Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

These prospective technological scenarios seem inexhaustible and figure ever more powerfully in our culture. Time was when a new consumer durable had to be marketed with conventional accompanying advertisements, while now the latest versions of smartphones are newsworthy in themselves. They are not only reported in the financial pages but are headline news framing and representing tales of individual empowerment. The “i” word is practically an intoxicant. The topic of technology is in fact by far the best predictor of the popularity of news items on Twitter.24

At one level, all this speculative hyperbole has an obvious function: these (mostly) guys are promoting a benign future in which their own products feature heavily. They are transparently selling a particular vision in which technology will solve all our ills, including the time crunch. As I write, Big Data is the tool du jour for tech-savvy companies: the irresistible technological fix or answer to all social problems.25 This idea, that we live in a technocracy in which technical rationality both defines political problems and provides the solution, has a long lineage. Frankfurt School writers like Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas were wise to it before the dawn of the computer.26 Such depictions of the “proximate future” are far from innocent. They are being mobilized as a resource to influence the direction of sociotechnical innovation in the present.27 Some thought-provoking sociology is exploring how patterns of hope, promise, and hype—the “dynamics of expectations”—are constructed, and the performative role they play in actually shaping research agendas.

Perhaps less obvious than the marketing ploys of the technoevangelists is the extent to which speed itself has become the ultimate rationale for technical innovation. This in turn purveys a distorted model of the relationalities between time, technology and social change. Technologies change all the time, but this does not mean that technical change is always inventive.

In The Mantra of Eficiency, the historian Jennifer Karns Alexander traces how the modern orthodoxy that “all things should act eficiently” became dominant in Western culture. “Good” technological design is eficient, it is about making things work, efecting control over situations and events. This is “particularly apparent in the contemporary emphasis on quantifiable productivity and associated fears of waste, especially the waste of time.”28 In other words, technological inventiveness is associated with making us more eficient in the sense of being economical with time.

Chapter seven

178

This instrumental philosophy of maximizing eficiency is at the heart of engineering. According to this logic, automation is the perfect solution because human “interference” is a potential source of error and should be eliminated. The latest, fastest, most automated systems appear as objectively the best, rather than as the congealed product of particular localized choices, histories, ideas, technical instruments, and materials.29

Take something we rarely think about, searching the web. We interface with IT apparatus as if it was immaterial, screens providing neutral, value-free information. The speed of Google’s search engine so enthralls us that we seldom reflect on the fact that it favors some content over others. Nor are we alert to the way that entering a search term into Google triggers an instant auction that determines the order in which advertisements appear. This is especially true for the all-important first page of search results. What matters here, the way power is exercised, is in what is excluded—the vast number of relevant websites that we do not see.

It used to be the case (until Google changed the results) that a search for the phrase, “she invented,” would return the query, “Did you mean “he invented?”.” As Google explained, this “correctly” reflects past searches, in that over the entire corpus of the web the word “invented” is preceded by “he” much more often than “she.” Google’s algorithm recognized this— and presumed it meant the first search query was merely a typographical error. Thus the conventional wisdom that the world’s greatest inventors are male presents itself as factual. We could have more diverse search engine technology, running diferent algorithms, instead of the standardization of the key filter for most web users.30 This would be much slower. But might it be more eficient in the sense of acknowledging the diference between data, information and knowledge? Might the articles that a computer program quickly tells you are “popular” on the Internet not necessarily be the same as those that are actually worth reading?

There is growing recognition that software algorithms are not impartial.31 Diferent software embeds diferent philosophies, and these philosophies, as they become ubiquitous, become invisible. Code is written by people, it contains inferences and assumptions and embodies certain human values and biases. Indeed, the surface structure of flexibility and freedom, heralded by computing, is undergirded by a rigid infrastructure of legal and economics protocols. Software systems shape output— computer-generated predictions, recommendations, and simulations. What appears to be eficient, the constant upgrading of computer software and hardware packages, “are instances of a restrictive strategy, locking users into existing configurations producing enforced obsolescence, reproducing the contours of the existing technological zone in a trivially ‘new’ form.”32 The flip side of accelerated novelty production, the continual simulation of the new, is a mounting pile of trash.

Finding Time in a D igi tal Age

179

But this need not be the case. Jonathan Sterne, for example, imagines a company that took its time developing a computer that could last, could be easily updated, repaired, and upgraded, was easy to learn and use, worked well with other platforms, and that was less environmentally hazardous when it did finally decompose.33 This would be a “convivial” tool in Ivan Illich’s sense: ease of use, flexibility in implementation, harmony with the environment, and ease of integration into truly democratic forms of social life. Instead, computers are designed to become obsolete after a short period of use. Within the occupational ideology of computer engineering, Moore’s law is “less of a law of computer evolution than it is a fantasy the industry wishes to uphold,” as a high rate of machine turnover drives exponential profit.

To be sure, we have been all too ready to conflate the speed of technical innovation with inventiveness. On the contrary, rapid technological change can actually be conservative, maintaining or solidifying existing social arrangements. Its very speed may occur in order to block and stifle the possibility of alternative trajectories. As other STS scholars argue, inventiveness is not about the novelty of artifacts in themselves, but about the degree to which they are “aligned with inventive ways of thinking and doing and configuring and reconfiguring relations with other actors.”34 Genuine inventiveness, then, can occur when the pace of technological change is slow, or in places and at times least expected.

If inventiveness is about challenging our common-sense ways of doing things, questioning the assumptions that permeate our political discourse, and creating new possibilities for the present, we leave engineering to the engineers at our peril. I have written elsewhere about the culture of engineering and computing, where “the masculine workplace culture of passionate virtuosity, typified by hacker-style work, epitomizes a world of mastery, individualism and non-sensuality.”35 Being in an intimate relationship with a computer can be both a substitute for, and a refuge from, the much more uncertain and messy relationships that characterize social life. It is an environment that thwarts the imaginations of technology designers, ignoring the needs of those who do not fit or conform to their own paradigm of normality.36 One might venture that this mindset is ever more influential in our digital age in which the world’s richest companies are predominantly engineering companies: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Chapter seven

180

My point here is not about the predisposition of individual engineers so much as the institutional culture they inhabit. Much technoscientific innovation originates in either the military or in corporate business environments, where the expertise and ingenuity that is valued is directed toward tackling certain kinds of soluble problems.

Take a radical innovation for saving time, such as Google’s driverless car. That a car can drive itself without crashing is a remarkable achievement of mapping software. It is economical with time, in that you can get on with work while being driven and don’t need to employ a chauffeur to achieve this eficiency. However, as Evgeny Morozov rightly points out, there may be unintended consequences: “Would self-driving cars result in inferior public transport as more people took up driving? Would it lead to even greater suburban sprawl as, now they no longer had to drive, people could do email during their commute and thus would tolerate spending more time in the car?”37 One might add that little thought has been given to gendered patterns of travel, the intricate map of itineraries that thread through the daily lives of mothers. Car travel is not wholly instrumental. It may be an important time and space for parentchild relationships, such as on the daily school run. As the driverless car becomes more reliable, parents will surely succumb to the temptation to send their children of in it while they get on with other tasks.

But in relation to saving time, the self-driving car presents a narrow model of change, even in terms of transport. The car is more than a machine for mobility, it is a sociotechnical system that locks people into certain social habits and practices. Shifting these requires innovating in the economic, political, and social arrangements that embed them. In fact, cars are in decline in the West, and travel activity has reached a plateau. Many forecast alternative scenarios of electric cars based not on individual ownership but on access.38 They cite new vehicle-sharing systems, the increasing interest of car manufacturers in experimenting with pay-as-you-go schemes, and the mass development of electric bikes in China. What is at stake here is commuting time. But perhaps long distance travel may become less necessary with hypermobile network communications while refinements to less sophisticated technologies, such as the bicycle, increase their appeal. In other words, a more imaginative combination of old and new technologies together with diferent ownership arrangements might release more time than automating the car.

Finding Time in a D igi tal Age

181

Enthusiasm for the smart kitchen also betrays a belief that automation automatically saves time, regardless of the context. The idea of a kitchen run by super-intelligent machines, like Herb the robot butler, is not radical at all. As we saw in chapter 5, there are limits to how smart a kitchen can be if the home is conceived in terms akin to a rational, orderly, wellfunctioning machine. Time is treated as a highly individualized activity rather than as an aspect of shared, socially organized activities that are themselves shaped both by institutions and physical infrastructures. A far more inventive design frame would think outside the kitchen box. It would see beyond the private single-family household to encompass diferent social arrangements. If the aim were to economize on housework time, it could reorganize the sexual division of domestic labor. It might even collectivize housework in the way envisioned by American feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the late nineteenth century.39

The problem is that ultra high-tech conceptions of conserving personal time have ramifications. They materially shape not only our machines but also our cultural frames, tropes, and metaphors for understanding ourselves. How can we possibly refuse the ensemble of objects that define our world as given, if we are constantly narrated as subjects who are programmed, “hard-wired,” or coded to process information in particular ways? As Lucy Suchman has shown, grand projects in humanoid robotics and artificial intelligence perversely limit the potential for altering our cultural imaginaries of the human. They make it much more dificult to locate “the conditions for action and possibilities for intervention in the specificities of mundane sociomaterial assemblages.”40

Chapter seven

182

To my mind, such projects also reflect the marginalization of women from technoscientific work. (Even the famous MIT Media Lab has a male milieu, as only 20 percent of the faculty are women.41) Mine is not an essentialist argument about innate female values but part of a more general proposition about opening up the processes of technological research and development to a wider range of societal groups and interests. Time is calibrated by power, and therefore promoting diversity in design would produce entities and interfaces more attuned to those who do not fit the mold of methods oriented to speed. The way ICTs are interpreted and used depends on the tapestry of social relations woven by age, gender, race, class, and other axes of inequality. We should not subsume all the often slow and discordant rhythms of everyday life to the standardized clock time of our technoculture.

The digital is not a black box, a magic thing that is going to fulfill a vision of the future. It is coproduced with society and mirrors the boundaries of our imagination. Rather like the ways in which people represent themselves on social media, the initial radical promises of cyberspace as a disembodied zone of freedom is belied by clichéd and deeply regressive visual and textual representations. It is new technology reiterating old narratives. What presents itself as novelty and change is often a more concrete expression of the ongoing limits to, and stasis in, our collective social and political aspirations—as these are continually enacted in the distorted distributions of labor, time, power, and other resources.

\* \* \*

The contemporary imperative of speed is as much a cultural artifact as a material one. We are at a pivotal juncture in the evolution of technology, yet industrial regimes still set the contours of our lives. These traditional timescapes and domains of activity have been subsumed within networked $2 4 / 7$ digital temporalities. The question posed by this book is whether acceleration is an adequate trope for understanding our emerging relationship to time.

Rather than being endemically pressed for time, perhaps we are confused about what time we are living in. Part of the problem may be that the categories of speed and acceleration, and their association with progress, productivity and eficiency, do not provide us with the appropriate language to formulate fresh ideas about how we might leverage the digital infrastructure.

Finding Time in a D igi tal Age

183

Electronic technologies are integral to our experience of space, time, communication, and consciousness, crystallizing new ways of being, knowing, and doing. They as much reflect our high-speed culture as shape it. If technologies are sites of practice, then sociotechnical orders are not predetermined but are the result of humans and nonhumans coming together to constitute society. The latest technologies can, then, be recruited as a resource in our quest for discretionary time.

Too often, however, critical reflections on the impact of digital devices are framed negatively, as if we are victims of a “crisis” that needs correction.42 Such readings make it dificult to formulate an alternative politics of time (and in particular a gendered time politics) which cannot be separated from either the emergence of digitalization, or its entanglement with the shifting temporalities of social life.

There is a disjunction between the cultural allure of speed and the common experience of always feeling rushed, but this can be a source of creative tension. Smart, fast technologies provide an unparalleled opportunity for realizing a more humane and just society, only we need to keep in mind that busyness is not a function of gadgetry but of the priorities and parameters we ourselves set. Now is the moment to contest the euphorics of speed, and the technological impulse to achieve it, harnessing our inventiveness to take control of our time more of the time.

Chapter seven

184

Notes

Introduction

1 Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 18.

2 Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (1965): 114–17, described how the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years.

3 I do not intend to go into the vast literature on the philosophy of time. See, for example, chapter 7 of Time Matters: On Theory and Method (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), where Andrew Abbott draws on Henri Bergson, George Herbert Mead, and Alfred North Whitehead to elaborate a theory of temporality as social, processual, and relational. To paraphrase, what matters is not how fast social change is occurring or that new communication technologies make interaction faster, but rather how fast these things occur relative to other things as they used to be.

4 Donald MacKenzie, Daniel Beunza, Yuval Milo, and Juan Pablo Pardo-Guerra, “Drilling through the Allegheny Mountains: Liquidity, Materiality and High-Frequency Trading,” Journal of Cultural Economy 5, no. 3(2012): 279–96. For example, a firm that did not use it would have feared that its price quotes would become “stale” (that is, they would no longer reflect price changes in the wider market), and that those stale quotes would be “picked of” by trading firms using the new, faster, cable.

5 I refer to social shaping here simply to introduce the idea that technology is socially shaped, but society is technically shaped, too. See Donald Mac-Kenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. (Milton Keynes, UK: Open University Press, 1999). A fuller account of science and technology studies can be found in the second half of chapter 1.

6 See John Robinson and Geofrey Godbey, “Busyness as Usual,” Social Research 72, no. 2 (2005): 407–26. Details of all these studies can be found in chapter 3.

185

7 Jonathan Gershuny and Kimberly Fisher calculate the figure of five hundred minutes as consistent across the developed world from 1961 to 2006. See “Exploit and Industry: Why Work Time Will Not Disappear for Our Grandchildren” (paper presented at The Value of Time: Addressing Social Inequalities: 35th IATUR Conference on Time Use Research, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, August 7–10, 2013).

8 See Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), and John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000) respectively, detailed in chapter 1.

Chapter One

1 Philipp Hildebrand, vice-chairman of BlackRock, goes on to say that he has meditated for seven years and that “in the financial world, it is a must” (“Zen and the Art of Management,” Financial Times, September 17, 2013).

2 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), uses the term “timeless time”; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), uses “time-space compression”; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), uses “time-space distanciation”; John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2000), uses “instantaneous time”; Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: Second Edition (New York: Semiotext[e], 1986), uses “chronoscopic time”; Robert Hassan, Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2009), uses “network time”; and Michel Mafesoli, L’instant eternal (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2003), uses “pointillist time.” See also Helga Nowotny, Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), and various writings by Barbara Adam, such as Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); “Reflexive Modernization Temporalized,” Theory, Culture & Society 20, no. 2 (2003): 59–78; Time (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

3 Hartmut Rosa has developed his thesis that social acceleration is the constitutive trait of post- or late modernity in a range of impressive publications, such as “Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society,” Constellations 10, no. 1 (2003): 3–33 (see esp. p. 28); Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

4 Rosa, “Social Acceleration,” 10.

5 Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 240. See also Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of the Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962).

6 Adam, “Reflexive Modernization Temporalized,” 67.

Notes to Pages 5–17

186

Notes to Pages 18–23

187