What are the effects of the acceleration of social rhythms?

I think this is not an either-or question: It is the former which brings about the latter! When we think of Globalization, what do we mean? We do not mean the fact that people, or goods, or diseases can travel around the world, for they have always done so, or at least: They have done so for a long time. But the fact that money and images and ideas can do so within factions of seconds, and goods and people can move around globally without much effort or costs at very high speeds: This is new! Thus, it is the acceleration of social, communicative, technical and economic processes which has brought about a ‘globalized’ world.

The consequences are manifold, and it is certainly interesting to think about them in terms of the consequences for space and time. Social Acceleration, in my view, is a change of both: time and space, therefore, we could and should talk of a change in the time-space regime. But I think that despite the term (‘globalization’), the main motor is changes in the temporal dimension: Our perception of space is transformed because we speed up the way we use it. In many respects, space is perceived in terms of the time in needs to cross it. How far is it to travel from Paris to New York? We might ask and get the answer: Four weeks, or ten days  (in the age of ships) – or: eight hours by plane, seconds via Skype. This is the sense in which space appears to be ‘annihilated’ by time. If we travel today, the problem is not space, but time: We worry about connections and schedules, not about mountains and deserts.

Nevertheless, social acceleration has does have its problematic consequences, for social processes have become too fast for the world ‘above’ society – the eco-spheres, which cannot reproduce forests or fish or raw-materials fast enough for our consumption, and for the world ‘below’ us: The psycho-sphere, where people suffer from ‘burnout’ in record-numbers. The high speed of economic transactions, technological developments and social change is also too fast for politics: Democracy is a time-consuming process, and the faster and more complex the world is, the more time democratic decision-making needs to be completed. Hence, we approach the age of post-democracy, where politics is no longer shaping society, but only reacting to events occurring in the fast lane.

This is not easy to answer. In my view, there is one central idea in modernity, one great human promise: That we do not accept any limitations imposed on us by social powers: We do not accept the church, or the king, to tell us what to do, we even strive to overcome the limitations imposed on us by nature: We decide whether it is light or dark in our room, and we decide whether it is hot or cold there – irrespective of what the whether and daytime is out there. We even decide on whether we’ll eat strawberrys or bananas or pineapples.

So, why should we accept the domination of a social law – the law of acceleration – which was imposed on us by ourselves, even though inadvertently? Basically, I only see two possible futures: Either we will have to completely overhaul our human bodies and psyche and become ‘transhumanist’: Computers fused with brains in bodies fully geared up pharmaceutically and technologically. Or we remember the great promise of freedom and autonomy which is the promise and the dream of modernity: The ideal of self-rule. Even though it is hard to see how we could come to re-gain control over the runaway world when democracy as we know it is no longer the tool to work with, I a sociologist am bent to stick to the second solution: The problem is man-made, so it can be solved by man. What we need for this is an economic revolution that takes us beyond capitalism, a political revolution that introduces something like a basic income, and a philosophical revolution that redefines our conception of the good life.