--- schema_version: "library-reader-v1" source_type: "original_book" title: "The Great Accelerator" author: null edition: null publisher: null year: null isbn: null library_document_id: "bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580" source_sha256: "768e3e2e1bbc1a89b6dc82d24a0b7a084f273b697cdce779e7598c45ce5068c2" pdf_physical_page_count: 105 pdf_physical_page_index_base: 0 range_start: 30 range_count: 10 html_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580?start=30&limit=10" markdown_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=30&limit=10" previous_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=20&limit=10" next_url: "https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=40&limit=10" --- # The Great Accelerator > 页码规则：PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX 是从 0 开始的权威文件物理页索引；PRINTED_PAGE 是页面中识别出的印刷页码，可能为空，二者不得混用。 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=30 | PRINTED_PAGE=24 In the face o f this astrono m ical sh atteri ng of our emploi du temps, our daily regimen, the shattering of a continuum that's abo ut to go from being postmodern to become 'posthistoric' , we can legitimately ask ourselves about the INTEM PO RARY am nesia of tech nically oriented civilization. The proposed ministry of the rel ativity that is restricted to o u r incredibly cramped planet would, in fact, open up a new avenue for hope, the hope o f allowing for the kairos, the right moment for action and not j u st interactive reaction - that fu ture 'gh etto of CONNECTION' in a substanceless addiction that will soo n supplant the 'ghetto o f PLAC E' of age-old sedentariness on a telluric planet that's decidedly too small fo r tech nical progress, j ust as it is too small for the profits of a cap - ital i sm u nleashed by the systemic crash of the NANOTEC H NO LOG IES of instantaneity. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 24 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=31 | PRINTED_PAGE=25 It all e nd s , u l t i m ately, in the 'great lo ckdown ' of H i sto ry, the unantici pated re naissance of a new form of sun worsh ip, one requi ring sacrifices that are not only human (sociological} b ut rural (eco logical) . I n o ther words, i t ends in the i nevitable revival o f the illumi ni sm o f l ight through the illumin ism behind the instantaneism o f l igh t ' s l i m i t speed . Th at is the new absol ute of a god who dearly doesn't play dice, but happily dons the ridiculo us cast-o fs o f the ' S u n King' , or of Jupi ter, god of the sky and of ligh t, but also of thunder and lightning - divinity of th is truly stunni ng, and not j ust explosive, instantaneity of a demandingly secular age. An age in which mono-atheism outpaces the nihil ism behind the death of the gods, with the renaissance, the new age, of a late form of sun wo rship in which the speed of electromagnetic waves l igh ts up, th ro ugh i t s radiation m u ch more t h a n i t s rays , the rad iant future of p rogressivi sm . Th i s t ri u mph of mo no-atheism is particularly marked by the construction in G eneva of a circular (subterranean) cathedral , which is actually a 2 7 kilometre racetrack, destined to discover, at the end o f the race, ' G od ' s particl e ' , the HAD RON - at the risk of ending in the obscurantism of a 'black hole' . Such an accident in knowledge would no doubt put an end to the demand fo r experimental physi cs and thereby the exact sciences, p romoting instead the eternal return o f the magical thinking of the Pythagoreans of the digital and other programmers of handy software that can do anything. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 25 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=32 | PRINTED_PAGE=26 So, it's all too e asy to see that, with the latest electro nic ill u m i n ism, transh uman societies of the animal species are metamo rphosi ng into hyb rids of the plant species as they in turn become H ELIOTRO PICAL and photosensitive, 'objectoriented' through the framing of point of view, and captured by the i nterface-to-face confrontation of the multiple screens of an environment that's suddenly go ne interactive . We m ight now have a better sense of the havoc wreaked by progress i n a KIN EMATIC energy of instantaneous transmission that has come to complete the KIN ETIC energy i nvolved in the transport o f bodi es i n the era o f the i ndustrial revolution that preceded the very recent information revolution produced by telecommunications. The kinematic energy involved i n being carried away in the age of interactive synch ronization rounds of the ' real ity efects' produced by the kinetic energy involved in the physical movement of individuals, at high speed . THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 26 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=33 | PRINTED_PAGE=27 'J ust-in-time-zero -stock' : that slogan of l argescale commercial distribution today beautifully descri b es the m u tatio n in the i n itial fo rm o f i nertia, that of fixed-property settlement, into a final in ertia, that o f the i nstant or, more p recisely, the ' m o ment o f i nertia' i n the i nteractivity that now defines our relationship with the wo rld. A wo rld globalized by world time, thanks to the restrained relativity of (i nstantaneous) exchanges. And this rel ativity leads n o t o nly to E i nstein ian restrict i o n , b u t also to the ecosystemic reduction of the time distances of t h e star that carries us a n d supp orts us (with greater and greater dificulty) , the original ark, EART H , which the phenomenologist Edmund H usserl told us couldn 't move, si nce speed is not a 'phenomenon' but the relatio nsh ip between phenomena. For, the tempo ral co mpressio n of ime ractivity is equ ivalent to the tel l u ric contraction of the planet o f living bei ngs: this incredibly ' D own-to-Earth' star of the QUICK, the l ive (vifj, where the acceleration of the QUI C K, the swi ft (vite), i n the VO I D (vide), has now become the pri mary issue fo r an ecology that i s pol i tical - not transpolitical, as those p u re d isciples o f the cult o f the speed o f l ight in the vacuum (vide) of deep space, the illuminists of the Last D ay, would like to have us believe . THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 27 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=34 | PRINTED_PAGE=28 I n the end, the maj o r i ssue fo r the third m i l - lennium is i ndeed the issue of the regime of periodicity in an 'aeropolitics of time' that would not, all the same, negate the geopol itics of the origi n al settli ng of the Earth and the C ITY, that has turned into a WO RLD-CITY, TH E O RIGINAL ARK OF TOMORROW. Here, a metaphor springs to mind - of ocean navigation, with the invention of first the m echanical clock and then the o n-board chronometer. If the sky is indeed a monumental clock, that doesn't make it easy to decipher, desp ite the co mpass and the sextant and ASTRO LAB E. For, if we can calculate lati tude by observing the height of stars above the horizon, longitude, on the other hand , can ' t be verified except by co nsidering the time diference between two diferent points o n the globe. That requires the use of the chrono meter, whereas the 'wheelhouse hourglass', very like a speedometer, merely showed a ship ' s speed , with the aid o f a log, that invisible lifel ine lying submerged at the end of a piece of stri ng, gradu ated i n kno ts. 1 THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 28 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=35 | PRINTED_PAGE=29 S urely we can't fail to see the enormous time diference that exists, today, between our at once untimely and i nteractive practi ces - p ractices involved in supersonic transpo rt and instantaneous transmissi o n - and our daily l i fe, now so exhausted , so deprived of the intervals of time needed fo r reflection and responsible actio n . This is to say nothing o f the 'casino economy' , that infernal mach i ne that is i mpossible to stop before a SYSTEM IC CRAS H , the shipwreck of the o rigi nal Ark, o ccurs, l eadi ng, th i s time, to a chaos we can well imagine . . . A Ch ro nic UTO PIA, or a topical UC H RON IA, as some people might call the fut u re b i rth of a great M i ni stry of the Times or, m o re precisely, of the weather, le temps qu 'il fait, and the time needed , le temps qu 'il faut, here below, in the depths of a fo reclosed wo rld. A world that would, in the end, deserve th is AERO PO LITICS of the periodicity o f what is vital for chronophage societies, keen to crash, tomorrow, into the C I RCULAR time barrier at the end of the tunnel of LIN EAR historici ty. C ERN ' s 'G reat H adron Collider' in G eneva has become the perfect symbol of a postmodern ret u rn o f i ll u m i n is m , the i l l u m i n i sm of the cult of light speed for a history operating in a diferent time zone fro m all co mmon reality. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 1 Gilles Lapouge, La Ugmde de Ia geonzpl1ie. Paris: Albin Michel, 2009. 29 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=36 | PRINTED_PAGE=30 S o , if we can j ust h ang on a l i ttle wh ile l o nger, the known world of our memory might well fade from the control screens o f H istory and disappear, seemingly inadvertently. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 30 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=37 | PRINTED_PAGE=31 Too Late for Private Life Communism hasn't disappeared, it's been privatized. 1\hrius Oprea Mode de vie (lifestyle) and cardiac rhythms (heartbeats), mode de vitesse (speed mode) and technical rhythmics (technical cycles) - that, in a nutshell, is the question posed by the TEM PO of our use of time and space in a vitality that was once run-of-the-mill but is now sufering from everyday life's electro technical ARHYTHMIA which never stops rocking people's consciences. lhe old calendar-based systems of agrarian societies, their seasonal rhythms, have long yielded to the systems and rhythms of industrialization and the mass population shifts from the country to the towns. lhis process has, by the same token, abolished the remainder of the Wes t's Christian rituals, wi th public holidays dwindling as the programmed end of lifetime employment - the practice of open-ended work contracts - spreads, along with structural unemployment. I t has reached the point of pure and simple elimination of the weekly c:ycle now that Sunday has been subverted as a day of rest and the much-touted seven-days-a-week (7/7) made imperative. 31 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=38 | PRINTED_PAGE=32 Annual and seasonal not so long ago, weekly and daily after that, this truly historic rhythmics was to be given a fatal blow by the cybernetic information revol ution. For, the acceleration of common reality swiftly makes practical life, everyday life and not j ust social or family life, impossible. lhis has recen tly resulted i n the atomization, the sudden ' fractalization' of social units which , beyond the risks o f 'communitarianism', entails the incomparably more serious risks of an emotional SYNCHRONIZATION that will lead to a 'communism of afects' on the scale of a planet reduced to nothing, where the real time of 'cyber' instantaneity will, th is time, finally overtake the real space of the time diferences and time distances involved in our indispensable relationship with the world. Desocialization will thereby extend people's current mental and emotional disorientation. THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 32 ## PDF_PHYSICAL_PAGE_INDEX=39 | PRINTED_PAGE=33 Media pressure already notoriously ends up exposing the private lives of select individuals, poli ticians, celebri ties, 'top- tier' sportsmen, even of that avant-garde of progressivism, the presenters of nightly newscasts. Here, we might note, the doping of television audiences is no longer chemical but electro-optical and it has reached the point where the usual simulation of the virtual world of screens is enhanced by the rhythmical excess of a stimulation that mentally and emotionally shakes people once so attentive to the hours of the day and the months of the civil year that successfully replaced the new year of the historical calendar system and the holy year of the j ubilees of yore. One particular presenter, a woman, put it this way: 'My obj ective is to feel that I ' m always alive, to not become mummified. But I don't know if I can keep up the pace for much longer. I know that if I ' d worked less, I 'd have had a second child. That will always be my great regret. But current afairs are forever wearing us down.'1 THE GREAT ACCELERATOR 33 下一段：[继续读取](https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bd5d8e41-2fcc-4125-b172-83e84325f580.md?start=40&limit=10)