who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t know the value of time.” To which the circus performer, Mr. Childers, retorted, “If you mean that you can make more money of your time than I can of mine, I should judge by your appearance, that you are about right.”3

Throughout their extensive publications, both Barbara Adam and Helga Nowotny trace the historical shift in the way people understand time to the clock culture that developed in modernity. They stress that industrial time engendered the pursuit of a disciplined and frugal use of time in the quest for eficiency. Time became commodified, compressed, colonized, and controlled.4 And once the linear system of time was set:

Acceleration could start in the form of motion making everything dynamic, which seemed to stop at nothing. In the tourbillon social which broke out with the industrial revolution and wrenched people out of their countless “small worlds”  .  .  . acceleration became the experience of modernisation overshadowing and shaping everything else. The pace became more important than the destination: anyone who stands firm stands still; everything, above all time, becomes frantic motion: the new myth was speed.5

Marx’s analysis of the commodification of time remains the touchstone for such writing.6 Marx’s central argument was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time, applicable anywhere, anytime, was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labor and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time assume such a pivotal position in all economic exchange. Since “moments” are “the elements of profit,” it is command over the labor time of others that gives capitalists the initial power to appropriate profit as their own.7

Struggles between owners of labor and capital over the use of time and the intensity of labor have been endemic. What Thompson’s account highlights is that it took several generations for the new labor habits and the new time discipline, “the familiar landscape of disciplined industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines,” to be instilled. The time discipline was based on obedience to the clock and to the appointments specified on it, such as the time to begin work. In a much quoted passage, Thompson records how two nineteenthcentury factory workers testified that they were not allowed to have their own clocks or watches on company grounds:

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In reality there were no regular hours: masters and managers did with us as they liked. The clocks at the factories were often put forward in the morning and back at night, and instead of being instruments for the measurement of time, they were used as cloaks for cheatery and oppression. Though this was known amongst the hands, all were afraid to speak, and a workman then was afraid to carry a watch, as it was no uncommon event to dismiss any one who presumed to know too much about the science of horology [clock and watch making].8

Furthermore, if people could be taught the new time discipline early in life, they would be better prepared to meet the growing synchronization demands of the workplace. As a result, there was an increased emphasis on teaching punctuality in schools in both England and the United States. Such practices continued in the twentieth century. Allen Bluedorn notes that in 1903, his American maternal grandmother, at the age of thirteen, received a school attendance certificate with the telling phrase “having been neither absent nor tardy during the month ending.”9 To this day, meeting attendance requirements is an essential criterion for graduation at the London School of Economics.

In recent years there has been a lively discussion about the historical accuracy of the major prevailing accounts of clock time. In their volume Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800, Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift critique the technological determinist version based on drawing direct relationships between technical developments in clocks and the hegemony of clock time.10 They also maintain that Thompson’s account draws too direct a relationship between economic changes and clock time. Echoing my own perspective, the authors argue that while we need to take the devices seriously, it is important to understand clock times as everyday practices, which were (and are) remarkably diverse.

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There is mounting evidence of the widespread use of clocks and timekeeping practices from the fifteenth century onward, long before private ownership of clocks and watches was commonplace, let alone the emergence of factories. In early modern England, for example, diaries and letters indicate that schools were already imposing a temporal discipline: “Now at five of the clock by the moonlight I must go to my book and let sleep and sloth alone” ran a saying that dates from around 1500 and is attributed to a twelve-year-old boy.11 Whether he actually arrived on time is lost to history. Nonetheless, there was a timetable and an intended discipline, known to the young, confirming “the sheer density of temporal infrastructure” at that time.

The issue of periodization need not detain us, but the case that Glennie and Thrift make is salient to my argument here. They eschew a linear view whereby early forms of timekeeping were wholly replaced by clock time. Instead, they stress the very diferent registers and dimensions of overlaying clock times that coexisted in the past, as they were embodied in complex sets of practices in diferent temporal communities. There was no sudden rupture, whether for better or worse, with the advent of industrialization. We were and are able to internalize and live with many diferent time notations, astronomical, biological, private and public, and so on.

It follows, therefore, that we cannot accept the influential commentaries about the preeminence and triumph of clock time. The authors subscribe neither to a story of technological supremacy in the later eighteenth century, heralding a glorious modernity, nor to a jeremiad on the imposition of strict timetables and the loss of preindustrial freedom.

Indeed, they firmly reject the increasingly popular view that the procedures and practices of aggregation that we call “clock time” are to blame for all the ills of the world: “clock time has been as much a liberatory as an oppressive force. It has allowed as much as it has disciplined. New entities, capacities, and experiences have become possible which did not exist before and there is no reason to believe that all of these have been negative.”12 Fear of the omnipotence of clock time runs through contemporary narratives about the accelerating world and betrays a tragic teleological tale about modernization.

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The continuing role of clock time in relation to labor productivity is a theme I will pursue in chapter 4. There is certainly much evidence that the use of clocks to increase the rate of work was even more marked in the early years of the twentieth century, with developments such as scientific management and Taylorism.13 It would later be immortalized in Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 film Modern Times, which depicts the alienated factory worker literally fighting the clock to slow down production.

What is undeniable is that by the early twentieth century a new sense of temporal exactitude was developing. Inhabitants of that era would have been conscious of a change in the pace of working and social life; of living in a culture in which accurate timekeeping, eficiency and punctuality were becoming normative.

However, in order to understand how speed enters the modern cultural imagination, we need to move beyond a narrow focus on clocks as talismanic artifacts. Arguably, communication systems like the railway, the telegraph, the telephone, and wireless communications were as significant as increasingly accurate timepieces in leading to novel ways of experiencing both time and human afairs. As we shall see, this new material world paradoxically brought both an optimistic sense of security, of being in control of events, and a sense of insecurity, a sense of a world speeding out of control. And, as Hannah Gay observes, “In the early twentieth century these two sensibilities ran in parallel and played of each other.”14

Machine Speed and Modernity

Much has been written about the massive social and technological changes that took place from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The cultural historian Stephen Kern’s well-known account describes how innovations in art, architecture, literature, science, and technology mutually influenced and inspired each other.15 The achievement of higher speed was integral to those developments and permeated every aspect of society. Speed, in the sense of modern machine velocity, formed a powerful cultural narrative during this period, yoking together machines, money, and progress. The telegraph presaged many of these changes, so altering the structure of social relations that it has been christened the Victorian Internet.16 I will therefore consider this case before turning to look at modernist avant-gardists’ celebration of speed.17

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But first it is befitting to reflect on the abiding connection between machine speed and progress. Although the idea of progress can be traced back to the classical world, it only becomes a powerful social ideology in the first part of the twentieth century. Our common sense notion of “modern” denotes a historical process of steady advance and improvement in human material well-being, occasioned by technological innovation. How, though, asks John Tomlinson, does speed itself become a prime mark of social progress?18

One answer is the straightforward association between the pace of mechanical production and the delivery of material improvements. The speed of manufacturing, transportation, and communication technologies saved vast amounts of physical efort and time as well as providing afordable material goods. For the first time, human ingenuity deploying mechanical power appeared to overcome the natural order, giving rise to engineering notions of control and regulation. Rational mechanical speed promised to overcome the physical realities of space, distance, and separation—obstacles to the fulfillment of human needs and desires.

In this way, speed presents itself as the prime condition for economic growth and prosperity. The associated increase in the pace of life, though it may not be attractive in itself, may appear as a matter of “pragmatic acceptance as part of the cultural ‘bargain’ with modernity.” However, there is also a quasi-moral linkage between speed as dynamism and visions of the human good. The ideological nub of progress, Tomlinson argues, is its impatience with the way things are, that human good lies in the struggle for improvement. Change thus comes to be valorized over continuity, and once this is accepted, the speed of change becomes a self-evident good. “This moral underpinning of mechanical speed combines with the material benefits if ofers and its sheer excitement, to construct a hugely powerful cultural narrative of social acceleration.”19 That notions of speed and progress are still so intertwined in contemporary political discourse is integral to the insistent sense of time pressure.

Although our own experience of time-space compression is unique in detail, its structure is characteristically modern. The dramatic efect of the electrical telegraph on the mental maps of Europeans and Americans is illustrative of this. For the first time, a communication machine could separate communication from transportation, allowing information to move independently of—and much faster than—transport. It caused people to wonder, much as the Internet does today, about the rapid and extraordinary shifts it wrought in the spatial and temporal boundaries of human relationships. Indeed, James Carey argues that “the innovation of the telegraph can stand metaphorically for all the innovations that ushered in the modern phase of history and determined, even to this day, the major lines of development of American communications.”20

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Compared to the telegraph, the Internet does provide a spectacularly enhanced degree of speed. However, many of the claims for the revolutionary consequences of the Internet presume a putatively diferent past, and a belief that our current ambivalence toward technological change has no precedent. For example, the emergence of global space is not as new as we think. The telegraph also promised to annihilate time and space and to bind all of mankind together “on the face of the globe.” In the words of the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, in 1899, the telegraph “has, as it were, assembled all mankind upon one great plane, where they can see everything that is done and hear everything that is said, and judge of every policy that is pursued at the very moment those events take place.”21 Likewise, the consequences of this for the very nature of language, knowledge, and human awareness led to both the kind of euphoric claims and accusations of trivialization that bear an uncanny resemblance to discussions about Twitter.

The telegraph had a profound impact on the conduct of commerce, government, the military, and colonialism, dramatically altering the ways in which time and space were understood by ordinary men and women. The telegraph’s role in establishing standard “railway” time is well known. The eventual adoption of Greenwich Mean Time brought the world within one grid of time, uprooting older, local ways of marking the passage of time. Similarly, standard units of distance and territorial measurement incorporated space into a single regime of measurement.

It is precisely these transformations that Anthony Giddens famously situates at the heart of the constitution of modernity. The new systems of calibration provide the means for “precise temporal and spatial zoning” and thereby produce new topographies and chronologies of experience, new divisions between public and private space, work and home, labor and leisure, employment and retirement.22 In other words, the very dynamism of modernity “derives from the separation of time and space and their recombination.” The result is a fundamentally changed consciousness of temporality in social and cultural life.

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However, Giddens is unclear about the precise forces that produce these shifts. His discussion moves between ofering a metatheory of space and time and a focus on how modern societies actually organize these dimensions. Either way, he does not pay much attention to the role of communication systems in shaping the modern experience.23 This is at least in part because he treats technology as an autonomous force rather than as a sociomaterial ensemble of humans, machines, infrastructures, institutions, and everyday practices. The modern experience of time was actively reconstituted together with the technologies that fostered it. And the commodification of time that underpinned industrial capitalism relied on a whole range of interconnected technological innovations.

It is salutary, then, to recall the less familiar tale of the telegraph’s role in the development of commodity markets. According to Carey, the telegraph was the critical instrument in making time the new frontier for commerce. Before the telegraph, markets were relatively independent of one another and the principal method of trading was arbitrage: buying cheap and selling dear by physically moving goods around. When the prices of commodities were equalized in space as a result of the telegraph, however, commodity trading moved from trading between places to trading between times, shifting speculation from space to time, from arbitrage to futures.

In eliminating space as an arena of arbitrage, therefore, the growth of communications gave rise to the futures market. In order to develop, futures markets required three conditions: that information moved faster than products, that prices were uniform in space and decontextualized, and that commodities be separated from the receipts that represent them and be reduced to uniform grades. The shift of market activity from certain space to uncertain time was, Carey remarks, “the first practical attempt to make time a new frontier, a newly defined zone of uncertainty, and to penetrate it with the price system.”24 In a sense, the telegraph invented the future.

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The Allure of Speed

No 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?

Most 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

It 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.

Futurism 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.

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