Hans Achterhuis: Speed in Time
a Brief Exploration

The video clip you saw stems from the project 'Vision of the Future'. This big project of Philips Corporate Design was initiated to investigate possible cultural and technological developments over the next ten years. The broad aim of the project was to explore what people will perceive as useful, desirable and beneficial in the future and to create a technological roadmap to realise this goal. The project started by mapping out the social cultural horizon of the next decade. In conver gence with the work of well known futurologists as Toffler, Naisbitt and Popcorn an international panel of experts tried to detect the emergent and latent trends in industrialized societies. On the dimensions of time and space they tried to develop a relatively clear picture of socio cultural attitudes and preoccupations in the year 2005. I am interested here in the analysis of the dimension of time.

The expert panel suggests that there are at least two ways in which people perceive time today. One is an ever accelerating rate of living. People are constantly struggling to keep up with the demands of modern life. They never have enough time, everything is going faster and faster. Another contrasting way of perceiving time consists of the moments of rest meditation and wonder. This the panel called quality time. They deem it one of the most important tasks for the development of new technology to try to restore the balance between the two ways of perceiving time, between speed and slowness, between activity and rest. I agree in the main lines with this kind of socio cultural analysis. But I don't agree with the way the designers of Vision of the Future worked it out. The video clip of the 'hot badges' gives a perfect example of the way this balance cannot be restored but is even more distorted.

The idea behind this new technological device is simple. The pace of modern life and the demands of work mean that there is often little opportunity to make social contacts. Hot badges will help us out. They store and transmit information about the wearer's interests and receive similar information from badges worn by others. When two people with hot badges meet, the badges will signal to each other, informing the wearers about mutual hobbies and interests. Talking is supposed to become easier this way for people who are short of time. The suggestion behind this kind of technology always is that people have a scarcity of time, anyway of the so called quality time. Technology can help them to gain time.

This promise is as old as modern technology and economy. In a superb way it was formulated by Adam Smith, the father of the modern capitalist economy, more than 200 years ago in 'The Wealth of Nations'. All technology and all economy according to Smith fundamentally is one great struggle to combat the scarcity of time. I give you one of his most famous illustrations. It is about the fire engine. In the first fire engines a boy was constantly employed to open and shut alternately the communication between the boiler and the cylinder, according as the piston either ascended or descended. One of these boys, who loved to play with his friends, observed, that by tying a string to two parts of the machine, the valve would open and shut without his assistance. So he got according to Smith, the liberty to go playing with his comrades. I am afraid that in the middle of the eighteenth century for this poor boy instead other more demanding work was found. But I am afraid also that this is true in a more general way. The struggle of western economy and technology against the supposed scarcity of time has had as a paradoxical consequence that time, and especially quality time, has been getting more scarce' the last two centuries. The faster we go in order to save time, the more scarce it seems to become.

It would take much too long for me to work out this paradoxical effect of the fight against scarcity and for the gaining of time. Instead I like to give you a few suggestions that may help to go some way in restoring the balance between accelerated and quality time, between speed and slowness. We have not only ecological reasons for doing this as Wolfgang Sachs was telling us yesterday. My reasons are mainly anthropological; I think that it is hard for human beings to live without this kind of balance. Anyway it is hard for me as I shall illustrate by a personal experience. Last September my wife and I were hiking in France, in the Cevennes. We walked the Stevenson trail, following for ten days the footsteps of the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, who walked here with a donkey more than a century ago.

On a Sunday afternoon we arrived early at our destination. Our first hiking day was planned for the Monday. Since we were early we decided to visit two Dutch friends who are living in the Cevennes. We knew that we still had to cover another 200 km but since we were in the Cevennes we decided not to miss the opportunity to see them. Alas, two hundred km on French country roads on a beautiful Sunday afternoon take a lot of time. After a hectic journey we arrived just before dark. The next day we returned in an exhausting high tempo. When we started walking I discovered that it was very hard to slow down my body and my mind. In some way they were deeply influenced by the speed of the days before. It took at least two days before I really managed to slow down, to make myself at home in the landscape. Only then it became possible for me to share the feelings and experien ces that Stevenson is describing in his 'Travel with a donkey', that I read day by day while we were progressing in the same tempo as Stevenson did.

I like to draw two conclusions from my hiking trip. The first rather hopeful one is that the French country side didn't change so much since the last century. I emphasize this point against the pessimistic ideas of Stevenson himself. When he talks about a railway that was going to be built he suggests that this will change totally the country side. "A year or two hence and this may be another world", he writes. Well, I am not going to tell you that nothing did change in the Cevennes since the last century. But the biggest changes certainly were not caused by speed, by the train, but by the man made disaster of the first World War. Some of the villages lost the quasi totality of their young male inhabitants in these years. They never recovered. The train and the automobile only facilitated the desertion of these villages. But as far as my wife and I did see, many of the landscapes and villages of Stevenson's time are still present. My second conclusion probably is more important for our conference. I discovered that slowness and all the good things that come with it, never is an instant device. You cannot construct or create it in the turn of a hand. You only get the benefits of slowness by taking your time for them, by doing something slowly instead of trying to get them instantly. What I discovered in practice I knew allready theoretically. A few years ago I wrote a critical review of a study of a Flemish physicist about humanistic technology. De Meester pictures how people in the middle of the next century will travel on earth and in space with a speed of 40.000 km (with special hormonal pills for neutralising the jet lag). The curse of labour will almost be abolished and finally we will have gained time for other things. Then he writes that he hopes that people in the next century will use some of the time they gained in order to walk with The Little Prince of De Saint Exupery to the source to be refreshed by a swallow of fresh water.

When you take the trouble to look up the passage in the book of De Saint Exupery you read there that the little prince discovers the water that refreshes the heart and the soul after a long journey through the desert. Without this toil it simply is not there according to De Saint Exupery. I think he is right. Some experiences just cannot be given in an instant technological way. The joy in a conversation with an unknown person to discover that you have a lot of interests in common may be one of them. You cannot get a serious conversation by an instant technolo gical device like the hot badge that degrades a lot of the talking with another as superfluous. Well, as I said I knew these kind of things theoretically; I had to rediscover them the practical way on my hiking trip. I told you these experiences because they are not singular but rather common. The past twenty years many people are fleeing the speed of everyday life and looking for the slowness of the hiking tempo. The old walking ways through Europe are restored. The most famous undoubtedly is the pilgrims way to Santiago de Compostella in Spain.

A compatriot of mine, Herman Vuysje, who took this way some years ago wrote a nice book about it. In it we meet many other modern pilgrims, young and old, respectable and unrespectable. All are looking for the same experience of the benefits that slowness brings in an age of perpetuous acceleration. In some ways their stories resemble Chaucers 'Canterbury Tales' from the Middle Ages. They picture our modern times like Chaucer gave an image of the last part of the Middle Ages.

How must we interpret this movement towards slowness? Is it only a compensation for a way of living in which everything is going faster and faster all the time? Or can it be more than this? Can it become the beginning of the balance between the two ways of perceiving time that I mentionned in the beginning of my lecture? I know that most of my colleague philosophers who think about speed are pessimistic in their answers. Peter Sloterdijk is an outstanding example of this gloomy vision. According to him modernity is one big kinetic utopia, a utopia of speed. All the images in his last book 'Eurotaoismus. Zur Kritik der politischen Kinetik' carry the same message: we are living in a realised utopia in which all the experiences that earlier generations deemed important, are swept away by continuous acceleration.

In his reference to the utopian tradition Sloterdijk certainly is right. Almost all the utopia's we know, in which modern man invested his wishes and his hopes, are kinetic utopias. They are characterised by technological dreams of omnipresence in which time and distance are annihilated. It started out already with Utopia of Thomas More itself. In 1516 More did not imagine the kind of speed that De Meester likes to see in the twenty first century, but in another way he realises the same goal. Talking about the towns on the island of Utopia, Raphael, the teller of the story, remarks: "When you've seen one of them, you've seen them all, for they're as identical as local conditions will permit." The aim of Utopia becomes clear; all local differences should be abolished, everywhere the world should look the same way.

When also men are made almost identical, another aim of Utopia in which for instance all inhabitants are forced to change houses every ten years, time and space will be quasi abolis hed. Travelling will not be necessary any more because there can be found no reasons for it. Modern technological Utopia s realise these aims another way. High speed makes it possible to be almost everywhere at the same moment. So far for utopia s and Peter Sloterdijk. When I am not as pessimistic as he is, it is because I think we are not living in a realised utopia. Or maybe better, the realisation of the utopian ideals fortunately is far from complete. I have been studying the utopian literature for the past three years and in my opinion many of the doomsday prophets of which Sloterdijk is one, depict our modern world as a completely realised utopia. They don t see that when utopia is realised, and partly is certainly is, it does change a lot. In "Sideraal Amerika" (Amerique in French) Baudrillard interprets the speed and mobility that characterise the United States also as the realisation of utopian ideals. But he underscores that the idea of a realised utopia is a paradoxical one, and that you cannot identify the utopia of the texts with the realised utopia of our modern world. I agree with him on this point The pessimism of Stevenson about the future turned out to be ill founded in the same way. The prophecy of the total destruction and equalisation of the natural environment of the Cevennes didn t turn out to be true. My wife and I could still admire the same landscapes as he did, we could still understand and partly repeat his experien ces. The realised kinetic Utopia of our hectic world still offers possibilities for slowness and the experiences that accompany it. But, and this is my last point, these possibilities consciously have to be built into the design of our material surroundings. Maybe the main characteristic of utopia s is that they try to condition the behaviour and feelings of their inhabitants by designing an appropriate material world. In the same way however, also slowness and quality time can be built into technical devices. You understand that I am not talking about hot badges. My most concrete example at this moment would be the way the value of safety is built into many of our instruments and into the new design of towns. The residential precinct forces drivers to slow down in order to quarantee the safety of children and elderly people. It is easy to imagine one further step. Residential quarters that are designed in such a way that the use of a car is even more restricted not only foster safety but also force people to slow down in an important part of their lives. It is not up to me to challenge your creativity, but I am assured that when the value of slowness is deemed as important as safety many possibilities are open for designers to further this value.