A second modernity would live even shorter than the first

Evidence

The first possibility consists in the formation of a new form of institutional facilitation and stabilization of the acceleration process and thus the attainment of a new equilibrium at a higher level of speed. This would repeat the organizational and orientational achievement of “classical modernity” by replacing the social, political, and juridical institutions of the national welfare state that have become too slow by more dynamic arrangements that reconcile the project of modernity with the speeds of late modernity at both individual and collective levels. Hopes for reform by those who press for adaptive political measures while maintaining the claim to autonomy aim at this goal. … However, I think these hopes are unrealistic because it is difficult to see how such reforms could come to grips with the problem of the desynchronization of deliberative-democratic politics and economic-technological development and how they could be politically achieved at all when political steering with existing means is becoming more and more improbable. Yet, even if such a revision of modern institutional arrangements and related individual and collective identities were successful, the novel emerging forms would likely not long be able to withstand the newly fostered forces of acceleration in view of the institution-disintegrating character of the primacy of dynamization: in accordance with the previously discussed dialectical logic of the development of the forces of acceleration and their institutional enabling conditions, one should expect that the lifetime of a “second modernity” created in this way would be even shorter than that of the first. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 845