OUT OF BREATH

"If in classical modernity people could imagine their lives in intergenerational terms—say, the same firm passing down through a bourgeois family—in late capitalism, turnover is so accelerated that it becomes hard to imagine one's life course even within a few years, let alone a few generations. This in turn drives a sense of the acceleration of the "pace of life," the psychological feeling of always being out of breath—which in turn drives the desire for more labor-saving technology, and technical change...For Rosa, modernity is defined by a continual sense of the present contracting—a feeling that what one is able to do within a given time frame is shrinking. The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed." 

— "Too Fast, Too Furious," N+1 Winter 2015