The Speed Trap

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"As the tempo of modern life has continued to accelerate, we have come to feel increasingly out of touch with the biological rhythms of the planet, unable to experience a close connection with the natural environment. The human time world is no longer joined to the incoming and outgoing tides, the rising and setting sun, and the changing seasons. Instead, humanity has created an artificial time environment punctuated by mechanical contrivances and electronic impulses."

Rifkin closed his book with an eloquent call for a new social movement to improve the quality of life and defend the environment, a movement of people from all walks of life gathering under the "Slow Is Beautiful" banner. Perhaps appropriately, progress in forging such a movement has moved forward very slowly in the decade since Time Wars was published, while the pace of modern life has revved up considerably thanks to breakthroughs in technology and new economic demands imposed by the globalizing economy.

A number of these advocates of slowness gathered in Amsterdam last November for a conference hosted by the Netherlands Design Institute. Drawing an overflow crowd of designers, computer professionals, scholars, journalists, environmentalists, business leaders, and activists from around the world, the conference marked the first large-scale forum on the cultural and political implications of unmitigated speed in our ever-acclerating world.

Not everyone at the conference, which focused on the design and technological aspects of the issue, was convinced that speed poses any real problems. Some of the younger participants, were appalled that anyone would advocate slowing down the pace of life.

Historian Stephen Kern, a professor at Northern Illinois University whose book Culture of Time and Space chronicled the soaring velocity of life between 1880 and World War I, pointed out that "new speeds have always brought out alarmists." In the 1830s, he noted, it was feared that train passengers would suffer crushed bones from traveling at speeds as high as 35 miles an hour. Kern considers the current concern about the effects of our speeded-up lives a similar kind of hysteria. "Technologies that promote speed are essentially good," he said, adding that "the historical record is that humans have never, ever opted for slowness."

Danny Hillis, who pioneered the conceptual design behind high-speed supercomputers, disagreed with Kern, warning that our obsession with speed forces us to lose sight of the future and remain trapped in the present. He recommended cultivating what he calls "a new aesthetic of slowness." To illustrate what that might look like he told a story about how Oxford University replaced the gigantic oak beams in the ceiling of one of its dining halls. When the beams began to show signs of rotting, university officials were concerned that they wouldn't be able to find enough lumber large and strong enough to replace them. But the university's forester explained to them that, when the dining hall was built 500 years ago, their predecessors had planted a grove of oak trees so that the university could replace the beams when the time came.

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