Harmut Rosa explains why modern societies keep accelerating

SPEEDCORE for proper mood!

This post started when I felt exhausted after reading Scale, especially after that chapter describing how modern cities are speeding up the bigger they get, rather than slowing down. So I looked around for explanation of why, and found

Of course, I watched it on 2x speed while playing an idle game at the same time. The game is World Idle (2015), and I actually think it's a good way to get a visceral feel for this. In this game, you play as the sole controller of a country's economy, and you are constantly pushed to keep the numbers in the green. But keeping the numbers in the green only means people reproduce and the country keep growing, and you are clicking frantically only to keep in the same place (just above starvation), all the while the economy grows.

This post mostly follows Appropriation, Activation and Acceleration: The Escalatory Logics of Capitalist Modernity and the Crises of Dynamic Stabilization (2017).

Definition of modernity

What's modernity? Rosa observes that it's not science, or rationality, but a combination of change and stability:

modern societies appear to be extremely dynamic with respect to their high rates of growth, innovation and change, on the one hand, and quite robust and stable in terms of their basic socioeconomic structures on the other hand.

From this observation, Rosa gives a definition

society can be called modern when its mode of stabilization is dynamic, i.e. when it needs (material) growth, (technological) augmentation and high rates of (cultural) innovation in order to reproduce its structure and to preserve the socioeconomic and political status quo.

Or as I would call it, the ramjet society: if it slow down it crashes.

Boeing X-51 Waverider, using scramjet (ramjet, but faster)

Without expansion, innovation and accumulation, companies close down, jobs are lost, and, by consequence, public revenues decrease and expenditures increase, and the ensuing monetary and fiscal crisis can put political legitimation at risk, too. All of this can be observed at present in the evolving economic and political crisis in Greece.

China is highly modern by this definition. Indeed, its government has made keeping GDP growth rate above 8% ("保8", "keep 8") its main criteria for success and claim to legitimacy for about 20 years. Recently, it's more like above 6%.

It's not just economy, but science and art too

• Science is not the preservation of past knowledge, but "the belief in the ignorance of experts." (Feynman).
• Modern art is mostly about innovation and transgression. Imitation of the past is just "boring", "kitschy" or worse, "uncreative".
• Democracy is a constant process of election and replacement of the governors, to keep it stable.

Alternatives to modernity

Rosa does not think modernity can continue, because it is too demanding on the natural environment (but if nuclear fusion...) and is making people unproductive by pressuring them into burnouts and other unproductive psychological illnesses.

These are in general "desynchronization" errors, because somethings can't be sped up (yet). The environment on earth renews itself too slowly for humans to exploit, humans react too slowly for push notifications, economy runs too slowly for the financial market, children grow up too slowly for the job market, etc.

He proposes post-growth societies that do not need growth to be stable, which can be done by using universal basic income, a change of culture to not demand people to work to achieve meaning in life, try to optimize happiness than GDP, etc.

Triple-A-Theory

Modernity is sustained by three A.

Appropriation of non-capital stuff (environmental, mineral, social, cultural, etc) into capitalism. This is quite well-known and expressed in many ways, such as "money is the universal solvent", or as in the Communist Manifesto (1848):

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. 

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The modern obsession with going to Mars and colonize the whole galaxy can be seen as a desire to convert more of the unproductive material in the universe into productive material, in accordance to the value system of capitalism.

Acceleration of society. There are three elements to this acceleration:

• technical (cars, planes, email, messaging apps...)
• social change (fashion, gender, political system, policies...)
• rate of interesting things to do (infinite scroll, meme binging, push alert...)

The first one, technical, is the first to emerge in the age of capitalism, and it's illustrated in this PMV:

The third can be experienced very directly, in the constant feeling of losing out, of not consuming enough, not spending enough time with friends, not spending enough time learning, not...

Activation is basically making people work for capitalism, consume, work, make it grow, keep it stable.

late-modern individual becomes a ‘perpetuum mobile’ of its own kind: an actor who not only cares for him-/herself but also for the economic and social reproduction of the system, and who can never be sufficiently active and mobile nor ever show sufficient initiative.

ACTIVATE APPLES