Optimistically, the more benign form of frenetic standstill is not a new thing. In the terminology of popular media we have been ‘living on a hamster wheel’ since the 1950s, while we have been ‘on a treadmill’ since the 1970s. And we can go further back still. In February 1920, in a letter to his colleague Ludwig Hopf, Einstein observed how he was ‘being so terribly deluged with inquiries, invitations, and requests that at night I dream I am burning in hell and the mailman is the devil and is continually yelling at me, hurling a fresh bundle of letters at my head because I still haven’t answered the old ones’.
And further back still. ‘Everything is now “ultra”,’ Goethe wrote to the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter. ‘Young people are . . . swept along in the whirlpool of time; wealth and speed are what the world admires and what everyone strives for. All kinds of communicative facility are what the civilized world is aiming at in outpacing itself.’ That was in 1825.
Regrettably, not all of our new acceleration is benign. Rosa concludes his book with a worst-case scenario, an endgame he calls ‘the unbridled onward rush into the abyss’ – death by time. It will be caused by our inability to balance the conflict of movement and inertia, and ‘the abyss will be embodied in either the collapse of the ecosystem or in the ultimate breakdown of the modern social order’. There may also be ‘nuclear or climatic catastrophes, with the diffusion at a furious pace of new diseases, or with new forms of political collapse and the eruption of uncontrolled violence, which can be particularly expected where the masses excluded from the process of acceleration and growth take a stand against the acceleration society’. Happy days.
Is it possible to schedule when this collapse of time, this black hole of our own creation, will begin? Will our quest for modernity and advance lead to nihilistic wipeout in months, years or aeons? Unfortunately, this scenario has no definable calendar. Also unfortunately, we may already be spinning within its maelstrom. It is not just cosseted Western lives that suffer: time seems to have reached its terrible conclusion environmentally; practically, ISIS obliterates artefacts in Iraq and Syria, time’s record is destroyed. On a less calamitous precipice, we are already supposed to have reached the end of the novel and the end of history; critically, all social, cultural and political movements are ‘post-’ if not ‘post-post-’, and the two ultimate ‘post-post’ things are, ironically, modernism and irony. Acceleration has brought on a plague of cynicism.
Hartmut Rosa’s book was translated into English by Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, a social and political philosopher who died from cancer in 2014, well before his time at the age of 35. Unusually for a translator, he wrote a lengthy introduction of his own, examining a recent incident in which time itself, no longer passive or benign, appeared to have adopted human traits of venality and malevolence.
The first was triggered by the financial crisis of 2008. As we know, this occurred through a process of overextension and under-regulation, but recovery was swift, and by 2009 money was being earned and traded again in criminal amounts. This was because there was a new, faster way of earning money than ever before: high-frequency trading.
Never had Benjamin Franklin’s notion of ‘time is money’ been more apt. The outside world came to learn of high-frequency trading at around 2.40 p.m. on 6 May 2010, when a trillion dollars was lost in an instant. After seven minutes of financial freefall, during which the Dow Jones index lost 700 points, a safety mechanism jolted into place on the exchanges to prevent further panic; the ‘flash crash’ was over almost as soon as it had begun, and within the hour the market had regained most of its losses. But then a similar crash happened four months later. This time, the utility company Progress Energy (107 years old, some 3.1 million customers and 11,000 staff) saw its share value drop 90 per cent in a few seconds. On this occasion, what has been termed ‘a wayward keystroke’ by a single trader triggered algorithmic mayhem. On both occasions, the losses were caused by the same thing that caused the profits: the almost incalculable speed of glass fibre-optic cables.
The ability of computers to transact billions of dollars’ worth of business at very close to the speed of light proved to be a fantastic thing until suddenly it wasn’t. The strangest thing of all was that even the most schooled trader at, say, Goldman Sachs couldn’t offer a plausible (or at least a public) explanation of what had happened, or how to prevent it happening again, because it all just happened too fast. One explanation, reported in the New York Times, suggested the May 2010 crash had come about through ‘a poorly timed trade by a mutual fund in Kansas’, but five years later a more unexpected suspect emerged in a leafy London suburb near Heathrow airport. Navinder Singh Sarao, 36, was arrested in Hounslow in April 2015 on charges of ‘spoofing’ – fraudulently buying and then cancelling commodity orders in such quantities and at such speeds that it had sent the algorithms barmy. Further analysis of the markets over the following few months suggested that this scenario was unlikely, but the fact that the fragility of the economic health of the Western world had been blamed on a man trading, almost mythically, on a high-street computer in his pyjamas in his parents’ house was enough cause for concern that we may not be in complete control. (And the fact it had taken five years for the regulators to think they had found their man suggested that we have become quite unable to keep pace with acceleration in the real world. Not so long ago, the worst financial authorities had to contend with was insider trading; how quaint that seems today.) At the time of writing, Navinder Sarao faces 22 counts of market manipulation but has yet to stand trial.
Readers of Flash Boys, the gripping account of misdeeds in this high-frequency world by former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis, will be familiar with several new notions of time, not least the tiny increments of advantage or delay that meant the difference between helipad profit and suicidal loss (the biggest scandal seemed to be that telecom carriers Verizon and AT&T were inconsistent in their transmission speeds from Chicago to New York – sometimes data took 17 milliseconds to arrive, whereas the ideal was 12 milliseconds (a millisecond is one-thousandth of a second; it takes about 100 milliseconds to blink). Another strange and worrying change in the new trading environment was the complete lack of a need for human beings to oversee (and thus potentially regulate) any transactions; it used to be people in braces yelling at phones and waving their hands, but now it was millisecond flashes on screens and nothing else.
As Lewis recounts, the really successful traders were the ones who found a way to rig the market beneath the surface of the technology in the ‘dark pools’, where transactions were hidden from public scrutiny. ‘Everyone was telling us it was all about faster. We had to go faster,’ one of Lewis’s protagonists tells him, before revealing that the real trick was to make some transactions actually go slower. High-frequency traders – even the honest ones – tend not to specialise in high morals for the greater good, but here, surely, was one for the whole of society.
Why should we care about what happens in the trading markets? Shouldn’t we leave this to the investment pages and the movies? We should care because this is the stuff of great depressions and worse, and in an instant. At the time of writing we are able to transmit information at more than 100 petabits per second over one kilometre of optical fibre. A petabit is 1,000 terabits, while a terabit is 1,000 gigabits; at any rate, it’s a speed enabling the download of 50,000 two-hour HD films, enough movies to last more than 11.4 years. In a second. (This is an optimal-condition maximum speed achieved in controlled conditions in Japan, and not yet available from your friendly but disappointing local Internet service provider. But give it time.) The economic upside of this is colossal wealth creation for a few; the downside is a worldwide financial doomsday so catastrophic that it will make all crashes from the 1920s onwards look like losing a coin down a sofa.
And then of course there is the everyday world around us, and the challenge of our climate. The key factor in all the debates about the decline of animal species, and the melting polar regions, and the p
lastics clogging the oceans, is how much time we have left. How did it get so late so soon?
iii) Those Who Feel Differently
Geologists, cosmologists, ecologists and museum curators have always had a different way of looking at time, a temporal layering composed of eras and epochs that may seem reassuringly comforting to anyone concerned with imminent doomsday: crises and all our modern pressures of time keep mounting, but the Earth keeps spinning regardless.
The sense of security this provides may prove to be unreliable, so where else should we look for solace? Perhaps to the Inuit at the North Pole, particularly since the native Inuktitut language has no word for the concept of time. A calendar used by a hunter in the Canadian Eastern Arctic in the 1920s shows where the priorities lay: the days are marked, and there is a special cross for Sundays following the arrival of missionaries and Christianity, but the big space in the middle of the chart is reserved for illustrated tallies of caribou, polar bear, seal and walrus. Prior to nineteenth-century European contact, which introduced the dubious merits of the mechanical watch, time was ruled by the seasons, the weather, the movements of the sun and moon, and migratory patterns of edible animals – much like pre-Christian England. Demarcations came in the shape of flexible Inuit Moons, which were named after practical considerations such as the nesting of birds or the break-up of sea ice; in dark winter months the position of the stars indicated when it was time to leave the igloo and feed the dogs and prepare fuel for cooking. When fur traders’ clocks were introduced to communities, the Inuit in the Keewatin region initially hung on to their own interpretations of what the passing hours meant: ulamautinguaq (‘looks like an axe’) was 7 o’clock; 12 noon was ullurummitavik (‘time for lunch’), and at 9 o’clock it was sukatirvik (‘time to wind the clock’). So much of this way of life has now been eroded by Western time and the imposition of what the Inuit refer to as ‘order’, although as John MacDonald of the Nunavut Research Institute points out (in a break from supplying this magnificent Inuktitut vocabulary), ‘the arrival of spring triggers an irresistible urge to partake of nature’s bounty . . . a mass exodus to traditional fishing and hunting grounds ensues . . . Employers’ clock-driven schedules fall apart as the new time temporarily gives way to the old.’
Or perhaps we are attracted to the mechanical timekeeping systems of ancient Mexico, which, before the New World encroached, were non-existent: there is no evidence even of a sundial, far less an inclination to measure the day into hours. Alternatively, the ancient Indian system of hours may appeal, complex as it seems: the 24-hour day is familiar enough, but less so its romantic-sounding division into 30 muhrtas of 48 minutes or 60 ghatikas of 24 minutes. The ghatika is then divided into 30 kala of 48 seconds or 60 pala of 24 seconds. The 60-unit base stretches back to Babylonian origin and persisted until the nineteenth century. The British then ordered almost everything to tick in its shadow, the whole country reverting to Indian Standard Time in 1947, 5½ hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), which was then linked to atomic time controlled by caesium atoms. (Although Calcutta and Bombay held on to their own zones for a few years, and Assam remains unofficially and gleefully on Tea Garden Time, with local growers setting their clocks an hour ahead of the standard to increase productivity.) Venezuela turned the clocks back by 30 minutes for a similar reason in 2007, thus providing what was hoped to be ‘a fairer distribution of the sunrise’ (or President Hugo Chávez may just have been being political and maniacally perverse, having already changed the country’s flag and constitution and moved Christmas to November).
Or perhaps we will plump for the Ethiopian system of Christmas in January and the 12-hour clock, a logical device where the day begins at dawn rather than midnight. Or maybe the Jamaican soon-come mentality that tends to irritate Westerners on holiday until they fall into step with its gentleness, at which point it is time to fly home. And perhaps, since 15 August 2015, we have even held a sneaking admiration for the horological independence shown by North Korea, where Pyongyang Time was set back 30 minutes as a way of ending the blow inflicted 70 years earlier ‘when wicked Japanese imperialists deprived Korea of even its standard time’. Or perhaps not.
Extended temporal possibilities in the modern world have, since 1996, been the promise of the Long Now Foundation, an organisation designed to foster long-term thinking within a framework of 10,000 years. In fact, it was formed in 01996, the extra zero intended to ‘solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years’ (so there is something to look forward to!)
The Foundation, with its principal spirit-guides Danny Hillis, Stewart Brand and Brian Eno, has poetic and laudable ambitions, and a succinct manifesto based on the notion that ‘civilisation is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span’. The aims include: serve the long-view; foster responsibility; reward patience; ally with competition; take no sides; leverage longevity; and ‘mind mythic depth’.
But the Foundation is not all talk and wonder. It is also constructing a giant clock (a real clock, a counterpoint to the Doomsday Clock) within a mountain in Western Texas. In 1995, Danny Hillis, a computer engineer, dreamt of a machine that ticked once a year, chimed once a century, and contained a cuckoo that came out to say hello once a millennium. The clock is intended to last 10,000 years, and its pendulum is to be powered by thermal energy (i.e. changes in heat in the surrounding atmosphere). Although the clock under construction in Texas chimes more frequently than originally planned (a visitor must have some reward for taking a day’s hike just to find it), the principle ethos of its inventor remains intact: ‘I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future.’ The clock is part-funded by Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, a nice touch from the man whose company aims to get you essential household items within an hour of ordering.
The Long Now Foundation has also been thinking about how we may archive our current knowledge-base so that we may pass it on not just to the next generation, but to the next stage of life-form. To popularise this long-term perspective, one may also take out a Long Bet, a wager formed not over an election or sporting season, but over, say, a half-century. Kevin Kelly, the bookmaker in this scenario, has taken on challengers to many predictions, including the proposition that ‘By 2060 the total population of humans on earth will be less than it is today’ and ‘There will be only three significant currencies used in the world by 2063, and more than 95 per cent of countries in the world will use one of them.’ Don’t lose that betting slip.
One may take out a membership in the Long Now way of thinking, and by the middle of 02016 more than 7500 had paid to join. Like all good clubs, there are tiered privileges. A Steel Member pays $96 annually for tickets to live events and access to live streaming seminars, as well as several other enticements and 10 per cent off in the Long Now shop. A Tungsten Member ($960 a year) gets all of the above, and also a Long Now book and a special Brian Eno CD. The goodies are not really the thing, of course: you are investing in the long-term future, or at least in the belief that there may be one.
Neuroscientists tell us that we live our conscious states about half a second behind real time – the delay between our brain receiving signals, sending them out, and getting the message that something has been done. The time between deciding to snap our fingers and seeing or hearing this action is always longer than we think, because our brain edits out the delay and constructs its own fluid story. We are always behind even in the now, and we can never catch up.
What to do? Is there a more philosophical approach to time than the Doomsday Clock and the bureaucratic headache of the time zone? Not that he’s a great sage or anything, but Woody Allen frequently has a levelling take on these things. The answer to life’s short and gloomy span may just be to watch more Marx Brothers movies, as he does in Hannah and Her Sisters: he’s feeling suicidal, tries to shoot himself but bungles it, and in the daze that follows wanders into a movie
theatre where they’re showing Duck Soup. The Marx Brothers are playing the helmets of guards like a glockenspiel, and slowly the world seems to make sense to him again: why not just enjoy life when you can? One of Allen’s other semi-autobiographical characters, Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, long ago pronounced that life is ‘full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it’s all over much too quickly’.
Allen restated his philosophy in an interview a few years later, but now there was another solution: ‘I do feel that it is a grim, painful, nightmarish, meaningless experience, and that the only way you can be happy is if you tell yourself some lies and deceive yourself – and I’m not the first person to say this, or the most articulate person on it, it was said by Nietzsche, it was said by Freud: one must have one’s delusions to live.’ The opposite course is too unthinkable, or at least unlivable – the notion that everything we care for so much in our lives will soon be swept away. We struggle our whole lives to make enough money, to give enough love, to get the things we think are important, to do the things we think are important, to right some wrongs, to help others, to advance our understanding of the universe, to advance technology and the ease of living – and if we consider ourselves artists we try to create beauty and truth – and we try to do this all in the narrow time span available to us, and then every 100 years we’re all swept away and another bunch of people try to do the same. Time – and not even geologists’ deep time, just the time that comes after the time we have now – just keeps on rolling right along. The old Negro spirituals had it right from the start.5
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