Velocities of Power: An Introduction

The fairground injunction to “scream if you want to go faster” has become one of the defining imperatives of advanced capitalism, the ambivalence of that scream both calling forth acceleration and announcing a terror at its prospect. Commentators on the radical time–space compression achieved by the technological developments of recent decades are as conflicted in outlook as their predecessors have been in marking the utopian and apocalyptic promises of the heightened velocity of everyday life (see Bertman 1998; Gleick 1999; Scheuerman 2001, 2004). There is nothing new, of course, about the acceleration of processes and practices due to technological innovation and improvements in organizational efficiency, and there is a long history of both awestruck celebration and fearful criticism of the effects produced by the intensified speed of things. Yet speed itself – as an experience, a quality, a...