Kind of Blue: An Essay on Melancholia and Depression

"[W]henever we think we need to rush through what we’re doing so that later we can get to something more relaxing, meaningful or important, we are cheating ourselves."

Lorne Ladner | The Lost Art of Compassion | p. 4

"Avant-garde artists like the Futurists and Surrealists plucked new kinds of art from the very speed, flatness, flux, randomness, irregularity, fragmentation and multiplicity of modern experience."

Terry Eagleton | How to Read a Poem | p21

"Since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the great speeding up of technology …. we in the west have become a culture focused on the future. We are not looking back as much as we are looking ahead. …."

Ronald Wright  (ca. 6:00)

(Source: extraenvironmentalist.com)

"With the internalisation of virtual time, we discipline ourselves to speed, and when time moves fast we tend to look forward rather than sideways. The ideological force that underpins the narrowing of temporal diversity (and is also at work in the socio-economic restructuring that drives societies to become faster and ever more competitive) is ‘progress’."

Jeppe Graugaard and Morten Svenstrup

(Source: appropedia.org)

"[I]ndustrial time – and later network time – accelerate the way we experience time at a pace that organisms can’t keep up with.
…..
Today we travel faster, we produce more, we communicate instantaneously etc. We seem to think that what is faster is better – and tend to accelerate social processes according to this belief. This doesn’t count in art though. One of the basic understandings …. is that it doesn’t make sense to try to speed up a piece of music, say. If you do that, you will ruin the piece – or at least change the expression in a fundamental way."

Morten Svenstrup

(Source: time-culture.net)

"While people. with an easy-going kind of logic, believe that fast transport and instantaneous communications open up a new dimension of freedom (which they do in some rather trivial respects), they overlook the fact that these achievements also tend to destroy “freedom, by making everything extremely vulnerable and extremely insecure, unless conscious policies are developed and conscious action is taken, to mitigate the destructive effects of these technological developments.
Now, these destructive effects are obviously most severe in large countries, because, as we have seen, frontiers produce ‘structure’, and it is a much bigger decision for someone to cross a frontier, to uproot himself from his native land and try and put down roots in another land, than to move within the frontiers of his country. The factor of footlooseness is, therefore, the more serious, the bigger the country. Its destructive effects can be traced both in the rich and in the poor countries. In the rich countries such as the United States of America, it produces, as already mentioned, ‘megalopolis’. It also produces a rapidly increasing and ever more intractable problem of
‘drop-outs’, of people, who, having become footloose, cannot find a place anywhere in society. Directly connected with this, it produces an appalling problem of crime, alienation, stress, social breakdown, right down to the level of the family. In the poor countries, again most severely in the largest ones, it produces mass migration into cities, mass unemployment, and, as vitality is drained out of the rural areas, the threat of famine. The result is a ‘dual society’ without any inner cohesion, subject to a maximum of political instability."

E. F. Schumacher | Small is beautiful

(Source: ee.iitb.ac.in)

"

[C]ars, as operated now, are inefficient. This inefficiency is blamed on the fact that modern vehicles are designed for private ownership, not for the public good. In fact, modern personnel transport is inefficient not …. because these vehicles are now owned by their drivers. It is inefficient because of the obsessive identification of higher speed with better transport. Just as the demand for better health at all costs is a form of mental sickness, so is the pretense of higher speed.

…. But when a society commits itself to higher speeds, the speedometer becomes an indicator of social class. Any peasant could accompany Làzaro Càrdenas on horseback. Today only his personal staff can accompany a modern governor in his private helicopter. In capitalist countries how often you can cover great distances is determined by what your can pay. In socialist countries your velocity depends on the social importance the bureaucracy attaches to you. In both cases the particular speed at which you travel puts you into your class and company. Speed is one of the means by which an efficiency-oriented society is stratified.

Fostered addiction to speed is also a means of social control.

"

Tools for Conviviality | Ivan Illich

(Source: clevercycles.com)

"For most of human history, the top speed at which human beings could travel had been around 25 miles per hour. By 1900 it had increased to 100 miles per hour, and for the next seventy years it did seem to be increasing exponentially. By the time Toffler was writing, in 1970, the record for the fastest speed at which any human had traveled stood at roughly 25,000 mph, achieved by the crew of Apollo 10 in 1969, just one year before. At such an exponential rate, it must have seemed reasonable to assume that within a matter of decades, humanity would be exploring other solar systems."

Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit David Graeber

from The Baffler No. 19

(Source: thebaffler.com)

"In the countryside, until the Middle Ages, time was inseparable from nature. Work patterns, the timing of harvests or lambing seasons, all set rural, agrarian rhythms. It was a time, write medievalist Jacques LeGoff, ‘free of haste, careless of exactitude, and unconcerned by productivity’. In the growing cities, though, life became very different. Neither work nor social life in the city depended on nature; there time was ‘constructed’. Clockwork replaced natural rhythms. Today, it is all but a cliché to say that time runs more slowly in the countryside that it does in the cities; people leave cities for holidays, to go where there is ‘more’ time, because there is less time measurement—fewer clocks. In this way, as in so many others, the clock is, in effect, the opposite of time."

Jay Griffiths | Pip Pip: A Sideways Look at Time | p 238