On time: scarcity and speed
As in all eras, the technological developments that emerged held promises of savings, rewards and even liberation. Human beings would be (are they?) the main beneficiaries of their inventiveness and ingenuity. Time, effort and convenience were earned at the expense of machines and technologies increasingly capable of sparing us the hardships and costs that previous generations had no choice but to bear. It was imagined, or predicted, that we would work less and less and gain time for the pleasure of becoming better, wiser and more cultured. Idleness would no longer belong to the lazy and the fortunate, but would be at hand for everyone, or at least for many more. None of this happened.
As with all the great developments of the past, the technologies being applied today will be having effects on the way we live in the world, how we experience it, with ourselves and with others. Some of these effects will still be unknown, because they are recent; because not enough time has passed yet for us to understand them. Because we are too close and involved, we have not reached a sufficient distance to be able to reflect critically. Others remain invisible because we are still blind, voluntarily, because it suits us, or involuntarily, because we are unconscious. Perhaps things like this are said by someone of all generations in relation to a novelty or in relation to the younger people living among us, for whom the new is not new. It is that kind of speech that young people call "old man's talk", of those who are stuck in the past; that middle-aged people, when uttering it, use to perceive that they are approaching old age; and the really old use it to demonstrate all the certainty, all the conviction and all the wisdom that their years of life have provided them with.
News aside, the language most spoken today is binary: it is a language of quantities. It is not always the most appropriate, despite its seductive capacity to make the world objective and measurable. In the world of "ones and zeros", control is privileged. And control makes the path of manipulation closer and, perhaps, more attractive. For example, the act of forecasting is no longer something done by more or less doubtful magicians, but is now given to scientists and economists who change lives and planets with their theses. Basically, to predict is to want to control future time. This claim is only possible when we start from a perspective in which time is linear, constant, whose passage is independent of ourselves and of everything else. This angle on time has brought another kind of comfort: the rest that arises when one has the absolute conviction that nothing depends on our action. The happy irresponsibility present in fate, in destiny, in what is already written somewhere by an order of the universe. It is that kind of comfort that, paradoxically, for some, will be a source of anguish. Time does not work like that. It is not independent from those who experience it.
Those who speak preferably through numbers or who let numbers speak for them become addicted to quantity and speed. And today everything is so much and so fast. Consider a situation in which one wants to know something that one does not know; or that the memory, capricious and limited, has erased or replaced what one already knew by something more interesting or relevant. How long will the unease of not knowing something last today? Very, very little. Information is at our fingertips and is very quick to reach our eyes. The fingers and the eyes, even if they work together, are not intelligent enough to distinguish information from knowledge, let alone wisdom. Perhaps this is also why so much false information is taken as true, so many lies are taken as the truth. The speed and quantity of information are the enemy of its incorporation and transformation. On the other hand, the same dimensions are allies of confusion.
Today, in addition to speed and the claim to control future time, there is also the illusion of being able to suspend present time. The ability to pause and resume reality (video, audio, etc.) seems to be conditioning and feeding impatience and lack of resilience. Today I witness my children arguing when one of them needs to go "home" while watching cartoons, making arguments about the imperative need for someone to press "pause". It's a very different scenario from when you had no choice. It wasn't resignation that developed. Patience and the notion that the world is not at our service or disposal grew.
The worst thing is that we are increasingly on pause, suspended, clinging to screens, waiting for reality to regain its leading role in our attention and our presence. Just look at how people walk in the street now. We seem to want to train our tact with our shoes on, feeling the steps and the pavements so as not to look away from the small glasses we are petting, in the anxiety of not missing anything that is happening far away. We no longer know how to see (and feel) up close. This inverted myopia is not only of the senses, but also of feelings.
We are lucky that one of the recent advances in our knowledge is that we have begun to understand that time depends on who lives it, making us responsible, whether we want to take that responsibility or not.
