«Is haste the passion of fools?». It was still a hundred years before the first Industrial Revolution, and Pascal, in the midst of the 17th century, eloquently pondered whether speed was becoming a detriment in the lives of citizens. At that time, both the time of the artisan and the time of the farmer had their own rhythm. Whether it was leather, metal, or the harvest, everything had its own cadence. Production was subject to an irrefutable temporal sequence: metal had to be forged, wicker carefully bent, and leather had to dry in the sun. All of this was done by humans with the help of rudimentary tools. But one thing was certain: time had its own flow, almost immutable.
Three centuries later, although Pascal couldn’t have known, time was about to accelerate even more than he could have foreseen. Nowadays, two characteristics seem to define the world we live in. On one hand, speed. On the other, the constant pursuit of experience. In the midst of both, technology plays a fundamental role, as its tentacles not only drive and promote acceleration but also promise that one can feel fulfilled at every moment by interacting with countless options.
Time and experience
It was in 1982 when Larry Dossey coined the term «time sickness.» This American physician believed he detected one of the symptoms of our era in the feeling that time is never enough, constantly slipping away without us being able to do anything about it. There’s not enough quantity, and not enough quality. He used the metaphor of constant pedaling, getting faster and faster, trying to catch a portion of time that becomes smaller and more distant with each pedal stroke. It’s no coincidence that the Spanish thinker Agustín García Mallo, in «La forma de la multitud,» characterized infinitesimal capitalism by acceleration, a combination of bots, algorithms, and high-speed operations that ultimately escape human control. In the end, everything is moving too fast and accelerating to the point of losing control, as happened in 2018 when the Dow Jones index dropped 1,500 points in a matter of hours because, as García Mallo puts it, «traders operated too quickly».
The other symptom of today’s fast-paced world is the constant pursuit of experience, which is both the cause and consequence of the rapid processing of data and information. Zygmunt Bauman noted that this increasing speed has an impact on life. Simply put, knowledge is fragmented and becomes unintelligible. Additionally, one symptom of this new knowledge is the almost infinite number of opportunities, something that Pete Davis analyzes in his book «Dedicated», which examines the consequences of the age of endless navigation through multiple devices. The author exemplifies one symptom in the inability of many Netflix subscribers to select a movie due to the overwhelming amount of available content. It’s what’s known in user experience as the paradox of choice: the subject is unable to choose anything due to the abundance of options. The result? Fatigue and eventual abandonment.
However, this speed and the pursuit of experience manifest in other aspects of daily life. If Nike triggered the era of continuous movement with its slogan «Just do it» in the late ’80s, today we could say that in the digital age, everything boils down to «Just browse it.» In this constant browsing, time has fractured, and not only do we want everything, but we want it instantly. If in 2011, a user could spend between 10 and 20 seconds before leaving a website, today, 53% will do so if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load. To make matters worse, a user now spends just 0.05 seconds deciding whether they like a website or not.
Calm technology
Given the great speed in accessing information and interacting with screens, the digital industry’s big battle is to retain the user’s attention. Social media and e-commerce have conducted countless studies to hold that attention, even using what are called dark patterns. For example, infinite scroll, created by engineer Aza Raskin in 2006, acts on the brain, releasing dopamine and, in some cases, making the interaction addictive for some individuals. As a result, social networks like Instagram have had to add optional filters to allow users to restrict their daily app usage. Where everything seems to happen, nothing really occurs, but attention remains intact, waiting for the big event, the big attraction.
The question is whether there will be a moment for what professionals like Amber Case have called «calm technology.» This means technology that doesn’t demand constant user attention and has a single clear goal associated with its basic functionality. Although the concept of calm technology can be applied to many interfaces, one of the best examples of such products, in my opinion, would be Mymind, a simple information repository where users can add content in various formats. So far, Mymind has refused to adopt the typical patterns of the digital industry, and users cannot share content on social networks or have access to «vanity metrics.» They don’t see ads while using the app either. Their promotional messages are as eloquent and calm as «you have no new messages» or «less features, more magic». Or even their JOMO, where it’s suggested that there’s joy in disconnecting (Joy of Missing Out) and that confronts the current fear of missing out (FOMO). These messages are almost subversive in today’s world. Only time will tell if user demand makes the business model sustainable.
In the age of immediacy, where attention is the business model, and the constant pursuit of experience, it seems that «chronos» has definitively overshadowed «kairós». For the Greeks, the former was linear time, where events occur. However, «kairós» was the time of discovery, of the extraordinary. In a world where something seems to happen every millisecond and everything is expected, the paradox of choice becomes the axis of exhaustion. As Nicholas Negroponte warned, «Computing is not about computers anymore, it’s about living.»
