Pentland argues speed of networked life renders old political concepts obsolete

Evidence

Pentland worries that our political-economic constructs such as “market” and “class” hail from an old, slow world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new, “light-speed hyperconnected world” leaves no time for the kind of rational deliberation and face-to-face negotiation and compromise that characterized the social milieu in which such political concepts originated: “We can no longer think of ourselves as only individuals reaching carefully considered decisions; we must include the dynamic social effects that influence our individual decisions and drive economic bubbles, political revolutions, and the internet economy.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1380

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Zuboff’s broader argument that instrumentarian power supersedes politics; also resonates with accelerationist critiques of deliberation in modern digital capitalism. — connects to: Speed is rhetorically repurposed to justify surrendering individual agency — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1381; Unmanned weapons render obsolete any teleological philosophy of history — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 645
• SEED: Essay angle: how ‘velocity’ is rhetorically deployed to delegitimize slow, deliberative political institutions across tech-utopian writing.

Broader Connections

• Unmanned weapons render obsolete any teleological philosophy of history #epitomizes (0.72) — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 645
• Speed is rhetorically repurposed to justify surrendering individual agency #responds-to (0.70) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1381