Capitalism - the first time as tragedy, now it's fast: "speed rules" over every aspect of life now being reformatted by "the dromocratic revolution" (Virilio and Lotringer 1983:43-51).

Franco Berardi, from "Panic, War and Semio-Kapital" : "During the past two centuries, global control was the general techno-utopia of capitalist society and modern culture. Now, the time of global control is over. We are completely out of this framework today. The new governing framework of capitalism is global panic. If we want to understand what panic means we have to talk about the ‘attention economy’ and about ‘digital labour’. This is where the source of contemporary panic is, in the organisation of time in the digital sphere, in the relationship between cyberspace and cybertime. […] We don’t have time for attention in the workplace. We are forced to process far too large amounts of information and our body-mind is completely taken by this. And further, we have no time for affection, for communication, for erotic relationships. We have no more time for that spatial kind of attention that means attention to the body – to our body, to the the body of the other. So, more and more, we feel that we have run out of time, that we must accelerate. And we feel simultaneously that acceleration leads to a loss of life, of pleasure and of understanding."  This recourse to the body is reminiscent of Virilio's and Lotringer's recent work (see below).

While Berardi insists that a general rule cannot nor should be imposed on this flux, Hassan argues in more upbeat terms for the potentiality of cybertime’s dis-orientations: "Power time has been undermined, but potential timescapes of diversity have not filled the vacuum. Flux, risk and uncertainty are still the defining characteristics of the neoliberal network society. However, within this dis-order lie immense opportunities for individuals and groups seeking to achieve more autonomy and sovereignty in the spaces and times of the network. Democratic potential, like potential timescapes, is immanent in the network. Within the flux of the network, new power-geometry formations are possible, and dense levels of interconnectivity are the basis for this." [ Rest at fastCapitalism ] 

It's unfortunate that Hassan opts for the particularly Kantian coupling of 'autonomy and sovereignty', unfortunate for many reasons, not least because I suspect it really is the discourse of leftwing dromocrats.

The theoretical precedents of much of this discussion comes from Agger et al [ see eg: Fast Capitalism ], and Virilio's many works on speed.  But let's not forget Marshall Berman's epic, All That is Solid Melts into Air, a retake on the modernist pardigmatics of Marx/Engel's Communist Manifesto. 

Virilio is less optmistic than those associated with Agger, Baudrillard, Kroker etc.  Another snippet from Virilio: "The twin phenomena of immediacy and of instantaneity are presently one of the most pressing problems confronting political and military strategists alike. Real time now prevails above both real space and the geosphere." More: "The dictatorship of speed at the limit will increasingly clash with representative democracy." "For the first time, history is going to unfold within a one-time-system: global time. Up to now, history has taken place within local times, local frames, regions and nations. But now, in a certain way, globalization and virtualization are inaugurating a global time that prefigures a new form of tyranny."

More Virilio and Lotringer, on dromocracy, what they call: "[The ruling elite of 'fast capitalism' who] are residents in absolute motion-speed, the super-speed of the train, or the supersonic jet, or the super-fast boat, and the super-speed of the instantaneous telecommunication which allows them to play the stock market instantaneously on Wall Street or in Hong Kong" Go on to argue for a form of resistance which seeks to give the world weight, because "resistance makes you aware of the body." [ From Crepuscular Dawn, Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer. ]