Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism

A common feature of the avant-gardists was their wholesale rejection of the past, of everything old, and an exuberance about “the new.” Accordingly, they were especially enthusiastic about new technologies, such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Steel, concrete, and sheet glass were preferred over brickwork, the legacy of which can be seen in every major city of the world. From the outset, modernist architects sought to rebuild the urban landscape through rational planning and engineering in order to deliver an enhanced, dynamic lifestyle. As Le Corbusier famously said, “A city made for speed is made for success,” and the car was therefore integral to its design.27

Italy was the birthplace of futurism, and it was here that the first motorways were built. By the end of the 1920s they covered over four thousand kilometers and were touted by Benito Mussolini as one of his greatest achievements and proof of his commitment to progress and modernization. The pure hedonism of speeding on a motorway would later be captured in the electronic, repetitive rhythms of the German technoband Kraftwerk’s song “Autobahn,” named after the expressway system, which uniquely has few speed limits.

In extolling the virtues of rational, functional planning, what modernists like Le Corbusier overlooked was the fundamental ambiguity that the urban experience would induce. It was the German sociologist Georg Simmel who anticipated the nervous stimulation and sensory overload generated by the tempo of metropolitan life, as we shall see. But first, I want to pause for a moment to describe the two opposing facets of machine speed itself—that it represents both economic growth and violent destruction.

The futurists best captured the aesthetic excitement of those transformations in everyday life associated with the new celebratory culture of machine speed. In doing so, they identified three core elements of the modern twentieth century’s cultural imagination, as Tomlinson outlines:

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1. That the sensual-aesthetic experience to be derived from fast machines is valuable and desirable in itself and that the risk and danger associated with speed ofers satisfactions beyond those generally sanctioned within mainstream society.

1. That courting this risk and danger has an “existential”/heroic/ transgressive dimension.

1. That speed and violence are inextricably intertwined.28

Why people find speed itself intoxicating is a complex psychological matter. My interest is rather in the cultural association between machine speed and sensuality, risk, thrills, and danger. I have already mentioned the essential afinity between speed and modern warfare in relation to Virilio. The more general point about the emotional power of “afiliative” or “evocative” objects, and the pleasures that can be derived from the mastery of machinery, is a long-standing theme in science and technology studies.29 My own technofeminist writing has examined the gendered nature of this technical culture, not something Tomlinson touches on, and I will return to it later.

Tomlinson’s observations about the contradictory impulses of capitalist modernity, that “the impulse to promote speed in one area of life begets the need to regulate, even to suppress it, in others” are, however, astute.30 The resulting tensions of life in an accelerated culture are vividly illustrated by driving. On the one hand, there is the powerful mythology of iconic rebels such as James Dean, who live recklessly and die young at the wheel, and heroic individuals like Chuck Yeager, the first pilot to travel faster than sound (revered in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Right Stuf). On the other hand, driving has become a mundane, everyday necessity, and, in a time-pressured culture, people’s desire for speed is incessantly frustrated by speed limits and trafic congestion that inhibit them from driving fast.

But speed is literally lethal. The car is an instrument of violence and destruction, a vehicle of “mass murder,” according to Norbert Elias.31 The World Health Organization estimates that well over one million people are killed on the road every year. This varies for diferent countries, with high rates in Latin America and Africa. Even so, road safety is largely seen as the sole responsibility of individual road users. Automobility only “works” because its accidents are denied.32 The trafic accident is not seen as a normal social occurrence, but as an aberration. While there is a morbid fascination in the media with spectacular car crashes, and they are the stock in trade of Hollywood action movies, their routine occurrence is only news to the extent that they disturb trafic flow.

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Car accidents are, however, predictable and preventable. As any STS scholar would tell you, the technical solution to dangerous driving is not a speed camera or Latour’s iconic road bumps. The way to regulate speed is to design slower cars. But car engines are specifically designed and marketed for their capacity for high velocity and fast acceleration. Cars are not only transport machines but also intimate objects expressive of individuality and lifestyle choices. (Even I must admit to being seduced by the allure of speed, having owned an MG sports car as an eighteen-year-old in Australia and enjoying its close-to-the road feel.) According to J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash, the car crash may even be a source of sexual fetishism. The incongruity of the automobile’s promise of freedom of movement with the actuality of a largely sedentary existence in a landscape dominated by trafic-overloaded motorways is even more pronounced today. However, it is the speed of information flows rather than of motorcars that is at the forefront of our imagination.

The Metropolitan Pace of Life

A sense of acceleration has thus accompanied the path of Western modernity since its origins. The modern metropolis is the prime site for the intensification of time use, as it creates a dense set of possible interactions in a small space. As we move into an era where more than half the world’s population lives in cities and the number of global cities has mushroomed—estimated to number about seventy worldwide—the urban experience is becoming ever more pervasive.33

It is in this context that Simmel’s writings have once again become resonant. For Simmel, in contrast to other social theorists, it is the metropolis rather than the industrial enterprise or production or rational organization that is key to modernity. His insights about the increasing pace of life in fin de siècle Europe, his take on the zeitgeist, have such affinity with postmodern discussions of our contemporary condition that I want to recall them here.

In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel analyzes the ephemerality and briefness that have become signifiers of the temporality of modernity. For him, there is an intrinsic connection between the increased pace of life in the city and the peculiarity of money. Indeed, he draws a direct parallel between the efects of the mathematical character of money and the general use of pocket watches: “like the determination of abstract value by money, the determination of abstract time by clocks provides a system for the most detailed and definite arrangements and measurements that imparts an otherwise unattainable transparency and calculability to the contents of life, at least as regards their practical management.”34

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Money only fulfills its function through its circulation, and thus it speeds up every activity connected with money, making them continuous. Production, transportation, sales, or consumption all have to be constantly on the move, and this revolutionizes the time-space coordinates of social relations. The totally dynamic impetus of the money economy, throwing everything into the circulation process, shatters stable and constant relations and creates a transitory constellation of relations in which everything is in flux, with no secure resting points.

The perfect institutional embodiment of the “teleology” of money, as an “end in itself,” is the stock and commodity exchange, where time is radically compressed, and “values,” in Simmel’s words, are “rushed through the greatest number of hands in the shortest possible time.” The human activity of the exchange is emblematic of the larger social trend, namely “an extreme acceleration in the pace of life, a feverish commotion and compression of its fluctuations, in which the specific influence of money upon the course of psychological life becomes most clearly discernible.”35

What is particularly fascinating is Simmel’s description of the modern personality types that this social turbulence generates. The classic metropolitan type, the blasé individual, sufers from the “intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli.”36 The cornucopia of possibilities and distractions available within the capitalist metropolitan milieu make it the locale in which “stimulations, interests, fillings in of time, and consciousness” are ofered in profusion. In stark contrast to the slow rhythm of rural life, each crossing of the city street creates “the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of a single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions.” While too much nervous stimulation can cause the blasé character to become obsessive and even pathological, for Simmel, these same processes are also responsible for “the finest and highest elements of our culture.” Indeed, his critical perspective did not prevent him from fully appreciating the myriad stimulations of the vibrant urban scene and the enlarged social horizons, freed from tradition, it profered.

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The cultural value we attach to having a busy lifestyle, one rich in manifold activities and events, echoes this sentiment and it is a recurring theme in this book. As one of the leading time-use scholars, Manfred Garhammer, argues, the “ambivalent consequences of modernity distinguished by Simmel are crucial for the understanding of the time-crunchlife-enjoyment-paradox: life may become richer in terms of the number of events, and at the same time it may become poorer.”37

Simmel was acutely aware of the inherent ambiguity of modern city life, that it promotes individualization and standardization at the same time. For example, in his exploration of fashion and style, we find the dialectical interplay of individual imitation and diferentiation, the desire to be like others and the desire for diference. Fashion requires continuous reproduction to accelerate the turnover time of new commodities, making its newness its simultaneous death. As such, it exemplifies the modern cultural fixation with the “eternal present,” with immediacy, the transitory, perpetual motion. Simmel was thus highly attuned to the emergent time consciousness of the modern individual: “the dominion of presentism—erasure of the past, efacement of inherited connections, domination by the immediately invisible sublime—is an integral part of modernity.”38 The point I will return to is that this condition of immediacy is taken today as being wholly a consequence of digital technologies.

Strikingly absent from Simmel’s prescient analysis, however, is how the experience of the metropolis is highly stratified by social class, status, gender, and ethnicity, in other words, power relations. The realization of simultaneity as a phenomenon of the perception of time, the awareness of everything happening in the moment, was reserved for the privileged few. The acceleration of the pace of life was not then, and is not now, a uniform condition of existence.

Speed and mobility remain diferentially distributed, accessed and interpreted by diferent groups depending on their circumstances. If we return to the subject of the automobile, we will see that this technology itself shifts from being a sociomaterial practice of the rich to becoming, literally, a vehicle of democracy in the era of mass consumption. Once again, the speed it ofers has unanticipated consequences.

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Automobiles: Wheels in Motion

The automobile is a preeminent feature of the urban environment. The modern city is premised on car travel, and it was the mass production of the motorcar that greatly influenced its shape. Wide access to the experience of automobile speed was, in turn, enabled by the acceleration of car production.

Henry Ford did not invent the motorcar. Nor was his Model T a particularly good motorcar. Ford was not even the first to use a moving assembly line. But he was the first to “mass produce” a car, a phrase that he was also the first to use. As a result, the time taken to assemble a Ford chassis fell from just under 12.5 hours in the spring of 1913 to 93 minutes a year later. Greater eficiency led to big falls in price: the Model T cost \$950 in 1909 and \$360 in 1916, a fall in real terms of more than two-thirds.

Ford realized his aim of building a car “so low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one.” Between 1908 and 1927, Ford sold a total of 15 million Model Ts. Other car manufacturers followed suit, so that between 1908 and 1923 the average price of a car fell from \$2,126 to \$317 (in 1908 dollars). At the same time, annual sales rose from just 64,000 to 3.6 million. For its period, this rate of difusion was extraordinary. Indeed, economic historians Tim Leunig and Hans-Joachim Voth argue that mechanizing the production process of the car (as with cotton spinning) was as valuable in terms of consumer welfare as inventing the Internet, and much more valuable than inventing the mobile phone.39

Weighing up the costs and benefits of the motor vehicle is not easy. Its significance and the lived experience of driving are full of complexity, ambiguity, and contradiction. Undoubtedly, in the early twentieth century, the car represented freedom for many and, arguably, had a greater impact on women than on men. Notably, the automobile appeared at the same time that women were striving for freedom in the home and in politics. At first, women were almost exclusively passengers. It was the electric automobile that gave upper-middle-class women the freedom to leave home and break free of the control of their husbands. In her book on women and the car, Virginia Scharf traces the critical role of the automobile in facilitating the sufragettes’ mobilization, allowing the regional and cross-country campaigns that led to women winning the right to vote in the 1920s.40 However, women had no place then in the actual manufacture of cars, while from early on the racial division of labor was built into the Ford factory.

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The liberation and autonomy promoted by the private car also played an important role in the civil rights struggle, as Paul Gilroy describes. Initially, automobiles had been exclusively presented to white consumers and some companies expressly stipulated that their machines not be sold to blacks. However, when they could aford to buy them, African Americans bought cars at least as readily as their economic circumstances permitted. At one level, they were an absolute necessity for finding and maintaining employment. But the car also acquired additional significance in that “for African American populations seeking ways out of the lingering shadows of slavery, owning and using automobiles supplied one significant means to measure the distance traveled towards political freedom and public respect.”41 No wonder that feelings of rapture and kinesthetic pleasure, of being in control of so much power and speed, would feature so strongly in black music and culture. That the car was frequently linked to the female body and driving to sex is another aspect of its gendered politics.

The popular promise of automobile speed was to be short lived as more and more cars hit the road. One billion cars were manufactured over the course of the twentieth century, and there are currently over seven hundred million cars moving around the world’s roads.42 The automobile and its infrastructure dominate most North American cities in the literal sense that vast tracts of land are required to accommodate it. Not only for the roads, but also for bridges, service stations, and parking spaces—at home, work, the supermarket, and everywhere that people congregate. Small wonder that in American cities, close to half of all urban space is dedicated to the automobile; in Los Angeles, the figure reaches two-thirds.

For the individual, the mobility and convenience that the private car bestows are unparalleled by any other means of transportation. However, what appears to be an ideal solution to individual needs is increasingly illusory as more and more people choose, or are forced to make, similar decisions. In terms of individual mobility, the utility of the motor vehicle is diminishing as the number of cars on the road escalates. The prosperous 1950s and early 1960s were characterized by booming car ownership and, at least in the United States, the car was expected to be the future of urban transport. The land use/transport planning procedures of that period pioneered the building of elaborate highway and freeway systems. But freeways themselves spawned more and more trafic, until very soon after their completion they were already badly congested. The obvious response to trafic congestion was to build more roads, leading to a vicious cycle of congestion, road building, sprawl, congestion, and more road building. The drive to save time proved somewhat counterproductive.

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The net result is that London rush-hour trafic averages about ten miles per hour; in Tokyo, cars average twelve miles, and in Paris, seventeen. Indeed, riding a Victorian technology in central London—the bicycle— during peak hours is faster than traveling by car.43 By comparison, the average daily travel speed of thirty-three miles per hour in Southern California, where there are probably more miles of freeway than anywhere else in the world, may seem impressive. However, as a result of a much lower population density than European cities, the advantage of speed is ofset by the much longer distances required to travel to work.

The irony is that a horse and buggy could cross downtown Los Angeles or London almost as fast in 1900 as an automobile can make this trip at 5 p.m. today. Similarly, the speed of air transport has a wavering history. Whereas by 1958 travelers were going five hundred and fifty miles per hour in a Boeing 707, today we go no faster than in 1958 but rather slower due to the need to conserve fuel.44

I noted above how destructive car speed is in terms of road deaths worldwide. It is also a major cause of environmental pollution and international conflict in the imperial pursuit of fossil fuel. What is less remarked on are the ways in which the dominance of automobiles can lead to slow-down. The incongruity of the private car is that the accelerated mobility achieved in the “conditioned atmosphere and internal music of this windowed shell” is predicated on the sedentary human body.45 Rather like the experience of surfing the Internet at a computer screen, the driver is both stationary and mobile at the same time.

In afluent societies where the automobile dominates, the car is deeply entrenched in the ways in which we inhabit the physical world. In redefining movement, the car contains contradictions, as Virilio warns us, speed, gridlock, and a sedentary lifestyle. Indeed, the car is profoundly implicated in the recent finding that much of the world’s population is physically inactive. According to the medical journal Lancet, this increases the risk of many adverse health conditions, such as cancer and diabetes, and is therefore a major public health issue.46 Worldwide, it is estimated that physical inactivity causes 9 percent of premature mortality, or more than 5.3 million of the 57 million deaths that occurred worldwide.

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There are many other dimensions to the unequal access to speed and movement. The postcolonial metropolis is host to a massive discrepancy in material conditions and life chances, and for most of the world’s population, their only experience of speed is on a bicycle. In fact, nowadays many more bicycles than cars are being made, largely due to the massive expansion in Chinese production. The migration of millions from the countryside in places like China is a major source of global population movement and it is a far cry from the pleasures of the urban explorer evoked by the iconic modernist figure of the flâneur.

Conclusion

I would like to end this chapter with some reflections on the upsurge of academic interest in the significance of flows, movement and mobility in social life. John Urry, for example, has called for a new sociology of mobility, that sociology should focus on movement, travel, and mobility as opposed to settled bounded institutions.47 He argues that fundamental global transformations are making the concept of society less analytically useful. We are better of analyzing the social in terms of flows and networks, as mobility is now the determining feature that frames social relations, not structures or positions. This emphasis on mobility is also a key feature of Zygmunt Bauman’s writings about liquid modernity.48 There is much talk of the ubiquity of various forms of travel, that the paradigmatic modern experience is that of rapid mobility over long distances, while migration is often represented as the central global phenomenon.

However, this model of contemporary life is, in fact, strictly applicable only to a relatively small number of highly privileged people. As David

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Morley notes, “Despite all the talk of global flows, fluidity, hybridity and mobility, it is worth observing that, in the UK at least, there is evidence that points to continued geographical sedentarism on the part of the majority of the population.”49 Over half of British adults live within five miles of where they were born. Even in the more geographically mobile United States, two out of three people do not have a passport.

We should therefore not exaggerate the role of long-distance travel in people’s lives. Despite globalization, local life occupies the majority of our time and space, and vast realms of people remain static, whether through choice or force of circumstance. Some groups are more mobile than others and have more control over both their own mobility and that of others. The mobility available to the afluent middle classes is quite diferent from the mobility of the international refugee or migrant, domestic worker.

Speed for the few is contingent on others remaining stationary. As Tim Cresswell remarks, “Being able to get somewhere quickly is increasingly associated with exclusivity.”50 Even in air travel—where all classes of passenger travel at the same speed—those in first class pass smoothly through the airport to the car that has been parked in a special slot close to the terminal. London’s City Airport ofers business travelers to New York the option of flying via Dublin for immigration clearance in order to be in the fast lane on landing. Meanwhile, the majority of foreign arrivals are left waiting in the slow lanes. “Speed and slowness are often logically and operationally related in this way.”

Theorists of mobility flatten out such diferences because they mistake their own partial experience for a universal condition. The same can be said of much of the literature on social acceleration. The efect is to legitimate, Bev Skeggs argues, “the habitus of the middle-class that does not want to name itself.”51 Voluntary mobility, like speed, is seen as a social good, while fixity becomes associated with failure, with being left behind. Moreover, the notion of mobility is itself gendered in various ways such that women occupy a fixed place in the male narratives of travel, adventure, and discovery. Just as the literature on modernity, describing the fleeting, anonymous, ephemeral encounters of the life in the metropolis mainly accounts for the experience of men, so these arguments ignore the lingering separation of public and private spheres.52 By equating the modern with the public, they fail to describe women’s experience of immobility. As with time, mobility is a resource to which not everyone has an equal relationship.

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