Each paragraph of this piece should be read faster than the previous paragraph.
Acceleration
Imagine the fall of the French monarchy at the end of the 18th century. Blood trickling down the cobblestone streets, heads in powdered wigs toppling like melons from the apex of a pyramid of produce. On this side of the Atlantic, no one would know about it for weeks, maybe months, as news drifted langorously across the ocean with the fickle winds. The captain of a sailing vessel idly mentions to his first mate that he has heard murmurings about a Corsican of short stature whose influence is on the rise in Paris. After the ship docks in Boston, a pre-industrial game of telephone ensues, so that people in Hartford hear that a Sicilian midget is waiting in the froggy imperial wings. By the time the rumor reaches New York, the upstart has become a short-haired Maltese, causing some people in New Jersey to hold fast to the belief that the new Emperor of the French will be a cat. News of events beyond the salons of Europe never reaches America at all, the only thing entering the country from southern latitudes being microorganisms nesting comfortably in the fetid clothing of sailors, much like their swine flu descendants only at a more leisurely pace. Information is power. No one knows anything.
Now along comes the 19th century with the mournful aria of the train whistle keening across the empty prairie over the percussion of the locomotive clacking along the tracks. News of the California Gold Rush travels fast enough to stimulate the salivary glands of bankers in New York. Steamboats on the Mississippi bring cotton upriver and slaves downriver, each one with his own story, her own song. In this way, the pain and the stain spread like red dye in a load of white laundry. Crusading journalists seize the opportunity to mold public opinion. People who have the advantage of literacy swallow newspapers with their morning pancakes. They argue fervently about abolition, about the Union, about the future of the young country. The telegraph and the transatlantic cable drive the pace of information, now mechanized and encoded for the first time into dots and dashes. A certain distancing creeps in. The French and the Germans are fighting again. What else is new?
Still, the excitement of sharing the story is spreading and the tempo is picking up. Promenading above the scramble for bread there is a class of people with access to an instrument that can be held up to the ear and mouth enabling the miracle of disembodied conversation. Lives are saved. Gossip travels more rapidly across town. A box on the kitchen table sings to you and transports you across the miles to the scene of sporting events. In short order, the box replaces the table itself as the altar of family life. On the ground, horses are put out to pasture as more and more people are swept up in the erotic energy of the automobile. It takes you where you want to go. It knows no boundaries save the water's edge. You can have sex in the back seat. And if that's not enough speed, soon you will cruise over the grid of cornfields and dairy farms of the American heartland and at night over the glittering mica chips of the electrified cities below. Soon, every town will have its Bijou or Roxy where people more beautiful than we are will hold sway in the dark, all eyes fixated on their exceptional faces, all hands mining for pleasure in the adjoining seat, all mouths struggling to breathe in the desire and popcorn-infused air. After the Second War that some of our fathers fought in or nearly starved in, there will be television and soon there will be images of maimed soldiers and refugee marches and orphaned Asian children in your living room on your Zenith. There will be more information, but also more disinformation, more merchandising, more fantasy, more self-doubt.
But all this is only the preamble to the torrent of data that will come when the entire country, indeed the entire world, becomes enmeshed in a web of bits and bytes arriving simultaneously from all directions, all of us gleefully interconnected all of the time to the global anxiety of the 24-hour news cycle, the world-wide pornography market, the opportunities to make money or lose money at spectacular speed, the images, the videos, the blogs like this one, the tweets. Information is power, but is it oxygen? Can you breathe it?
Now, blood again, everywhere. Brown blood, white blood, black blood, all red. People in ugly Christmas sweaters stuffing cookies in their mouths gunned down by Tashfeen, our first A-list mass shooter who also happens to be a mother. Tashfeen and Syed, rampaging out of the southern California nowhere with their arsenal of semi-automatics. Video cameras scanning the horizon, documenting rafts stacked with bodies sinking in the freezing Adriatic. A caliphate rising out of the rubble as xenophobic Europeans close their borders to refugees and nativist Americans work to disinfect our country from the perceived Muslim infestation. Screaming, fear mongering, chest thumping like drunken football fans, all of them. Giant Macy's parade inflated balloons of ISIS jihadis, Trump, Assad, Putin all pumped full of testosterone hovering above the desperate, the hungry. Everyone who is anyone macho posturing. Oceans rising, drought advancing, whole species vanishing. Ukraine not even worth a few column inches. Black men executed in the street. Guns in every kitchen cabinet cuddling up to cornflakes. Life is cheap and even we who were born lucky into white America are drowning in the dystopian deep end and a lot faster than we were before. Is it possible to dam up the river of incoming information for just a week, a day, to shoot the shit instead of one another, to talk about nothing much?
Acceleration is a version of a 2012 piece. The last section has been updated to reflect the current news noise.