Social acceleration first enabled then collapsed modernity’s promise of autonomy

Evidence

According to Rosa, both these phenomena can be explained by the multidimensional acceleration of social processes and events that has been bound up with the modernization process from the very beginning. During the period of “classical” modernity, the temporal structures that resulted from the interaction of this principle with the initial conditions of early modern societies gave rise to a window of opportunity for that quintessentially modern promise of self-determination on both the individual and collective levels. Yet the further operation of the complex self-reinforcing syndrome of factors driving social acceleration now seems to have closed that window. The increases in speed that made classical modernity possible, with prospects at once both liberating and frightening, now both render it obsolete and threaten to break it apart at the seams and leave us in a paradoxical, characteristically late modern condition of frenetic standstill. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 23

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the book’s central thesis: ‘frenetic standstill’ as the paradoxical late-modern endpoint of acceleration.
• XREF: connects to: Modernity’s constitutive acceleration reaches a threshold beyond which societal integration fails — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 120; Social acceleration compresses the present across all institutional spheres — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 261; Modernity’s acceleration corrodes the very institutional stability it depends on — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 297 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Social acceleration itself erodes the preconditions for democratic self-steering #expands (0.82) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 442
• First modernity’s own successes eroded its authority and created self-directed individuals #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 111