Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything

Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick

Faster details how everything is moving faster and faster. Jobs, communications, entertainment, meals, and just about every aspect of people's lives moves at a more hectic pace. What was seen as a great technological innovation of yesterday is already slow and outdated today. This is inadvertently drilled home by the examples given in this 25 year old book. There are complaints about the time required to download a web page and the time needed to wait for a computer to boot up. How quaint! Now the only annoyance is when a phone takes two tries to unlock. Common internet speeds are a few orders of magnitude faster than what they were a quarter century ago. Yet, the complexity of websites has also increased - thus only giving us a small fraction of the speed increase. Advertisers have continued to find ways to suck our time and distract us from what we are looking for. The 500 cable channels are no longer a problem - instead there are a multitude of streaming services vying for out attention - from Youtube and Netflix down to every small studio. 

With so many demands for our attention we seek many "time savers". We have appliances that help us wash and dry out clothes. We have food delivered to our house. We hire people to do things we can't do on our own. However, what do we do with all the time we "save"? Mostly just watch screens. Lovely accomplishments. Is there much advantage to "faster"?