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).
