A proper history of speed might not have been written, as John Thackara
stated in his introduction to the fourth Doors of Perception conference,
but Stephen Kern illustrated the history of our underlying understanding
of speed from historical sources such as the visual arts. Kern placed the
'discovery' of speed in the mid-19th century when to many people's horror
but to some artists' excitement, life took on an accelerating pace with
the advent of mechanical, industrial transportation and communication: the
steam engine and locomotive and the telephone being its main prophets.
Speed not only reduced distance but also constructed a different reality
in a changing style of representation in literature and the arts. Language
was changed by it -- a new literary concision, for example, as reporters
saved money on telegraph time, e.g. Hemingway. Cinema, editing, changing
sets, time lapse pictures -- all brought new ways of seeing.
Stephen Kern
The new speed media destroyed the 'poetry of distance', as Italian Futurist
Marinetti claimed, while 'motion displaced the body', as Marcel Duchamp
showed in his 'Nude descending a staircase'. Later acceleration brought
even greater dematerialisation, when for the Futurists a new religion of
speed was born out of WW1 (according to Marinetti, who also fantasized of
a 300 mph straightened Danube...). Breakdown in diplomacy had led to WW1, as
countries had not adapted to the speed of change -- rapid back-and-forth
ultimatums, hours to make decisions when recently days had been available.
Ultimately, the Cold War left just 8 minutes to decide on nuclear showdown.
The Titanic serves as a metaphorical example of life and death at new speeds
of transportation and communication: going down, it radioed its fate to
the world; ten ships heard the distress call but were too distant to arrive
in time to aid rescue. This monument of speed (it was hoping to capture the
cross-Atlantic Blue Ribbon at time) and endurance was scuppered because
of the relative power of innovation when opposed to natural forces.
So it's no surprise that with the history of speed comes a whole history
of alarmism: whether we would suffer from 'bicycle face', fears of sexual
predation by bicycle, bodily damage, 'NewYorkitis', Future Shock -- every
acceleration was pictured with its own pathologies. But most human activity
has NOT changed: speed does not lead to future shock but stagnation for
most. We should discern assets from accidents. Kern rejected the tool-neutral
argument: our powers are charged with emotion and value. Speed is good.
Technology that enhances human values must be. But which accelerations are
bad?
Rick Prelinger followed Stephen Kern with historical evidence on
the speed=good argument from the 1915-1957 period. Prelinger conducts the
'meme business' from his archive of some 30-40,000 titles of 'ephemeral
footage', depicting corporate sponsored utopias and government desired morals.
In the '30s, student and disciple of Taylorism Frank Gilbreth's timing
experiments were aimed at speeding up industrial production by taking the
fastest worker from the plant, have him/her perform in the fastest manner
and setting that speed as a standard for the entire workforce. Gilbreth's
experiments are clinical documents with a ubiquitous clock on the scene
of the monotonous ballet of the repetitive processes of mass production:
man as part of the machine. Chevrolet's 1936 (the year of Chaplin's 'Modern
Times'!) promotion film brought the latter to its perfection, showing workers
on the production line placing just one tiny part on the chassis, set to
a bombastic soundtrack glorifying the hygienic man/machine collaboration.
Industrial production sped into three 8-hour shifts, 'sleeves rolled up'.
In the meantime, the domestic sphere too was conquered by the clock. From
the factory to the industrialisation of the home, scenes of domesticated
speed were shown, like 'Easy Does It' (1940), showing the housewife's industrious
action of setting a table for four at the most efficient speed, along the
shortest track from refrigerator to cupboard to the stove to the table and
vice versa.
Rick Prelinger
Today, physical speed is becoming eclipsed by the 'virtual' speed of communication,
as in the promotion of long distance dialing (1951) to facilitate information
access. In the '50-'60s Utopian speed is equated with individualisation,
internationalism, sexiness and sophistication (the jet set): social mobility
equals progress.
Doors had been trying to get Danny Hillis since the first edition.
As founder of Thinking Machines he designed the fastest computers in use,
but has a new project to make the slowest, and is looking for help.
First, he confronted the audience with the illusions of predictability,
using graphs to illustrate the underlying and real cause of accelerating
change. Comparing linear graphs to logarithmic ones, of phenomena increasing
exponentially (like bandwidth to the home, cost of chip fabrication plants,
new Net hosts), it was clearly illustrated that the first meet up with our
intuition of explosive acceleration and approaching singularity, while the
latter give a false sense of predictability. Logarithmic graphs make you
feel like you're in the middle of something, but a linear graphing of the
data will show that everything is happening today. This singularity is intuitively
grasped -- e.g. CO2 increases, species destruction also exploding -- and
we can't think past it. Hillis sketched the pessimists' and optimists' graphs
of soon-to-be development on the explosive path: the first collapses and
returns to a past level, having peaked and crashed; the latter stabilises
at the present high level of efficiency, heading for a 'phase transition'.
'Technology has a quality that is self-developing' -- you use a computer
to design a faster computer, it's an autocatalytic process, said Hillis.
So why plan for the future when you can't see what's coming? This is a damaging
but pervasive attitude. Planning being more about setting goals than about
extrapolating available figures, however, Hillis told the story of the restoration
of a 150 ft.-long beam at Oxford University's New College. When investigating
a source of solid oak for this purpose at the University Forestry Department,
restoration architects were informed that the desired beam was waiting for
them, having been planted more than 300 years before, to reach its just-in-time
length when replacement was due.
With the speed of development being relative to the clock internal to the
system, how can we extend this vision? When Hillis was a kid, he said, the
future was the year 2000. 'And it still is -- my future is shrinking by
a year every year!' Reflecting this, the idea for the Millenium Clock was
born: a clock with a tick per year, a cuckoo every century, and a chime
every millennium. Even thinking about where to site it invokes contemplation.
Near a city? By the ocean? No, put it in a slow landscape, like a wood or
desert, so that it takes time to get to it. Make it in need of being wound-up
every year, to maintain a living relationship. But what is the aesthetic
of slowness? Speed is tall, sharp -- slow says we're part of a very, very
long story. Hillis hopes that at some future 'Doors', thousands of years
from now, someone will look back to his project and say 'this was when they
finally started taking responsibility.'
Showing two videos of Hans van Manen choreographies, one slowed down and
the other at natural speed, Dutch design's grand old man Benno Premsela
related speed directly to the body and bodily experience. 'Speed' is not
the same as 'fast'; speed can be high and low, like tempo. Only slowing
down allows things to be really seen and enjoyed. The speed of the body
and experience are the same. Fast or slow embody different sensibilities.
How slow can humans move without falling down? Slowness captures the moment
between balance and falling.
Benno Premsela and Danny Hillis
Cramming an 18-year narrative into ten minutes, Trend Monitor's Jan Wyllie
argued that the Information Revolution hadn't happened: so far people have
changed faster than technologies. From his first application of content
analysis (sorting and filtering of data) to foresee the future of communication
in 1978, excitement and fear emerged. Yet the speed of technology change
and change in people appeared different. Why is the latter often quicker?
One problem was the fatal side-effect of information overload -- 'options
paralysis'. PC-based information requires slower assimilation than printed
information. As all surfers know, so too the Web. More information means
less knowledge for action.
Two years ago the Internet burst on the scene to the surprise of many technology
companies. Convenience, economics and critical mass led to rapid behaviour
change and speculation went ballistic. Wyllie's diagnosis was that it was
these characteristics and not the media and publishing opportunities that
created the flowering of the Net's use. Now communities and buyers have the edge
-- barter economies (such as LETS: Local Exchange Trading Systems) have
created waves of similar schemes. Participants create their own capital
by trusting their own communities, coupling technological change to social
change in a direct and democratic way. Lessons to be learned are first that
technology per se does not change social culture faster, and second, that
information overload is a serious barrier to intelligent use, which alone
may enable anticipation -- even harmonisation -- with change.
Political economist Susan George said natural processes could not
be hurried, and that we share a natural sense of speed (such as in speech,
or non-cancerous cell growth). Otherwise, there's a danger of positive feedback.
The moon slows the earth's rotation from 4 hours/day to 24. But Indo-European
tradition rewards the fast castes and hierarchies of speed.
Farmers are the slowest caste and least regarded (they watch grain grow)
-- warriors are faster, there's mobility, competition, just-in-time management
-- priests are the fastest caste because of their symbolic speed in having
direct access to God. Excessive social speed may destroy a society. This
is why unifying concepts (e.g. Christianity) have traditionally been used
to periodically slow it down. Capitalism's calendar does not replace these
rest periods: seasons are conquered, agricultural capital (static) gives
way to industrial capital (mobile, but still rooted in things) and finally
to financial capital, which is purely virtual, and totally fluid.
Susan George
Agricultural capital thus is grounded and slow, industrial capital is more
mobile, warlike, fastest-takes-all -- war proceeds in all seasons. But it
is also archaic: it can only yield a profit if it stands still for a while.
Finally financial capital, at the electronic speed of international markets,
moves US$1.2 trillion per day, with no connection to goods or services.
It produces near-instant judgment of industrial policies of countries, e.g.
1994 Mexico collapse. 'Mach3' financial capitalism serves no unifying morality
or unity on a global scale but speeds up limitlessly in the single global
time of the fast caste. It's absolute speed is absolute power -- or tyranny.
Tom Ray introduced a biological perspective of the diversity of speed
processes that can be measured in micro-seconds (molecular change) co-existing
with millions of years (evolutionary slowness). By changing the balance
of human activities/technologies, we change ecological and evolutionary
processes. Changing the birth/death rate is most influential on the division
of habitat on the planet: we take more and more place, driving away other
species: natural habitat becomes human habitat in response to human growth.
We can't increase the speed of speciation, but maybe half the world's species
are due to disappear in the course of one lifetime. A crash in diversity
threatens.
Shrinking habitats and accelerating extinction are two effects on which
development design (or cultural action) can bend the curves. It is relatively
easy to save space for reserves, as in Costa Rica, Tom Ray's stamping ground,
where 10% of the country's surface has been turned into national parks in
recent decades. Designing such enclaves may still be doable, maintaining
them takes management that connects them to the local economy and people.
Securing the reserve's 'indefinite' existence may prove harder.
Another example from the design field of positive contribution to consciousness
of change was when Ray translated LOGOS software into Spanish: with its
testing in a 'colonization' game, Latin-American primary school kids found
out that a family of four is ideal in terms of ecological sustainability.
The real benefit of this insight dawned to Tom Ray when the kids told him
that they had never thought about this before.
Andrew Ross introduced his cultural wrap-up of increasing speed phenomena
by stating that we are hurried forward by our desire to master tools for
comparative advantage. Computational tools enhance space/time compression:
we all want faster PCs, they're seen as artisanal and offering rewards for
their use. Their metaphor for data retrieval changed from old 'gopher' software
to 'navigators'. But the real world of workers in electronic sweatshops
and monitored workspaces around the globe (whereever outsourcing renders
the highest profits) wants the PC to slow down. To them they are tools for
regulation, monitoring, quotas to measure output, or length of toilet visit.
From burger flippers to offshore data entry clerks to Western white collar
workers, they are under-motivated and subject to control, not liberation.
Ross calls these the Second World (with we IT professionals the First).
An admitedly crude separation, but does technology make this happen, merely
enable it, or support it? There's different ways to perceive the process:
among the info-haves and have-nots, who is liberated? Are designers responsible?
Ross berated us for Designer Determinism (as specious as technological determinism),
which he also found Hillis guilty of.
'Division of labour' is maintained for capitalist reasons, not because
of technological demands. 'Capitalism needs to create scarcity before it
creates wealth' -- speed is used to create scarcity (including time scarcity)
and profit. Technology is not responsible, but capitalism. He quotes Illich's
'Energy and Equity' idea that any society becomes a class society once speeds
rise above 15 mph. If you are 'fast', someone must be slow. Cybercommunications
offer near instant travel of information commodities. All new mass travel
technologies have always been sold with promises of new community-building,
universal access, etc. These are illusory promises -- in reality, rapidly
succumbing to the global organisations.
Another hang-up of contemporary design can be referred to with what McLuhan
called 'rearview mirrorism': new goods are always designed as new versions
of old commodities, the car metaphor of the Infobahn is an anachronism.
It was used in the US when the government was being asked to fund its building,
rather than leaving it to the 'robber barons' of the Baby Bells.
Ross announced the death of the information superhighway in favour of the
web metaphor, but warned us against the organic intellectualists of the
Net. The corporations who were promised roles as gatekeepers are left grappling
for new visions. They are finding them in the ecologically resonant metaphors
(organic, inter-regulated, self-organising) of the new boosterism by likes
of Wired's Kevin Kelly, whose Whole Earth anarcho-libertarian, bio-social
engineering dreams of the '60s have been integral to the new greenwashed
corporate ideology. No mention of the second world of low wage subcontractors,
tumours, polluted ground water etc. are to be found in Out of Control. Kelly
is not alone in this: the ethic of 'intelligent control' is an old dream
of managers and those desirous of automated intelligences. How we respond
to these visions depends really on whose side of the divide you're on. 'We
can have a sustainable mediasphere without sweatshops', was Ross' hopeful
conclusion.
