Technical acceleration delivers abundant free time and banishes boredom
Evidence
Longheart is happy and feels he is rich. He has won time, almost inexhaustible amounts of time, and the strangest thing is that he is also no longer visited by the uncomfortable feeling of boredom that he used to feel before. He has at last found leisure. This surplus, this immeasurable wealth of time, has made him a new man, and Utempus a new society. — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 55
Categorization
- XREF: This naive first-order belief in acceleration-as-leisure is the foil the whole book will invert; pairs with Bell’s post-scarcity leisure predictions and Keynes’s fifteen-hour week. — connects to: Time scarcity despite technical acceleration forms a distinct third acceleration category — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of…, 228; Modern advocates long expected technology to deliver abundant free time; Boredom enables genuinely new forms of activity — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 39 (+5 more)
- SEED: A parable structure (the fable of Longheart) is an effective pedagogical device for an essay opening that first states the commonsense tech-liberation beliefs before dismantling them.
Broader Connections
- Time scarcity despite technical acceleration forms a distinct third acceleration category
#contradicts(0.85) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 228 - Time-saving technology coexists with unprecedented felt time scarcity
#contradicts(0.85) - Technical acceleration contradicts rather than explains modern time scarcity and stress
#contradicts(0.85) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 236 - Modern advocates long expected technology to deliver abundant free time
#responds-to(0.80) - Technology saves time yet people feel more time-starved than ever
#contradicts(0.80) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 58 - Boredom enables genuinely new forms of activity
#complicates(0.75) — Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, 39 - Boredom dissolves when attention is sustained long enough
#qualifies(0.70) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 348 - Time-saving technologies may form a zero-sum or negative-sum time game
#contradicts(0.70) — Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration, 59