Is technology to blame for making the world faster?

Is technology to blame for making the world faster?

Acceleration and alienation: The German sociologist and philosopher Hartmut Rosa has become well-known in France since the 2010 translation of *Acceleration: A Social Critique of Time*, which was later followed by a revised and expanded version titled *Acceleration and Alienation*. For Rosa, time has been largely ignored in many social science studies of modernity, which have mostly focused on processes such as rationalization or individualization. However, he argues that acceleration is a key feature of modern society.In his writings, he presents an interesting classification, explaining that the social acceleration we experience today comes from three sources: technical acceleration, social change, and the acceleration of personal rhythms, which leads to stress and increasing feelings of alienation, making us less and less able to live fully in the world.A good summary of Rosa's thesis can be found in the January 2013 edition of *Rhizome* (.pdf), the newsletter of the Observatory of Mental Health Practices and Precariousness. Rosa was invited by Insa from Lyon to give a lecture at the Marie Curie Library on the Doua Campus, where he spoke to a group of students about the theme "Is technology responsible for the acceleration of the world?" "my book explains that the core and nature of modernity is acceleration," says Hartmut Rosa. For him, our contemporary world is built on its dynamic pace, which has no other purpose than to drive the material, social, and intellectual world. To understand what it means to accelerate the world, one must understand what slowness means, according to Rosa. Slowness is a form of time wealth.It is a state where we have sufficient time to do what we need to do, after completing other tasks.Sluggishness refers to leftover free time.In German, *Muße* (which means leisure or creativity) is the opposite of boredom.Gradualness is the state of not feeling the pressure of a crisis, not being forced to accomplish something without enough time.Time richness is neither boredom nor forced slowing down, but rather an element of autonomy. "The dream of modernity is that technology allows us to gain temporal wealth. The idea is that technical acceleration lets us do more in less time," Rosa explains.And that is what technology has done, he says, pointing to the speed introduced by technology.Cars have become faster, allowing us to cover longer distances in the same amount of time.Thanks to technology, we copy knowledge more quickly: before printing, we had to copy a book by hand, then technology allowed us to print it, then photocopy it, and now we can download it via the Internet.Computers themselves have continued to increase in performance, meaning the number of operations they can perform per unit of time has risen. "The result of this technological acceleration is that we need less and less time to complete a task or a specific activity. The amount of free time available is growing.To travel 10 km, to copy a book, or to 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 complete tasks, concludes the philosopher. In 1964, wasn't *Life* magazine already worrying, and rightly so, that the most important social problem we would face tomorrow would be what to do with this free time... Yet, that did not happen. The prediction did not come true.We do not have more free time: we always have too little.We live in a time crunch, a "time famine," as American sociologists John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey described in *Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time* (1999). "All modern societies are characterized by a lack of time: the more modern a society, the less time it has," says the philosopher. It is not oil that we will one day miss, but rather time, ironically.The more time we save, the less we live. How to explain this? Where does it come from? A Swedish economist introduced an axiom stating that the value of time decreases as material wealth increases. He explained that as a society becomes more physically active and indulgent, people end up having less time. This idea holds true for all cultures around the world.In wealthier societies, there is a tendency for more people to experience stress, while less developed societies, despite having fewer material possessions, often have more free time.As societies develop and become more affluent, their way of life tends to become faster-paced.An American researcher pointed out that as a society becomes richer, its members tend to move and act more quickly.This trend is also seen within different social groups: the richer the group, the more they feel they are short on time.Likewise, this rule applies to individuals, highlighting a link between a person's financial situation and how they perceive time as being scarce.

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.