The Burdens of Speed

Life is getting faster - but at what cost?

Photo by Florian Steciuk on Unsplash

“[Speed] is the form of ecstasy the technological age has bestowed on man.” - Milan Kundera.

The modern world has brought about a revolution of speed. One cannot miss noticing just how fast life has become. Speed is now intertwined into pretty much every area of our lives: From the car out on the road transporting you to the next town at 70 mph, to the jet plane transversing the Atlantic in hours. A microwave oven heats food in minutes, and a machine can chop, strip, and dump a tree (which once was a symbol of stability and permanence) in a mere instant. Phenomena such as fast food, fast fashion, and fast-track (read next-day) delivery are expected and demanded norms. Woe betides the seller who is slow on delivery! We collectively clobber him with negative reviews even if the product is perfect.

This revolution has been a long time in the making and pinpointing an exact starting point is challenging. Certainly one could say the wheels of the revolution started turning in the Industrial Revolution when machines such as the Spinning Jenny emerged — dramatically speeding up work. Or one could say the arrival of the personal automobile was the moment speed became accessible to all. But I would argue it is in the last 50 years that the true revolution of speed began, with the ascendancy of this revolution being extremely rapid. For it is during this period that something emerged which took our desires and capacities for speed to heights unknown and which could itself increase in its speed year on year at a seemingly logarithmic rate. It was the widespread arrival of something Wendell Berry wouldn’t touch with a barge pole — the computer.

Digital speed

The digital revolution which the computer enabled has taken our love of speed and efficiency one giant leap further. Broadband speeds now verge on the instantaneous, enabling instant communication with almost anyone in the world (part of the phenomenon of ‘global shrinkage’). Our ever-switched-on society lives and breathes instant messaging (and instant replying), and productivity rates in almost all industries have gone through the roof via the improvements and innovations the computer has brought about.

But there is a catch.

The increases in efficiency and speed brought about by mechanisation and computer-based processes have vastly enhanced our society’s consumptive capacity — initiating a vicious circle. Economic prosperity (in our neo-classical growth paradigms) and indeed company survival is now fundamentally dependent on our consumptive desires not just never abating, but growing more and more — even if our consumption of resources reaches wholly unsustainable proportions (which it already has). The ‘Growth Machine’ demands constant feeding — and our forests, mines, attention spans¹, and diminishing savings are its food. We have coupled our economies and societies so closely to efficiency and speed that the survival of our modern society now depends on ever-increasing rapidity and growth — just watch what happens when the market detects a slowdown in growth or a company fails to deliver on its promises of increased speed. For ever-increasing speed to occur, the invasive dynamic and processes of speed need to infiltrate previously untouched areas of our societies, lives, and cultures (but that is for another essay).

It is worth now pausing (a rare occurrence in our fast-paced lives) and taking time to consider some of the broader effects of our addiction to speed. The eminent danger in a revolution which rapidly befalls us is that it leaves little time to adjust to the new norms, nor the time to critically reflect and review how best to engage or resist such changes and what effects they likely will have. A rapid revolution can knock you off your feet, leaving you disorientated with no choice but to go with the cultural flow. This makes it all the more necessary to identify some of the effects of our addiction to speed and the power it gives us (or more likely, takes away from us).

The most modern of virtues

Firstly, in normalising speed we have unconsciously and unreflectively defined it as a modern-day virtue. A virtue is a normative, essential, and integral feature of the good and moral life. Defining something as a virtue is a monumental declaration — it is a proclamation that this is the right way. Such a declaration should only be made after serious collective thought, critique, and testing (or an appeal to a higher Authority than humanity). But just as a mindset of speed leads to rash decisions, so has our collective/societal “fast-paced mindset” rapidly and rashly bestowed the title of virtue on speed. There has been no formal declaration — for then we might realise our folly. Instead, humanity’s addiction to speed and our integration of it into all facets of our lives has meant we have subconsciously bestowed this ultimate title on speed, for speed has become what we all expect, what we all demand, what we all desire, and what we all think is good.