Time Attack
Am I running late? I look at my micro-universe, that cursed slab of obsidian, my smartphone, but it’s out of charge. I’m tired, but there’s no time to lose, it feels. Deadlines, fleeting opportunities, investments of a relational or professional nature that with brutal hunger demand to be nurtured, and all the mere drudgery and chores of life, not to mention the relentless petty thefts of attention siphoned by that very same little concentrated smart shard of sweet promise and bitter disappointment. Next thing one knows, Time has crept up behind, with all the weight of age, but don’t look back, he is a stalker and his face is just the muzzle of a gun. What hero among us can beat the clock?
I draw another pill. 8 to 12 hours of decent work. I claim for myself another bundle of amphetaminutes, time compressed and straightened away from branching distractions, by alchemical means. Time roars, time urges.
Despite monumental if not outright fantastical technological achievements that accumulate as insistently and ferociously as time itself, leading to a considerable reduction of necessary labor time, one would be hard pressed to find an even just moderately well-adjusted person in the developed—and increasingly, also the semi-developed—world that feels satisfied with their allotment and management of free time. A curious expression, if you think about it, as Time is the one «thing»—rather, Time is the closest thing to active nothingness that one may conceive of—that is never free, it is not some substance secreted by clocks, it is not in fact fungible but deeply personal and referential, and very safely ciphered by Nature away from manufacture, forgery, or genuine redistribution. It is of supreme value, yet we think of those who have nothing but time as poor. Curious.
That said, there is one domain where we can, or at least think we can, meekly raise arms against the tyrannies of time. That domain is logico-computational complexity, an exceptionally natural domain pertinent to all interactions, but most salient in active thought. There, one may collate his experiences, apprehend some of the nature of his interactions, and concoct schemes that are time-saving. Indeed, I believe one goes further and generates time, though not Time.
Time Attacked
One may distinguish between at least three different senses of time. The most conventional and quotidian is that of historical time, an objective and global order of identifiable events. This happens, then that happens, and so on. This is little time (less charitably, realist time or naive time), an artificial shadow of Proper Time, which is Duration. Einstein threw a curve-ball (perhaps a timespiral-ball? If not him then at least Godel surely did) at little time with relativity, then came in quantum mechanics from the ropes with a steel folding chair, and little time has never been the same. But old habits die hard, and life on this rock is classical enough that the daily human experience of time is largely unchanged, save for high-tech infrastructure (GPS, atomic clocks, HFT, etc.). Bit of a shame, if you ask me.
Proper Time, or Duration, is quite mysterious, unsubstantial. And while Space is a good girl that plays very nicely with our intuitions and formalizations—often too nicely, leading to complacency towards more exotic abstractions such as would-be spaces—her brother Time mercilessly taunts us with endless pranks and refuses to sit still—naturally—for long enough to let Philosophy or Mathematics to draw his portrait, what is most vexing for Mathematics especially.
Then there is our great ally, computational or virtual time, vTime, the scion of little time, or was it the other way around? Maybe a Grandfather Paradox…it’s hard to tell the time up close, but in any event, vTime is how we acquire agency with respect to time, indeed any agency worth mentioning at all.
Otherwise, how to not be an idiot? Without vTime, there is no foresight, one becomes improvidential. Indeed vTime is what enables us to sacrifice our own resources to petition Providence for relief from our harshest of taskmasters. Virtual time requires sufficient concrete expressivity to instantiate a subsidiary temporal dimension through symbolic arbitration. Computational complexity for example abstracts from clock time, to focus on the intrinsic temporality of algorithms, what counts for it are transitions between finite steps of the algorithm under discussion, much like there is a temporal evolution in the evaluation of a mathematical expression. We then leverage this arbitration of signs into temporal arbitrage, but before talking about that I would like to introduce a coinage that helps me organize my thinking about vTime.
A horolect, or time-dialect, is a subspecies of format. The notion is inspired by the discussion of time spirals in accelerationist circles (for more on the entanglements of time I recommend Nick Land’s “Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time” and Anna Greenspan’s excellent thesis “Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine”) as a way of hybridizing if not fully reconciling pre-modern cyclical time and modern linear time, and horocycles from hyperbolic geometry.
This is a picture of the Poincaré disk model of the 2D hyperbolic plane tiled with ideal triangles. Let’s see if I can make this… plainer. Hyperbolic geometry is geometry in a space with uniform negative curvature, which means that triangles in it are “thinner” than usual, trajectories diverge (easy place to get lost in), and in a manner of speaking there is more space in the space, which is why models for it that can be visualized in the Euclidean format that we are accustomed to all feature some amount of distortion to make it fit.
Just as one can mentally extend a flat sheet of paper into an infinite plane, 2D hyperbolic space also has a plane, and that’s what is displayed in the Poincaré disk model. The entire plane is approximately presented in the image, and the plane being infinite, it has to be compressed as distance from the chosen center increases.
An apeirogon is a polygon with an infinite number of sides. One may obtain a regular apeirogon by dividing the Euclidean real line into equal-length segments, splitting the plane into two regions.
A horocycle is a special kind of curve in hyperbolic geometry with some interesting technical properties that curves infinitely and with infinite length, without ever returning to a center. Two concentric horocycles can circumscribe and inscribe an apeirogon.
Note (Wiki isn’t so bad for technical matters by the way, but it can be a little abstruse in presentation):
In the Poincaré disk model, it looks like points near opposite "ends" of a horocycle get closer to each other and to the center of the horocycle (on the boundary circle), but in hyperbolic geometry every point on a horocycle is infinitely distant from the center of the horocycle. Also the distance between points on opposite "ends" of the horocycle increases as the arc length between those points increases. (The Euclidean intuition can be misleading because the scale of the model increases to infinity at the boundary circle.)
That misleading intuition is precisely what I want to leverage and here we arrive at the notion, hopefully. A horolect makes time in the sense of enabling the construction of an apeirogon as a sequence of computational moments, and equips that sequence with its own Alpha and Omega, its origin and end, and while from within the structure things look a certain way, from a more external vantage point, origins and ends can be seen to converge, in a sense formatting the sequence to accord with the constraints of a teleology, so to speak. Thus we have an internal linear temporality and an external cyclic temporality.
Negative curvature should not be intimidating. Hyperbolic surfaces are not only ubiquitous, but even realizable, even cute, such as with hyperbolic crochet. They tend to emerge naturally from the constraint of maximizing surface area within a finite volume. Also, trees (the data structure, for example an Abstract Syntax Tree, a crucial representation for source code?) are a direct discrete analogue of hyperbolic manifolds (a manifold is a space embedded within some other space, e.g. a sheet of paper may be in a larger 3D space, but in a rigorous sense we can speak of what happens “inside” the sheet or along it as a 2D manifold) so hyperbolic spaces are naturally hierarchical in some sense and indeed we are already commonly equipped with many more intuitions about them than a scary-looking rigorously mathematical presentation may lead one to think.
If you still would like further clarification, I can recommend this Quanta Magazine article: What Is the Geometry of the Universe? | Quanta Magazine, likely a much more intuitive presentation than my novice writer’s attempt.
A horolect has two main functions. First, it enables the unfolding of a subsidiary virtual dimension of time, an apeirogon as a timeline with segments as computational moments. Second, but no less important, it enables the synchronization of operations across different horolects by its teleology, the transcendental constraints imposed on that timeline, the formatting as seen from a certain external vantage point.
A simple wall clock makes use of reliably periodic mechanisms to measure the «passage of time»—a loathsome expression, because time is a condition of possibility for the passage of anything, Being is not a being—and numerical-symbolic abstraction to broadcast it. Not just the numbers, but also the hands of the clock. Thus an individual may govern his own internal sense of time and submit it to regimentation, better managing his actions, and this also extends to groups. Horolects make the temporal dimension of action legible, evolvable, asynchronous—ironically enough—and keeps the different rhythms of interacting horolects harmonious. Music is decorated time. But well before wall clocks there is already all manner of time-keeping, from implicit products of physical interaction at base, to more explicit biological considerations, for example what is a mind without memory or a heart without rhythm?
I don’t propose horolects as a final or perfect modelling instrument (what a happy coincidence that would be!), but an initial one. They help me think about how acceleration socializes, and how it is internally structured (to be honest, you wouldn’t want to live inside my head). The space in which formatting lives admits far too little structure, indeed one may say that formats are set apart but without even an emptiness between them, can hardly be called a space at all. The topos, the basho of their becoming is a much purer nothingness, so if one is to attempt to think their interactions, generic models of their internal structures are helpful for comparisons.
Time for Time
The fundamental transaction motivating any such apparatus is simple and it hinges on the following:
The shortest path may not be the shortest journey.
You take the main avenue because it is larger and closer to your destination, but thousands of other Joes had the same bright idea so you get stuck in traffic. You gambled and lost time.
Conversely, what appears to be a poor choice may turn out to have compensating factors, return on investment. You gamble and either make time in the sense of establishing a horolect, a new virtual temporal order, or save time through increased efficiency. If acceleration is the birth of the new (intensive growth) by breaking through time, then being able to do more of the “same” (extensive growth) by saving time is our rapidity, or velocity.
Amphetaminutes are what our economy, in its most general sense, has tried to make of Time, and how we race our doomed race against it. We name it, partition it, commoditize it, magnify it until it achieves enough substance to act as a surface that can be etched and summoned as a machine, which can then be plugged into other machines or even itself, consuming itself and growing itself.
Then, the ghost of Time enchained, it becomes part of our claimed assets, our time, Time tamed by being made into Capital, Time processed into little particles of psychoactive sand in time-release capsules, repurposed into a stimulant currency consumable even by Time itself. An ocean of sand that threatens to digest us as it did Ozymandias.
What have we gotten ourselves into?
“Main deficiency of active people. Active men are usually lacking in higher activity-I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as quite particular, single and unique men. In this respect they are lazy.
It is the misfortune of active men that their activity is almost always a bit irrational. For example, one must not inquire of the money-gathering banker what the purpose for his restless activity is: it is irrational. Active people roll like a stone, conforming to the stupidity of mechanics.
Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, 1878.
Everyone needs to put food on their table of course, and it’s arrogant to scoff at that, but a busy world is not an intense world.
Indeed, one curious factoid is that modern humans show signs of domestication syndrome, a collection of traits, behavioral and morphological, that tends to show up in domesticated species. It includes reductions in certain brain areas and changes to cranial morphology (the closest thing to a serious existence of physiognomy), reduced aggressiveness, more tolerance to the presence of other members of the same species, paedomorphism (mature organism is more similar or retains more features of its youthful form), and other more species-specific traits. It is theorized that this happens through modification of neural crest cells, an early structure of vertebrate development that terminates in a variety of important tissues.
In his study of social complexity and its evolution, biologist Daniel McShea takes ant colonies as a case study for such a generic process that includes multicellularity as a society of cells.
In summary, we conclude that, in general, complex societies are characterized by large colony size, worker polymorphism, strong behavioural specialization and loss of totipotency in its workers, low individual complexity, decentralized colony control and high system redundancy, low individual competence, a high degree of worker cooperation when tackling tasks, group foraging strategies, high tempo, multi-chambered tailor-made nests, high functional integration, relatively greater use of cues and modulatory signals to coordinate individuals and heterogeneous patterns of worker-worker interaction.
Emphasis mine, as those are the traits most pertinent to the present discussion. See also the following table of traits, and see if that rings any bells.
So what is commonly taken in the mainstream as the most salient aspect of acceleration, the time-pressure or frenzied tempo of the modern world, is not at all unique to human civilization and therefore not a direct consequence of capitalism insofar as it is taken as a collection of human social practices and formats. Rather, it is a superficial symptom of a deeper complexity syndrome. The exact reasons for the increase of tempo are not identified, but some hypotheses are raised and it seems tied to colony size. Moreover, note that while we also see differentiation into castes, there are echoes of Nietzsche’s “accelerationist fragment” in the loss of individual totipotency and complexity as a kind of “flattening” or homogenizing of European man in his instrumental integration with larger forces.
I don’t have a good theory for that either, what I am trying to do is make evident something I regard as very important in one’s personal relationship with Time, in these times. Accelerationist ‘praxis’ may involve a submission to the urgency of time-pressure and an ecstatic self-dissolution into a machinic habitus, but it may just as well include the possibility of a more patient path. It is not “speedism.”
One of the first lessons of accelerationism should be that there is a curious self-effacement involved, that just as one has to make money one has to spend money, we must make time for making time, that is, while time-pressure demands the hastening of judgment, acceleration as such intrinsically depends on the extension or momentary suspension of judgment as contemplation, compensated by the production of a rule.
In order to not get swallowed up by the sands of Time, one must think fast, but to think faster one must think well, and that takes time. Take your time, or odds are that someone else will take it from you.
Out of Time
This post is only a tentative outline of how we relate to Time. I have been somewhat cagey about Time in the ‘Introduction to Right-Accelerationism’ series, but that’s because I believe it is too delicate, complex and central a topic to blemish with simplification.
The contemplation of Time is the black heart of acceleration, its engine, both philosophically and technically, and the time to speak of it fast approaches, with the assistance of the considerations outlined in this post. The thesis of the prototypical model for the process of acceleration I intend to give is that acceleration is temporal arbitrage through symbolic arbitration. This is an operational principle, and how intelligence carves itself from the body of Time itself. Whatever the limitations of this format, it is better than the specification given by the definition of acceleration of time as gain of concrete expressivity because like all formats, it enables an evaluation, namely the evaluation of the internal mechanisms of intelligent systems as they relate to Time. I will make time for it.
“Change ain't lookin' for friends. Change calls the tune we dance to.” - Al Swearengen, Deadwood.
Whose destiny is it to be a gear in the works, whose destiny is it to be a time-keeper and whose destiny is it to be one of those who set the tempo?