Speed and its increasing rate of acceleration in human action are the concerns of John O. McGinnis in Accelerating Democracy and Hartmut Rosa in Social Acceleration. McGinnis sees ever-expanding computation as the core of modernization, and he regards it as a positive development, promising better governance through informatics. Rosa also treats informatics as a key driver behind social acceleration, but he worries that those individuals and societies will never be able fully to cope with modernity’s ever-increasing pace of acceleration.
On one level, these works are earnest and respectable scholarly attempts to document the ongoing processes of modernization through informationalization. On another level, however, can such scholarship ever be innovative? One permanent feature of the shifting terrains of modernity is the never-ending discovery of new theories of modernity, since the accelerating pace of change continuously transforms everyday life. The equally evergreen question raised by both works is how rapid economic, technical, and social change itself leads to either a condition of technological liberation or technocratic domination.
The McGinnis project is the more parochial and focused of the two, because it concentrates on the United States and the latest information technologies that should be adopted by governments. Such technics, he asserts, will help create and distribute more social knowledge. This development could be immensely beneficial. Yet in “the ever expanding domain of computation,” it is obvious that McGinnis simply reduces social knowledge to more megabytes of fungible digital bits. Indeed, throughout his argument, “information is a proxy for knowledge” (p. 17). The history of the Internet Era, however, undercuts his assertions: More information does not create more knowledge, and it often paralyzes or prevents the effective use of existing knowledge. It is astounding that a book published two decades after the first attack on New York’s World Trade Center, and 10 years after the invasion of Iraq, ignores how thoroughly “governance” has already been transformed by informational “technology” in many ways that have not led to more democracy, better management, or greater freedom. McGinnis’s sunny visions of why “much of modern government is administrative government” (p. 7) ignores the rapid proliferation of increasingly information-based oversight, surveillance, and control over the past 20 years. His book’s index underscores this blindness as it omits important themes, such as “intelligence-gathering,” “surveillance,” “social media,” or “hacking,” even though the author’s analysis cheerfully celebrates the power of commercialized artificial intelligence and the tactical prowess of Predator drone strikes.
It also is difficult to know what McGinnis might mean when he asserts that “the rise of new information technologies has only recently begun to be explored by political theorists,” since “improving collective decision making by increasing social knowledge concerns matters that have vexed political theorists and statesmen since ancient Athens” (p. 7). In fact, political thinkers as diverse as Daniel Bell, Herbert Marcuse, Kenneth Boulding, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Karl Deutsch, Jean-François Lyotard, and many others have been addressing these issues for decades.
Accelerating Democracy basically maintains that ubiquitous computing has left governments facing unprecedented changes and challenges. Indeed, “the world is changing fast, perhaps faster than any other time in human history” (p. 6). McGinnis is certain that these technoscientific changes will also enable democracies to assess the consequences of their policies, create new social knowledge, and mobilize new information technology, like applied empiricism, prediction markets, dispersed media, and artificial intelligence (pp. 6–8).
Turning the world over to computation will spark resentment against speed as the balance between stability and velocity favors machinic operations over human actions. McGinnis, however, sees these intelligence engines improving democracy by letting prediction markets aggregate collective choices and artificial intelligence run organizations more autonomously, with networks distributing more information faster and information reducing bias in democratic decision making. Empirical analyses of past practices and computer gaming of alternate worlds should also be pursued in today’s accelerating democracies. For McGinnis, these developments are almost certain, because “politics need to continue the progress in information production and use that has been marked out now for two millennia” (p. 158). As he reflects upon Athenian democracy, English industrialization, and the American Constitution, these phenomena become key benchmarks in the information-intensive evolution of democracy that are, in some sense, all products of “dispersed social information” (p. 155).
Whether or not more social knowledge, or even just more information, leads to better decision making arguably is one question that animates the agents of environmental politics today. The Earth has been warming up since the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago, but a great deal of new scientific information shows rapid increases in this trend coming only in the last 20, 50, or 100 years. Some maintain that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are accelerating these trends, and causing rapid climate change. Others dispute this information as well as the social knowledge about ensuing environmental disruptions. The links in the information between more fossil fuel consumption and global warming have been evident for 25 to 50 years. Yet greater knowledge has not led to better governance with decisive new policies to rapidly decarbonize the world’s energy regime, as McGinnis’s analysis implies. Instead, more information about this challenge has basically paralyzed many collective democratic actions to counter it.
Social Acceleration, which Rosa situates in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, is the more ambitious and comprehensive of the two books. The author outlines a comprehensive survey of the social knowledge about acceleration, which fixates on speed to the point of transforming rapidity itself into the core of modernity. An astute commentator, Rosa pieces together insights from Frankfurt School theorists Zygmut Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Pierre Bourdieu, Nikolas Lehmann, Paul Virilio, and Lyotard, as well as other important social theorists. His treatise is a strange patchwork meant to display how continuous acceleration phenomenologically creates a “frenetic standstill” of “directionless movement” in everyday life, and thereby breaks the foundational promise of modernity to provide autonomy, emancipation, and progress.
Rosa’s guiding hypothesis is simple: Modernity rests upon increasing speed in everyday life, and the increasing pace of life generates chronic time shortages as more goods and services quicken the development of technologies that increase the pace of producing more goods and services. Life lived at such rates must be understood as “an acceleration society” (p. 68). Of course, movements against acceleration always rise and fall with greater speed, but they cannot succeed without abandoning the project of modernity. For Rosa, any ethics to slowdown culture, economics, and politics will never succeed due to their futile efforts to oppose speed itself. First, such “decelerator forces are neither structurally nor culturally on par with the acceleration dynamic”; and, second, their antiacceleration programs compel them “to behave in an almost parasitical fashion toward it” (p. 91). Rosa spends many pages discussing various personal and social experiences with fast and slow living; but, at the end of the day, the acceleration dynamic trumps all efforts to stall it, and triggers the sense of busy stasis that speed always brings with it.
These insights are edifying but not really innovative. They parallel feminist critiques of everyday life expounded 10 to 25 years ago by Juliet Schoor in The Overworked American, Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering, or Ruth Schwartz Cowan in More Work for Mother. Like them, Rosa discovers that the workings of modernity are so fast, multidimensional, and nonstop that no one really “has time” to live a humane existence. At the end of history, there is an end to personality, identity, society induced by machinic acceleration, proliferating commodities, and self-bondage in the quest for ever newer goods and services. He fears that society may implode in a revolution against progress or be sucked into a systemic, catastrophic collapse. Meanwhile, it simply accelerates.
McGinnis and Rosa come to divergent conclusions. Rosa, on the one hand, opines that this new theory of modernity leaves everyone in today’s modern world “dealing with an extremely disconcerting finale” (Social Acceleration, p. 322). McGinnis, on the other hand, doubts that modern society has yet come to any finale, and it is really not that disconcerting. In McGinnis’s view, “man is both Homo faber—nature’s pre-eminent maker of tools to change the world—and Homo sapiens—nature’s master of symbols and language to represent and understand it. We will continue to thrive only if these capacities develop in tandem” (Accelerating Democracy, p. 159). Readers are encouraged to search slowly through both volumes, and then judge how much such analyses of acceleration add to our political understandings of modernity.
