Is technology responsible for making the world faster?

Is technology responsible for making the world faster?

Acceleration and alienation The German sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa has been noticed in France since the translation in 2010 of Acceleration: a social critique of time, supplemented since by synthesis and update of this book in Acceleration and aliénation ...

For Hartmut Rosa, the time has long been neglected in social science analyzes of modernity in favor of processes of rationalization or individualization. Yet, according to him, acceleration is a hallmark of modern society. In his essays, he delivers an interesting taxonomy explaining that the social acceleration that we know stems from technical acceleration, that of social change, and that of our rhythms of life which manifests itself in stress, ever more alienation. large which makes us more and more incapable of inhabiting the world (you can find a very good synthesis of Rosa's thesis in the January 2013 issue of Rhizome (.pdf), the newsletter of the Observatory of health practices mental and precariousness).

Invited by Insa from Lyon, he was giving a conference Thursday to a crowd of students at the Marie Curie library on the Doua Campus, on the theme "Is technology responsible for the acceleration of the world?" ".

"My book explains that the essence and nature of modernity is acceleration," says Hartmut Rosa. For him, our contemporary world is based on its dynamism, which has no other goal than to set in motion the material, social and ideal world.

To understand what accelerating the world is, you have to understand what slowness means, Rosa believes. Slowness is a wealth of time. It is a state in which we have enough time to do what we need to do, in the time that we have left after doing everything. The sluggishness is when we still have free time left… In German Muße (which means leisure, creativity) is the opposite of boredom. ""Gradualness is the inclination of not being feeling the squeeze of a crisis, of not accomplishing something without having time. "Time richness is neither boredom nor forced deceleration, but it is above all an element of autonomy.

"The dream of modernity is that technology allows us to acquire temporal wealth. The idea behind it is that technical acceleration allows us to do more things per unit of time. "And that's what the technique allowed," Rosa emphasizes, pointing to the speed introduced by the technique. Cars move faster and faster, allowing us to go further and further at the same time. Thanks to technology, we copied knowledge more and more quickly: before printing, we had to copy a book by hand, then technology allowed us to print it, then photocopy it, and now to copy it. download via the internet. Computers themselves have continued to increase their performance, that is, the number of operations they can perform per unit of time.

"The consequence of this technological acceleration is that we need less and less time to complete a task, a specific activity. The amount of free time resources is growing. To travel 10 km or to copy a book or produce a picture, we need much less time than our ancestors. "

Why don't we have more free time?

So we should have more free time than ever since we need less time to do things, concludes the philosopher. In 1964, wasn't Life magazine already worrying, and rightfully so, that the most important social problem we would face tomorrow would be what we would do with this free time ...

Yet, that is not what happened. The prediction did not come true. We don't have more time: we always have too little. We live in a time crunch, a “time famine,” as American sociologists John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey described it in 1999 in Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time.

"All cutting edge social orders are described by a deficiency of time: the more present-day a general public, the less time it has". It is not oil that we will one day miss, but rather time, ironically the philosopher. The more time we save, the less we live.

How to explain this? Where does it come from? A Swedish economist proposed an axiom: the wealth of time is inversely proportional to material wealth. “The more extravagant we are physically, the more unfortunate we become as far as time assets.. He applies this to all cultures in the world ”: the richer the societies, the more stressed people are. In less developed cultures, people are poor in material goods, but they have time. With modernization, the material enrichment of society, the pace of people becomes faster. An American researcher found that the richer the society, the faster people move. This difference is also found in social groups: the richer a social group, the more it will feel the shortage of time. And this axiom also applies to individuals, where there is a link between the economic status of individuals and lack of time.

The acceleration is not the fault of the technique

"Be that as it may, for what reason is it anyway when material advancement should let loose us time? 

 For Hartmut Rosa, it is the relationship between growth and acceleration that explains this. Because speeding up saves free time if and only if the amount of activity stays the same. But this is not the case! Growth in business is more important than acceleration.

When you walked to work, 5 km from home, it took an hour. Now that we take our cars, we can do these 5 km in 10 minutes and potentially gain 50. But we no longer live 5 km from our work, but 30 km, so we always go an hour to travel… In this case, the growth rate is the same as the acceleration rate: it takes the same time to make a longer trip. And very often, in fact, we no longer live 30 km away, but 60 km away, which means that we lost an hour rather than saving 50 minutes! Here, the growth rate is greater than the acceleration rate. Before, let's say it took us half an hour to write 4 letters. But now, in half an hour, we are dealing with a lot more emails. We have become faster, but we also have more interactions to deal with, and therefore more stress. “The shortage of time is not due to technological progress, but to the fact that growth is more important than acceleration. "

Around 1900, an average house contained 400 different objects. Today, it has about 10,000. This increase in quantity means that there is less time to attend to each object. With a washing machine, you spend less time washing clothes, but you wash them more often. The same goes for transport, we doubled our speed, but we quadrupled the distances traveled ...

“The acceleration is not the fault of technique. One can imagine a world where, thanks to technical progress, one could manage to free up a surplus of time, if the growth rate were not so strong. Technical progress widens our horizon and our possibilities of life. It changes the perception of possibilities and obstacles and also changes social expectations, both what we expect from others and what they expect from us. Technology accelerates the pace of life but does not impose it. It gives us the means to dispose of it freely. "

Time cannot grow

If we feel like we are trapped in a hamster cage wheel, then we need to understand the logic of modernization, says Rosa. “

"An advanced society is described by the way that it needs development, increasing speed, and advancement to keep up the norm. It must grow, innovate, accelerate to remain stable. "It is an always dynamic stabilization. Our economists keep telling us that the economy must grow. What if there is not enough growth, we will experience unemployment, crisis, and the collapse of the welfare state ... A modern society can only be maintained at the cost of growth, innovation, and 'acceleration. This is the very logic of capitalism, explains Hartmut Rosa. It is also the logic of modern sciences, which seek not so much to preserve and transmit knowledge as to constantly produce new knowledge and accelerate its pace. This is the logic of politics and law, which continually seek to shorten election times and produce new laws. It is also the logic of arts and literature: which ask us to be dynamic, original rather than to produce Mimesis. Stabilization through growth is the essence of modernity, not technology.

“Modernity means moving the material, social and ideal world more and more quickly. We aspire to multiply things, contacts, our horizon of options… The essential aspiration of modernity is to enlarge the space of possibilities… This aspiration inevitably creates a temporal problem, because in this diagram, time is there. the element that cannot be multiplied. You can't increase the amount of time. You can compress it, but not enlarge it. We live in a growing society and time cannot grow. "

We are in the three dimensions of acceleration: technical acceleration (communication, transport ... but also pollution), social acceleration (that of social change that destabilizes us), and acceleration of the pace of life (which is an attempt to respond to the global phenomenon, which pushes us to do more things per unit of time). These three dimensions form a closed system, where each component feeds on the other, further accelerating the acceleration. These three dimensions are also driven by three driving forces: money and competition which are the economic engine (time is money); functional differentiation (the division of labor in particular); and the cultural engine (the promise of acceleration). "This guarantee lays on the possibility of our passing, of our own finitude“. Before we get to that, we all want to do millions of things. If we hurry, we can do a lot of things before we die. If we double the speed of our life, maybe we can live two. If we increase the speed to infinity, will we achieve eternal life before we die? ". Obviously, that doesn't actually work, unexpectedly the logician.  But it conveys that cultural aspect that connects our idea of a "good life" to speed. The promise of acceleration is as connected to the idea of freedom as it is to that of eternity.

The result of this system is a logic of escalation of speed, growth, and innovation. The problem is that we always need more energy (physical, individual, collective ...) to maintain this dynamic stabilization, to maintain the status quo. We must always make more efforts to keep up with the changing world, to remain competitive ...

The limits of acceleration

This dynamic stabilization is no longer seen as progress. We have the impression of a movement, of an increase without progress. We have the feeling that innovation, acceleration and growth no longer allow to achieve something new, progressive ... But they are maintained only to avoid crisis, catastrophe.

Not to mention that not all areas can be accelerated, as the ecological crisis shows. A lot of resources are not fast enough for the company. We produce too much toxic material, we are going too fast for the environment. The psychological crisis (depression, burn or) is a reaction to a world that has become too fast, to a situation where you have to run always faster without getting somewhere, a world without recognition. Acceleration also explains the democratic crisis, because democracy is a political system that takes time to deliberate, to produce consultation, consensus ...

So what to do? " What can we do? Can we build a world where technology produces a wealth of time for us? Can we imagine a society that would not stabilize dynamically? "

In any case, this is what the philosopher is now working on with several colleagues at the University of Jena, around the Beyond the Growth Society program. The idea is to find a world that can grow, accelerate or innovate, but which does not have to grow to stay in place, to maintain its own state, its own status quo. "We are working to imagine a society that remains modern" (in the sense of freedom, pluralism, equality ...), "democratic, but where technical progress will not lead to a shortage of time. For Hartmut Rosa, such a society cannot be capitalist. It must correspond to an economic democracy or a democratic economy. For this society to be possible, it is necessary to introduce economic reforms, reforms of the welfare state, which must not only distribute the results of growth but notably introduce guaranteed income to break the logic of competition. . 

We need to have an idea of what is the "good life", the "good life" or "Buen Vivir": what makes our life successful? It is a cultural error to think that life is good if it goes fast if it offers more options, more possibilities. Our life is successful in moments of resonance. "Resonance is the feeling that we are acting in a context that responds to us, that speaks to us" ... as we sometimes find in family, work or music. Resonance [which echoes the concept of reliance of the philosopher Patrick Viveret, as he explains in this interview for the magazine Millénaire3 (.pdf)] is the opposite of alienation when the world seems unfriendly, hostile, or silent to us. We need another idea of what makes a good life and to clarify the structural conditions that stand in the way of this good life. "Only under these conditions can we imagine putting technique at the service of slowness," concludes Harmut Rosa.