Speed Demons

“Life goes by so fast, stop for

 a moment and take a look at it”

- 1970 Polaroid ad

            Among my prized Gizmotic objects is a rocket ship.

            Not a real one but a nice one.  It is a Flash Gordon rocket fighter, very cool, red and yellow, and very zoomy.   It is the kind of a toy that has come to stand for the future that never was – the tiny pilot seems to be wearing a leather football helmet – but it still carries a nostalgic trace of our dreams of speed.  Puffs of white are decaled onto the ends of the jets.  But actually the gizmo that best symbolizes our screeching time to me is something far less retro, less tied into our modernist fantasies or our movie whims. 

            I have in mind the velocipede.

            While not the fanciest of technodes, the velocipede captures both the danger and the romance of acceleration, which is the signature force of the technocosm.  Also called the Dandy Horse, it was invented by Baron Karl von Drais in Germany in 1818 and was the first means of transport to rely on two wheels in a line.  It was a bicycle before the advent of gears; the rider straddled it and pushed it along by running.

            Early ads for the velocipede show an actual dandy, a very hoity upper-classman in tights as a ruffle, trotting his way down a country road.  Very Georgian and snooty.  Yet the velocipede is a better symbol for speed than its descendant the bicycle – or the rocket for that matter – because it is so simple.  Just two wheels and a seat above; actual running below.

            Clearly it is not the practicality of the velocipede that makes it so symbolic of our time.  It is the dream.  The very idea of devices that keep pace with rapid change.  Hopeless dream to be sure – we cannot keep up; it is evolving faster than us – but running along on wheels captures the giddy faith in it.

            Consider this: a little over 100 years ago, in 1876, there was one telephone in the world.  It was owned by a Mr. Alexander Graham Bell of Boston, proud owner of the only working phone on the planet.  By 1940 almost half the households in America had phones.  In other words, it took 65 years for the telephone to go from a hand-made invention to a mass produced consumer product.

            By comparison, any photo of a typical New York street from the turn of the century is filled with horse carriages and no cars.  A photo of the same street only 25 years later is filled with cars and no carriages.  And by 1945 only a handful of households had an experimental product known as a television set.  By 1965, 86% had one.  Almost total saturation in only 20 years.

            And now, let us recall that a mere 25 years ago there as no email, no web searches, no dotcom.   In 1991, at the end of the first year of the existence of the Internet, there were only 500 sites to visit.  At the end of the next year there were 5,000 sites.  At the end of 1993, the third year, there were 50,000 sites, and by 1994 there were 500,000.  A tenfold increase every year in only over 5 years.  By now there are an uncountable number, because the number is growing so quickly.

            In other words, the accelerating rate of change has itself accelerated.

            It is not just that changes are happening faster than ever before, it is that speed is happening faster than ever.  The pace of the new, the unfolding of the future has been kicked into warp-speed drive.  In fact, speed alone is one of the things that turns mere perplexity into sheer perfluxity.

            Fiber optic transmissions allow us to send information at the rate of 1.7 billion bps.  That is roughly a billion times faster than typing and reading.  As an example, if I decided to transmit the entire contents of the Library of Congress to you by reading it over the phone, it would take me 2,000 years.  But I could transmit it digitally over a fiber optic cable in less than 12 hours.

            Whoosh.

            Time compresses, duration shrinks.  And so we slice the moment into ever teenier segments to keep up with the change and have no problem knowing of milliseconds, microseconds, nanoseconds.  Or eveno ohnoseconds…those instants in which we realize that we screwed something up.  We even develop nanostalgia…nostalgia for things that happened a few media moments ago.

            Change is probably always too fast but I doubt that any culture had to deal with it at the velocipedic pace that we do.

            I read once that England and Zanzibar had a 38-minute war in 1896.

            How futuristic of them.