The Speed of the Age

There are books one reads that contain messages so profound, they force into the brain new visions of how the world might be, others present messages that must be decipher and considered, but ultimately yield dramatic insights. Then, there are books whose message is mainly banal, but contain perhaps a chance phrase or random association of words that spark entirely unintended lines of thought.

For us, Vince Poscente's The Age of Speed, was this sort of book. Aimed primarily at the business set, it functions as a basic time-management primer for the 21st century. Readers are encouraged to adopt new technologies and strategies to minimize time spent "at work" and to maximize time spent "at leisure". Poscente makes the most of the fact that mobile technologies have caused the work/home, labour/leisure divide to become porous. If I answer emails at home, am I working? If a client contacts me for consultation while I'm on a weekend getaway, am I working? Does it have to be one or the other?

Aside from urging readers to reflect on the nature of their work, hoping that individuals find themselves doing work they love to do, Poscente also strongly recommends businesses move to a task-based, instead of a time-based system. This was something we used to argue back when we worked in the parking lots. Our employer paid us to park cars and direct traffic, if no cars or traffic appeared, then we were free to spend our time as we liked, provided we were available should a car or traffic appear. Thus parking truly did blur the leisure/labour divide, as most of our "work" hours were spent in various forms of leisure (working as we did in rarely frequented parking lots). Within a more professional context, a task-based system would appear to encourage decentralized decision making, as individuals made choices about their time. Clearly spending eight hours at a desk with very little to do is not anyone's best use of time.

Our main benefit from The Age of Speed however, was a confirmation about the the importance of time. It might be cliche to refer to time as the new wealth, but the fact remains that this is where the culture appears to be headed. In the pre-modern era, wealth was based on land, during the transition to capitalism, the accumulation of cash was often spent on acquiring the trappings of aristocratic wealth (ie. land, Thorstein Veblen has written much here), but at some point things changed, "the edges of the map were filled in" (to quote our favourite volume of The Pirates of the Caribbean), and there was no more unclaimed land to possess. Perhaps this explains the mid-century fascination with space travel with its promise of new sources of land. At any rate, the emphasis shifted from land to time, and cash was used to shortcut the consumption of time, where possible, via faster travel, personal chefs and personal telecommunications, etc.

This is an idea that Poscente attempts to evoke, and fails, but a chance encounter for us that saw Paul Virillo follow Poscente helped organize these ideas somewhat better.

Oddly, this is not a 21st century idea, but rather a more 19th one, prior to the onset of mechanization where the assembly-line required precise timing of labour. ,