Alienation and Acceleration

Modern life is speeding-up, incessantly. Strange as it is, while the art of saving time reaches unprecedented heights through the introduction of ever-new technologies of communication and production, it nevertheless feels like we are running out of time. In all western societies alike, time-famine is rising and individuals report the impression that they have to run faster and faster each year - not in order to get somewhere, but just to stay in place!

This book presents an analytic framework to identify the causes and effects of the various speed-up-processes which define modernity - and it develops A Critical Theory of late-modern temporality. Crucial for this is the idea that acceleration in the end leads to monstrous forms of alienation from time and space, from things and actions - and from self and others.