Rush to nowhere: Richard Swift says it's time we slammed on the brakes - Keynote

New Internationalist, March, 2002 by Richard Swift

THE Titanic and its sad fate have become a metaphor for human foibles and arrogance towards the power of nature leading to disaster. What is less well known is that the White Star Line built the ultramodern Titanic in part to compete in an obsessive effort to break the steamship record for crossing the North Atlantic. The record had passed back and forth between the North German Lloyd Line and the British Cunard Line. After the accident, both George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad wrote in anger about the foolishness of a ship's captain ploughing into an icefield at full throttle. The enquiry into the sinking of the Titanic identified pressure to keep tip with increasingly unrealistic schedules as a cause of the disaster. Criticism of the mania for speed records became common currency on both sides of the Atlantic.

Now that we have Concorde, which also famously crashed, the era of leisurely travel in steamships may feel archaic. But the preoccupation with speed that cost 1,500 lives in the icy ocean that fateful night in 1912 still drives us relentlessly on. Today we see it in the speed-up associated with almost every aspect of life. This is particularly true in the industrial heartland of the global economy. We drive fast cars. We are expected to 'multitask' and some People have even conic to enjoy it. Children are rushed to grow tip. We are under ever--increasing pressure to work faster and faster. Some people work themselves to death. The Japanese have even created a diagnosis for it. They call it karoshr death by overwork. We gobble fast food -- it is the aim of McDonald's to have a restaurant within four minutes of everyone in the US. We sleep less than we used to. More car accidents are caused by sleepy drivers than by drunk ones. We take energy drugs to keep us going. My favourite stimulant is coffee, but there's a new range of energy-based soft drinks with names like 'Jolt' and 'Surge', or Edge2 and Edge2OJ orange juice with caffeine added to keep us 'up to speed'. Added to this there are lots of pills, particularly amphetamines, and special vitamin diets.

Many people have daybooks so crammed with commitments that you'd have a better chance of getting an audience with the Pope. There is even a new craze for 'the nine-minute date', so that singles in a hurry can check each other out. The preoccupation is with control. A whole industry has evolved based on managing time. Drugstore bookshelves are crammed with titles on how you can do this. In his classic study, American Nervousness, George Beard identifies the dread that 'a delay of a few minutes might destroy the hopes of a lifetime'. There is a macho ethos of speed that goes with it all. It's like the Mike Douglas character in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street says: 'Lunch? Lunch is for wimps.' It's an idea that has fortunately been slow to catch on around the Mediterranean. Even some holidays are packaged to rush from place to place.

Time is at a premium. But where are we going?

The modern disaster -- the modern Titanic, if you like -- is economic development, particularly the mega-project form of it. Dams, roads, highrise buildings, port facilities, airports, pipelines, power-generating stations are slapped up with little thought as to the consequences. Dangerous corners are often cut to meet deadlines. Forests are despoiled. Toxic chemicals pumped into the air. Debt mounts. Local people, on the Yangtse River, in the Narmada Valley, in the jungles of Sarawak, have their lives uprooted. Their protests are studiously ignored.

Some management consultants say that 'it is better to be 50-percent over budget than to be six months late'. Gigantism and speed go hand-in-hand as mega-projects tie even the most remote parts of the world into a global economic web. Globalization is the product of a kind of turbo-capitalism that utilizes technologies to project itself through trade, investment and speculation at ever-faster speeds to ever-farther horizons.

Marx, who admired capitalism more than he should have, called it 'the most revolutionary' of social systems. And so it has proved. Dynamic. Aggressive. Technologically innovative. Always thrusting into the future. It is propelled forward at market-driven haste fuelled by competition -- or fear of it -- and acquisitiveness. The faster capital is turned over, the faster it can realize a profit. The faster that profit can be reinvested, the faster it can expand in its turn. This quick turnover of capital is of course connected with volume -- more widgets produced, more energy used, more money in circulation, more infrastructure needed.

The key to the process is to speed everything up, whether in production, transport, the circulation of money or -- nowadays particularly -- consumption. Historically this meant a shift towards factory mass-production and away from artisans, who were too concerned with the quality of their product. Then came the evolution of the assembly line, where workers were cued to perform particular tasks at precisely timed intervals. Techno-innovation spurs it on and is in turn driven by it. In our 'wired world' billions of dollars can be made or lost in hours. Stock markets are open 24 hours a day. Volatile oh-line and day trading have become a norm. It's like a giant, global Las Vegas.