Speed is rhetorically repurposed to justify surrendering individual agency

Evidence

The velocity of instrumentarian society leaves us no time to get our bearings, and that speed is repurposed here as a moral imperative demanding that we relinquish individual agency to the automated systems that can keep up the pace in order to quickly perceive and impose correct answers for the greater good. There is no room for politics in this instrumentarian society because politics means establishing and asserting our bearings. Individual moral and political bearings are a source of friction that wastes precious time and diverts behavior from confluence. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1381

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism identified here — velocity turned into a moral imperative for relinquishing agency, with individual bearings reframed as ‘friction’ — is a dense conceptual move worth returning to.
• XREF: Connects with Zuboff’s ‘radical indifference’ argument elsewhere and with Virilio’s dromology idea that speed itself becomes a mode of control. — connects to: Velocity is deliberately weaponized to outpace democratic awareness and freeze resistance — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1092; Commitments are often manufactured by removing one’s own control over action — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 714; Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Commitments are often manufactured by removing one’s own control over action #expands (0.85) — Thomas C. Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict, 714
• Ideologies act on people structurally through a process that escapes them #corroborates (0.78)