Fast and furious | 14 April 2016

Modern life is too fast. Everyone is always in a hurry; people skim-read and don’t take the time to eat properly; the art of conversation is dying; technology places too much stress on the human brain. This litany of familiar complaints comes, of course, from the late 19th century, as collected by the American writer and XKCD comic artist Randall Monroe in his arch cartoon ‘The Pace of Modern Life’. And here we are in the 21st, in another culture that both worships and deplores its ostensibly unprecedented speed.

Today we have hookup apps and high-frequency trading, and ‘tl;dr’ (too long, didn’t read) is the all-purpose internet comment; but on the other hand we have long reads and slow food. The Earth’s spin, as it happens, is slowing down, owing to tidal friction caused by the gravitational pull of the Moon, so days are getting longer, and months are also getting longer as the Moon slowly floats away from us. Is everything even getting faster down here on the planet’s surface? Anyone who has taken a suburban train recently might demur. There is masochistic pride in a culture that deplores its own excessive speed, just as people who are always complaining about how much they have to do are really showing off. (That phenomenon was already familiar to Samuel Johnson, who observed: ‘Idleness is often covered by turbulence and hurry.’)

The world’s increasing speed, nonetheless, is taken as read in modern publishing, which likes to issue handbooks on how to deal with it. Robert Colvile’s The Great Acceleration is an excellently researched and thoughtful guide to the changes wrought by technology on the media, pop culture, finance, medicine, transport, and teenagers’ social lives. Calmly, Colvile observes both problems and benefits in each realm.