Fragmentation timebomb
"What a rum thing time is, ain't it, Neddy?"
The quote, from The Pickwick Papers1, is highly perceptive. Time, truly, is a rum thing. And, since it has a focal role in the current Great Reset, the start of a new year seemed an appropriate time (sic) to put down some thoughts about it. Not least, the acronym Aargh! itself relates to a thought about time, prompted by a speech by adman Lord Maurice Saatchi:
We are victims of a drug administered by the Gods to all humans. As people grow older, they grow more disillusioned. The Gods are being cruel to be kind – it is easier to leave the world if “The country is going to the dogs” or if “It’s not like it was in the good old days”.2
Well, yes, I thought, since I’m now more than half way through my eighth decade, I am almost certainly prey to that syndrome. Hence the acronym, Aargh! - Age-activated rage grumpiness and humour. However, while fully accepting that I might now be a grumpy old so-and-so, it occurred to me that current goings-on go way beyond what one might imagine is ‘normal age-related grumpiness’. (I know, I know, that’s vague: please feel free to enlighten me if you have any accurate Grump metrics.)
The issue is, has time itself changed? More precisely, has the nature or perception of time changed? Here are a few thoughts.
Fragment 1: Intragenerational change, 1975
In 1975, I was working in Marketing in a large hotel company. My boss, the Marketing Director, volunteered me as a speaker for a Bord Fáilte (Irish Tourist Board) conference in Limerick, Ireland. Thanks a bunch, I thought, but was pleasantly surprised when the Bord Fáilte folks gave me an open remit to choose my subject.
At the time, I had come to believe that we had moved through history from ‘no change’ to ‘slow change’ to ‘generational change’ and, in my estimation, had progressed (if that’s the right word) to the point where change had just gone intragenerational, meaning that changes – possibly multiple changes – had to be accommodated by individuals within their own lifetimes. So that became my topic.
Fragment 2: ‘Fastime’, 1999
I was introduced to Robert Porter-Lynch at The Warren Company of Providence, Rhode Island. He had coined the term ‘Fastime’ to capture the idea of “an explosive rate of change and increase in the ‘clock speed’ of business.” Fastime, he explained, is not linear but exponential. And, in Fastime, early time is more valuable than late time because early genesis can provide major advantages over protracted decision making.
Fragment 3: A build-up of literature. Post-2000
First, the death of progress …
Business strategy expert Gary Hamel opened his 2000 book, Leading the Revolution3, with this:
“The Age of Progress is over. It was born in the Renaissance, achieved its exuberant adolescence during the Enlightenment, reached a robust maturity in the industrial age, and died with the dawn of the twenty-first century.”
… then Liquid Modernity …
Sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) used his formidable intellect to analyse the situation using the metaphor of ‘liquidity’.4 This includes a discussion about time and space that concludes as follows:
[P]resent-day men and women differ from their fathers and mothers by living in a present ‘which wants to forget the past and no longer seems to believe in the future’. But the memory of the past and trust in the future have been thus far the two pillars on which the cultural and moral bridges between transience and durability, human mortality and immortality of human accomplishments, as well as taking responsibility and living in the moment, all rested.
Since Liquid Modernity was published sentiments have further evolved so that the past is often regarded as a place of wrong-doing - a place where power was used by one group to disadvantage another, giving rise to a historical debt that must be repaid in the present. Heaven alone knows where this, to my mind, bloody silly proposition begins and ends.
… and Social Acceleration …
In my childhood in the long-ago 1950s some science fiction stories assumed that burgeoning technology would result in easier lives for us humans. Some suggested that we would end up lounging around like ancient Romans, but with mechanical rather than human slaves.
Sociologist and political scientist Hartmut Rosa (1965- ) noted that the opposite is true: the more and cleverer the tech we get, the more the pace of social change has accelerated, resulting in our having to go ever faster to stand still - Social Acceleration is acceleration in tech development, social change and the pace of life. Which means that, in Rosa’s words, time has now become …
“Timeless time” and “temporalization of time”: rhythm, duration, sequence and point in time decided in the course of performance.5
… summed up as ‘The annihilation of time and distance’
Finally in this short list, a simple yet profound quote from historian Ben Wilson (1980 - ) that puts what is happening today into context with the changes of the past two centuries:
People in the 1850s experienced something that we are living through, and indeed what every generation since has: the continual drawing-together of the human race and the annihilation of time and distance by the power of technology.6
“… to an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen.”
So, is how we experience time (rather than ‘time’ in and of itself) the key factor in much of what is occurring? That would surely imply that the nature of time has changed and done so in an extraordinarily short … er …. time.
More accurately, I guess, it’s a space-time issue: today’s technologies enable us to be simultaneously connected and disconnected, here and there, present and absent. And with the advent of ever more powerful virtual tech, the phenomenon will surely become ever more extreme.
Back in 1955 one of my favorite science fiction books was published: The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester7. It came to the UK later, which is when I discovered it, under the title Tiger! Tiger! The hero, Gulliver (Gully) Foyle, can teleport himself through space and time - they call it jaunting.
He jaunted up the geodesic lines of space-time to an Elsewhere and an Elsewhen. He arrived in chaos. He hung in a precarious para-Now for a moment and then tumbled back into chaos.
‘It can be done’, he thought. ‘It must be done’
He jaunted again, a burning spear flung from unknown into unknown, and again he tumbled back into a chaos of para-space and para-time. He was lost in Nowhere.
Is this, coincidentally, a metaphor for where we currently are, poised between order and chaos? Perhaps ‘twas ever thus? The outcome, at least in the short-term, seems to be fragmentation - atomization, even - on a very large scale.
Thanks for reading.
Dickens, Charles. The Pickwick Papers (1836)
Saatchi, Maurice. Address to Creative Britain in Golden Square, London (16th September 2008)
Hamel, Gary. Leading the Revolution (2000)
Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity (2000)
Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: a new theory of modernity (2005)
Wilson, Ben. Heyday: Britain and the Birth of the Modern World (2016)
Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination (1955) / Tiger! Tiger! (1967)
Super read David – Thanks, Paul