The acceleration of Time / Die Beschleunigung der Zeit / A aceleração do Tempo / La aceleración del Tiempo

This acceleration of time or complexity shows no sign of slowing down.

In fact within the fabric of our own lives we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute feel it speeding up taking hold.

It is a cliché that time is moving faster and faster; a cliché of the mass media.

But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage that this is actually happening to the space time matrix, that time is in fact speeding up that history in which we are embedded because our life of fifty to eighty years is do infemeral on a scale of ten to fifteen thousand years. But nevertheless history is a state of incredible destabilization.

It is a chaostrophy in the process of happening. It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection and it ends with a global internet of electronic information transfer and a language using species hurling its instruments towards the stars.

There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down or be deflected it has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature that this acceleration was built in.

What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals is that the speed of involution toward concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within the confines of our own lives.

There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several thousand years. There has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years.

Change is accelerating. Invention, connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematical algorithms, connectivity of people, social systems – this is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one; not the Catholic church, the communist party, the IMF – no one is in charge of this process.

This is what makes history so interesting.  It’s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.

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