at faster a pace than any nation. “The most significant thing about the American frontier,” Turner explained, “is that it lies at the hither edge of free land.”
This brisk acceleration of rail transit revealed an axiom of speed that matters to us still: The faster your speed, the less distance matters. Accelerate from five to fifty to five hundred miles an hour and the mileage becomes less significant with each notch on the speedometer. It all takes the same amount of time. Marx called the process “the annihilation of space by time”. He was right. Speed kills distance. The simple algebra linking increased speed and reduced distance had been apparent already in the shift from rowed galleys to sailing ships, but the age of industrial transport by rail or air meant that rapid changes, changes that affected the very quality of movement, took place within the time frame of a single lifetime. The acceleration from horseback to train to plane happened over a period of 150 years or so. Each new acceleration diminished the impact of distance.
There’s a phrase for this process - “Space-Time Compression” - first identified by the American sociologist Donald Janelle in 19651. Janelle saw that the technologies of transportation, trains and planes and boats, and all the little innovations that made them move ever-faster, were disrupting old spatial habits. They helped move goods more quickly, sure, but in the process they were also making the old, geographic maps less useful. When you could fly over a mountain, its importance diminished. In a wagon train you might have contemplated the desert with fear, by car you'd merely consider it with care. In a plane it was irrelevant. Janelle concluded that raw economics drove this compression as much as science. Centuries of constantly collapsing space and time had been driven not least by the hunger to poke into distant markets, to latch onto cheap labor, and to pull natural resources to wherever they were needed. This was “civilization” as a verb.
The demands for ever more commerce, ever faster, ever more profitably suggested that the horses-to-trains-to-cars-to jets acceleration was an inevitable feature of modern markets. We should expect it to continue, Janelle figured. Great fortunes would accumulate to those who mastered speed. To be fast is a competitive advantage; to be faster! decisive. Absolute speed is absolute power, as the philosopher Paul Virilio has framed it.19” That idea of “Space Time Compression” sounded felicitous enough, like the name of a clever magic trick. Space compressed? Time reduced? But that felicity hid the violent, revolutionary nature of the mechanism so powerfully at work. It meant that the battlefields of power, which for most of human history had been over the control of space, would now become - rather incredibly - about the control of time.
196 There’s a phrase: Janelle identified what he called “Space-Time Convergence;” Later geographer David Harvey renamed it as “Space Time Compression,” which is more commonly used today.
197 Absolute speed: See Armitage, John, Ed. The Virilio Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013)
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