Arthur a. Felts - Social Acceleration and the Technological Sublime the Loss of a Historical Narrative About the Role of Government

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Social Acceleration and the Technological Sublime:

The Loss of a Historical Narrative About the Role of Government

Arthur A. Felts

[email protected]

Professor, Department of Political Science

College of Charleston

Presented at the Annual Public Administration Theory Network Conference

May, 2013

San Francisco

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The Technological Sublime: Introduction

“If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism,

the twenty-‐first can be defined by presentism.” Douglas Rushkoff

The quote comes from Rushkoff’s recent book, Present Shock: When Everything

Happens Now. There, he writes for a erudite, but still lay audience about what was

widely accepted as the promise of information and communications technology

(ICT), in the twentieth century. That technology would give us a future that, if not

utopian, was decidedly a step in that direction. Technology no longer promised just

to make our work lives easier. In the latter part of the twentieth century it became a

totalizing experience—one that would make our political, economic, and social lives

better. It would foster democracy. But instead of that, Rushkoff argues it gave us

‘presentism’ where the future, any future, in many important ways, no longer exists.

The same is true of the past.

Rushkoff’s is a popularization of a critical message that has been presented by

scholars who are concerned with what broadly falls under the rubric, ‘social

acceleration.’ The the concept of social acceleration, in one form or another, has

been dealt with by such authors as Virilio (2006), Castells (2010) and Giddens 2002,

what is important about his book is that it is that it’s release suggests what is

happening has escaped the confines of academic reflection and scholarship and

become so well understood that it has integrated itself into the fabric of our social,

economic, political and cultural lives (on 4/21/13 it was ranked at #1813 by

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Amazon in all book sales, #15 in science and math-‐technology books and #5 in

computer and technology books).

What does it mean to define the current century as one of presentism? To frame

it in terms of this meeting, both utopian and dysutopian (u/d) visions require at

least some idea of a temporal future. In turn, this implies a temporally connected

‘past’—that is a ‘place’ from which we can examine where we have been, are now,

and working toward that u/d future. Yet Rushkoff begins his observations by

positing that now: “… there is no temporal backdrop against which to measure our

progress, no narrative through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward

which we may strive, and seemingly no time to figure any of this out.” We appear to

be more and more like Dory in the movie Finding Nemo, who is constantly distracted

by whatever we encounter, usually a new consumer commodity. Perhaps going

somewhere, but collectively more or less celebrating (because there is nothing else

to celebrate than what is here-‐now) Emerson’s advice that ‘it is about the journey,

not the destination.’ Unless we are inclined to admit that we are at our destination,

we should consider where our journey has taken us thus far—it is doubtful that

Emerson intended to say everything is about the “now.”

Perhaps we need look no further than how ICT has evidently changed academic

research for evidence of this presentism. Recent research by Evans (2008) on the

impacts of increased Internet access to journal contents and the online ability to

read them online shows that: “… as more journals came online, the articles

referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and

more of those citations were to fewer journals and articles.” The evidence, Evans

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observes, suggests that enduring scholarship conducted many years ago is

discounted and along with it, a grounding of disciplines in their respective

intellectual histories. In what we could call old-‐fashioned research, he argues that

“… forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientist and scholars to

anchor findings deep in past scholarship” (395). Online searching is more efficient,

but putting “… researchers in touch with prevailing opinion …. [which] may

accelerate consensus and narrow the range of findings and ideas [they are] built

upon (ibid.). “

Following Evans’ research, we can also observe that academic journals per se

are typically evaluated by the number of citations they garner. However, since

citations typically drop off after two years, they increasingly seek speedier ways for

release, now resorting to electronic pre-‐release to increase their shelf life. Partly to

be provocative, one possible way to alter some thinking would be to have a more

sophisticated measure that looks at the number of citations as a ratio of total

citations in the articles citing them. Or perhaps the number of citations of a volume

after ten years, suggesting durability. In any event, journals must struggle to be

continually present in the minds of academics and that is the major point I am

making here.

Time, Presentism and Technology

Going back to Rushkoff, it would be hard to argue his use of the word “our” in his

quote is not a reference to the American public and equally hard to argue that it

does not have at least some important, if not profound, implications for politics

generally and consequently administration specifically. At a minimum, it can be

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interpreted to say that our inability to enter into discourse based on a narrative

continuity on emerging and enduring problems is withering as we stay constantly

connected, attempt to multi-‐task and follow hyperlinks in a pattern that Rushkoff

terms “distracted thinking.,” a term that mirror’s Carr’s description of “shallow

thinking” and Hassan’s “abbreviated thinking” all of which are coined to address the

impress of ICT on our ability to process information. Equally as important, as we

shall see, Scheureman (2004) argues it is also eroding our very concept and

understanding of they ways the liberal democratic state was designed to operate.

This paper discusses the growing body of literature that suggests there has been

a technologically driven change in humankind’s sense of time—as reflected in

Rushkoff’s characterization of our time as one of presentism but also in literature

that argues our very social idea of time is shifting as there has been a general social

acceleration—that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. The

continuous promise of this technology has been that it would keep us on pace to a

sublime future—our lives would become easier, we would become more productive

and, perhaps more abstractly, come closer to “singularity” which, for now, means

that we will be able to rely on machines to make us better in all ways. In an

important sense, we should see at least part of the promise of computerization

leading toward a more utopianized future as one more made of behalf of a new

technology in our history that failed to deliver and instead gave us something not

only something less, but altogether different. Each time we have been faced with

what can best be described as a ‘tranformative’ technology such as the telegraph,

electricity, and radio, we see it as the technological sublime, and, in doing so engage

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in what Mosco terms “collective amnesia” by forgetting that similar promises were

made for all transformative technologies. For example, Briggs and Maverick wrote

about invention of the telegraph in 1858:

"Of all the marvelous achievements of modern science the electric telegraph

is transcendentally the greatest and most serviceable to mankind … The

whole earth will be belted with the electric current, palpitating with human

thoughts and emotions … How potent a power … is the telegraphic destined

to become …! This binds together by a vital cord all the nations …. It is

impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such

an instrument has been created . …."

A London Times writer opined at the same time: "Tomorrow the hearts of the

civilized world will beat in a single pulse, and from that time forth forevermore the

continental divisions of the earth will, in a measure, lose those conditions of time

and distance which now mark their relations." Of course this all seems a bit overly

effusive/optimistic but to many it was only premature. We would get there, but not

through our adoption of the telegraph. Such is the consistent promise of the

technological sublime. With respect to the most recent transformative technology,

ICT, if we follow Rushkoff and the social acceleration literature, we are not getting a

promised future of sublimity. Instead, we are getting no future at all.

The idea of social acceleration and its conquering of space and compression of

time is not new. Koselleck (1985) documents that a sense of things speeding up has

been a constant since the middle of the eighteenth century. For the most part, until

the latter part of the twentieth century much of this sense of things speeding up was

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attached to manufacturing and transportation technologies. Power looms wove

material faster, steam engines, then automobiles carried us faster. If exclusive

viewed in this context, then what we are witnessing today is more of the same.

There is, however, a profound difference between the mechanical, ‘speed’ inventions

up until the middle of the twentieth century and the shift from ‘clock,’ or mechanical

time to ‘computer time’ that has occurred with the ICT revolution since the advent

of PCs in the late 1970s. Since then, computer time has progressively penetrated

everyday life and created a qualitatively different social acceleration—one that we

not only experience externally, but one that is on a par with the invention of

mechanical clocks.

Most all historians of technology consider the mechanical clock to be if not the

most important invention since the middle ages, certainly one of the top two or

three. As early as 1934, in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford developed an

essentially unchallenged observation that without mechanical time to regulate the

behavior of large numbers of people, there is little doubt that the industrial

revolution would have not been possible.

In this picture, among those who argue this change is profound., for example,

suggests we are entering a third great period of our existence—moving beyond

mechanical time that has dictated the pace of life since the 14th century into an age

of ‘computime’ where computers and their attendant nanoseconds become

measures. Robins and Webster describe it as ‘the time of the network’ which is

totalizing because it is global in scope and we thus lose any real reference points in

our own lives in the face of shear-‐speed scale much as was predicted for telegraphy

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in the above quote. Less grandiosely, the pioneering political economist/media

researcher Harold Innis presciently observed in the early 1950s that we were

becoming more and more obsessed with ‘present-‐mindedness’ at the expense of

being able to devote sustained attention to enduring problems. In a slightly different

interpretation that arrives at the same conclusion, Gross suggests (1981) that our

understanding of time is increasingly spatialized and we are losing touch with a

diachronic co-‐existence in favor of a continually synchronic monadic one where life

narratives and connections with others become a series of disconnected events.

Rosa observes that while the postmodern vision of the change in ways of thinking

about history and time was one that is captured by the vision of the sublime

pleasures of motorcycling on the open road, the flip-‐side is the possibly that of the

bleakness of the treadmill where there is no real past or future. Rushkoff puts it

most clearly; when individuals lose a sense of past and future in favor of an

continuous present, there is no longer any coherent narrative structure with which

to understand their lives.

So critical has this time factor become in a globalized economy that in the first

half of 2013 a new transatlantic cable will be laid that will reduce the time of

computerized trades between North America and England by 5 milliseconds—

giving a distinct investing edge to those who use it since their algorithm-‐driven

computerized trade orders will get overseas faster and thus be first to be executed.

This, even as the US Congress has fretted about computerized trading since the

“flash crash” in May of 2010 in which the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed 1000

points in a matter of minutes and then recovered equally as fast. With respect to the

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role of administrative regulation, even though the Securities and Exchange

Commission implemented some strategies to prevent such occurrences in the

future, 76 percent of traders and technologists surveyed in late 2010 did not think it

would stop another flash crash. About the crash, Larry Tabb (who has testified

before the Senate on issues dealing with high-‐speed computerized trading stated):

"The Securities and Exchange Commission [SEC] doesn’t have the technology to

understand if all of this high frequency trading is legitimate, or if it’s manipulative.

The problem is that very few people have that ability." It would seem that not only is

the market outpacing the ability of government, it has also moved from any notion

of presentism into one of “instantism.”

While it is understandable that postmodernists would celebrate this emergence

of presentism, it is equally as important to examine, as Rosa suggests, the flip side.

Only then can we fairly assess its implications. On a grand scale, recognizing that

increasingly globalized economic forces are driving the simultaneous acceleration

and compression of time, we should question how our basic political institutions are

able to “fit” or adapt. On more pragmatic levels, we are confronted with genuine

policy and organizational problems:

• Noting the inability of the SEC to fully understand global computerized

trading, on the most profound side some surmise that our entire political

system is increasingly of of pace or tempo with global socio-‐economic shifts

that is more and more driven by an ICT consumer/social media mentality

(Vandenburg, Hassan, Scheuerman, Wolin). This view expresses itself

variously, but one is as an “end of politics” that sees fundamental liberal

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political institutions are increasingly falling behind and becoming irrelevant

in a socio-‐economically accelerating world. Inverting the mantra of the 60s

and 70s that ‘everything is political’ it now appears that ‘everything is social.’

The Department of Homelands Security wants to be “liked” on Facebook and

followed on Twitter—and it does not appear that many of us are bemused by

that fact as it tries to slip its governing bonds or to alter our understanding of

social media to include politics.

Echoing this, Rushkoff quotes former Secretary of State James Baker as

saying that increasingly policy makers are driven to have a quickly stated

policy position by virtue of the saturation of live, uncensored and

unconsidered images transmitted via cable news and the Internet. As a

result, ‘Policy, as such, is no longer measured against a larger plan or

narrative; it is simply a response to changing circumstances on the ground,

or on the tube.” (Kindle Location: 675 of 4641) Statecraft, he suggests, has

become crisis management as if reflected, I suggest (though I will not pursue

the idea any more in this paper) a desperate attempt to redefine our

problems as unique and “wicked.”

• On a similar level, Rushkoff argues that we have progressively lost touch with

the idea of a life and our collective history as a narrative that can only make

sense and be understood temporally. This loss expresses itself in stories as

disjointed and out-‐of-‐sequence where time no longer matters. An expression

of this is Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglorious Basterds.” Roger Ebert commented

on the film, pointing out that Tarantino:

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“… provides World War II with a much-‐needed alternative ending. For

once the basterds get what’s coming to them.

From the title, ripped off from a 1978 B-‐movie, to the Western

sound of the Ennio Morricone opening music to the key location, a

movie theater, the film embeds Tarantino’s love of the movies.”

The alternative ending is that Hilter and his henchmen get variously shot and

then burned to death in a Paris theater. In this way, Tarantino contributes to

a deconstructing and reconstruction of the grand narrative of this nation in a

way that was one step further than Baudrillard’s well-‐known 1991 editorial,

“The Gulf War Did Not Take Place.” History, important historical events in the

world, can be deconstructed and reconstructed to give WW II a much-‐needed

alternative ending with only an entertainment goal in mind. The grand

narrative of the United States including our political history in its battle

against Fascism is reduced to disjointed facts jumbled with entertaining

fiction. Under such conditions, can we expect for meaningful (and sustained)

dialogue on enduring issues from those whose knowledge about WW II is

colored by such entertainment?

• To the extent we want to see ICT as facilitating public discourse (and it can

and perhaps does) we must also contend with the flip-‐side in that we are

dealing with a public that increasingly shows signs of both abbreviated and

shallow thinking. While there are those who praise the fact that Internet

renders it no longer necessary to remember data/facts, the fact that they

must be sequentially, synchronically, accessed means that the ability to

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assemble them creatively or into more complex maps is now one-‐step

removed. We access information and increasingly confront hyperlinks. With

respect to these, Carr observes: “People who read hypertext comprehend and

learn less, studies show, than those who read the same material in printed

form. The more links in a piece of writing, the bigger the hit on

comprehension.” (http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1378)

• Since at least 1960, most have recognized Moore’s observation/law—that

technological change is accelerating if not growing exponentially—at work in

ICT ‘advances.’ This creates temporal pressure. In policy, accelerating

technological ‘advances’ mean that many policies may become outdated

before they are implemented and the attendant pressure will be to adapt. But

how? As this paper was being prepared there is a vigorous debate about gun

control—at the same time that we already know that fully functional guns

can be produced with a 3D printer.

• From an organizational perspective, work has been affected in myriad ways

and it is naïve to think that will always positively affect quality or efficiency

for that matter. It is easier to email than to talk and even easier to text—we

work with people who are a short walk away but we see face-‐to-‐face less and

less. We multitask, thinking it makes us more efficient. Yet research done by

Nass (among many others) at Stanford’s Communication between Humans

and Interactive Media (CHIMe) Lab demonstrated that : “…multitaskers are

terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They're terrible at ignoring

irrelevant information; they're terrible at keeping information in their head

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nicely and neatly organized; and they're terrible at switching from one task

to another.”

• From an organizational-‐psychological perspective, we are faced with tighter

and tighter intergenerational “gaps” such that individuals born five years

before those following them do not experience the same worlds as

technology penetrates social relationships. Some researchers (Turkle, Bell)

speculate that growing up constantly connected deprives young people of

important aspects of maturation that may be best understood as

“individuation.’ Bell suggests we have forgotten that as organizations absorb

these in the form of workers it can and likely will strain its operations as

different groups reflect different times.

The New Technological Future: Abundant Singularity or Impoverished

Unsustainability

In arguing for an increasing pressure toward presentism or social acceleration, it

would be naïve to think that history as a concept has vanished. Rather, as

synchronic thinking replaces a diachronic sense of temporality, both the future and

the past become more and more detached from the present. There is no real

narrative that can get us from “now” to “then” save for the sense that the visions of a

future require either a positive or negative apocalyptic technological event. The

result is starker and starker competing images of a utopian and dysutopian future

that selectively draw from the past. Moreover, implicitly if not explicitly, they also

imply a progressive diminished role of government much akin to Bobbitt’s (2002)

argument that as economic systems have become increasingly globalized, the role of

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the state has shifted to merely following economic, i.e., technological, changes.

Utopian futures usually suggest a highly diminished role/need for government and

dystopian ones usually operate in a chaotic state. In fact, it may that the two visions

are not all that different.

Technological Sublimity: Democracy and Abundance

In the context of these observations, if we care to try to envision a future at all, it

must become more and more at once wildly fantastic and sublime and a truly

utopian transformation that takes on the aura of religious faith. Like entering

heaven, we do not know how we can get there from here but it becomes a matter of

faith that we will. Thus, in that world of Abundance, Diamandis and Kolter observe:

“When viewed through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce …” (6)

They challenge us: “To imagine a world of nine billion people with clean water,

nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-‐tier medical care

and nonpolluting, ubiquitous energy.” (11) It does not take much research to

discover that tith respect to energy at least, historical amnesia is a work. In the

1950s, the promise of a future of nuclear power was safe, low-‐cost abundant energy

that would usher in an era of unprecedented economic prosperity, while at the same

time demonstrate American technological superiority. The first chairman of the

Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, predicted in a 1954 speech that nuclear

power would someday make electricity “too cheap to meter.” Diamandis and Kolter

also extol the productivity of genetically engineered crops, conveniently avoiding

the issue of their corporate ownership as salable goods and arguments of others

about their biological safety.

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One only need log on to the home website of Singularity University, founded by

computer/internet pioneers/new agers Ray Kurzwell and Peter Diamandis and click

on a video touting their executive institute with the lure, “Come: Create the Future”

to see this postmodern world translated into practical training. Kurzwell opines that

‘computing is everywhere, we see it in our cars, in our houses, and if you listened

yesterday, its gonna be in our bodies.’ The video goes from person to person, or

believer-‐to-‐believer in this radical future of a utopian singularity. One is Vint Cerf,

the Chief Internet Evangelist, Google. An interesting title—‘evangelist’ has typically

been used in the context of radical religion. Its Greek roots combine the words

“good” with “announce” and “angel/messenger.” Originally it referred to the New

Testament writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Later, it extended to traveling

charismatic preachers as, for example, portrayed in Elmer Gantry. To be sure, the

dictionary now lists a third usage of the noun as an ‘enthusiastic advocate,’ or

bringer of good news. So Cerf’s official title is not a misuse. But the usage of a term

usually reserved for religion is telling. Like the religious evangelists, they promise a

future where things will be much better (‘abundant’ to use Diamandis’ term) if not

totally, heavenly perfect.

Using Moore’s Law, the Singularity folks look ahead to a 2001: A Space

Odyssey-‐like event when humans take the next evolutionary step and merge with

machines. Or, perhaps at that point it might be more accurate to say, machines

merge with us since some are already arguing they are smarter than we and will

only become more so. With respect to this, the religious metaphor is worth

pursuing. At a 2009 conference a group of computer scientist met to consider

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whether there should be limits on research that might lead to a loss of human

control. Speaking about intelligent machines, Microsoft researcher Eric Horvitz,

president of the American Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence,

observed that: “Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years.

Technologists are providing almost religious visions, and their ideas are resonating

in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture”(Markoff, 2009) Indeed, they

conjure images of humans becoming literally immortal as medical and

nanotechnology advance and will be able to not only cure disease, but also reverse

aging. (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/science/26robot.html?_r=)

Diamandis is even more inspiring. His book, Abundance: The Future is Better

than You Think, co-‐authored with Steven Kotler, a future is envisioned in which

problem after problem after problem is solved and: “… a world of nine billion people

with clean water, nutritious food, affordable housing, personalized education, top-‐

tier medical care, and non-‐polluting, ubiquitous energy.” I intentionally do not give a

citation to that quote because it is so ubiquitous on the Internet. (A Clusty search

(3/4/2013) on that entire string of words yielded at least 239 hits. Google provided

699.) But then again, Abundance debuted as #1 for Amazon.com and Barnes and

Noble and made it to the #2 spot on the NY Times best-‐seller list. Clearly, the

utopian vision of the future still taps a wellspring of believers of the evangelists’

message.

Equally as compelling are visions of a more peaceful (utopianesque)

democratic future based on projections about social media as instruments of

revolution in totalitarian nations. The origins of this lie in Iran’s “Green Revolution”

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started in 2009 to protest the election of Mahmūd Ahmadinezhād as president.

Morozov reports that a simple request by a senior US State Department

administrator that Twitter delay a maintenance shutdown snowballed the

movement into the “Twitter Revolution,” so-‐dubbed by the New York Times and

rapidly picked up particularly by Internet bloggers. Whatever the role of Twitter or

Facebook in that movement, it is noteworthy that three years later Ahmadinezhād is

still president. Similarly, the “Arab Spring” revolts that were said to be fueled by

social media in Egypt have not panned out, democratically speaking. At this point it

is fair to say that technological transformation of repressive regimes into more

sublime visions of democracy via social media is just another version of the

technological expectation that scientific management would lead to world peace.

Viewing the concept of technology in a broader frame—as Ellul did in calling it

instrumentally rational methodology/logos (la technique) with its systematic

emphasis on efficiency, Waldo (2007) noted the utopian vision of adherents to

Scientific Management in thinking it would lead to the end of not just class conflict:

“The natural course of thought is “upward and onward,” and finally the scientific

managers a vision of …: universal peace between nations and between social classes,

the ultimate in efficiency and in material satisfactions, liberty and equality …,

general education and enlightenment” (51) While the legacy of scientific

management in public administration literature has been continuously evident in

the quest for efficiency which has always been pa’s bedrock claim to legitimacy, it is

clear that scientific managers saw it as the end of government. But for this very

reason—the lean on efficiency—it has been one that public administration theorists

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have not been able to critically address since it is at the heart of the discipline. But

efficiency is hardly the touchstone in this case.

Reconciling these visions of the future in a paper that supports Rushkoff’s idea of

a growing presentism is not difficult. As the future predicted as a result of prior

technological advances becomes more and more elusive, the temporal linkage

between the present and any vision of the future becomes less and less important.

In one sense, it is perhaps truly utopian visions unharnessed from any present or

past encumbrances because the past, present and future are separate phenomena,

no longer joined by any continuous narrative.

In point of fact, the end of history (and logical end of politics as classical

liberalism became ascendant everywhere) predicted by Fukuyama is an idea that

has persisted for more than twenty years now. The publication of Abundance points

to the fact that its persistence is not just coming from political thinkers. Rather, now

it appears to have become an inevitable technological imperative. We no longer

need exert any effort to realize a more utopian future, it will emerge without us, so

to speak, as a result of the magic of that imperative.

Technologically Fostered Unsustainability: Doom

As there are visionaries of the technological sublime as a function of advancing

technology, there have emerged on the other side those who see us advancing

toward an equally abstract future of technological doom, the contours of many of

which that have captured popular attention. Books angled this way abound, many

are about climate change connected to sea level rise and severe weather events (e.g.,

Englander, 2012). What is interesting about many of these books is how wildly the

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future is seen to vacillate. Some predict global inundation while others write of

different scenarios—all projecting to a relatively distant future. How we get from

“here” to that distant future is left for speculation.

What is truly interesting about the doom literature and to mention Present Shock

again, is that these apocalyptic visions of worldwide disasters have so thoroughly

penetrated popular culture that they have a part of popular entertainment and gone

beyond mere technological disaster to fantasies that exist apart from time. The TV

series, The Walking Dead, which is popular enough to be renewed for a fourth

season in 2013 and is the highest rated basic cable series in history, postulates a

dysutopian future with only vague reference to causes. Not really a narrative, they

posit a single, defining event that transforms everything—if not instantaneously as

is the case with a nuclear holocaust, in a mere 28 Days as is the case with potent

viruses. From that point on, time more or less ceases to exist. Current

technologically driven dystopian visions, like their utopian counterparts, are not

connected to now—rather they require a quantum leap in human evolution where

become a new species, merged with machines, or made immortal as zombies.

What is important about these dysutopian visions is that they envision a future

without much of a role, if any, for government or administration. Instead, society

devolves into what resembles a tribal community culture.

Public Administration and Speed

ICT is all about information and communications and the observation made here

thus far is that its technological development is driven by a need for speed. In the

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broader context, this may be interpreted as contributing to the literature on social

acceleration.

What does this mean for the study of public administration? In most all respects,

information and communication are central to the practice of public administration.

Yet, the connection between communication theory and public administration

seems to be a neglected area of pa research. Strangely, perhaps this may be because

communication and public administration are so deeply intertwined it is difficult to

see where one ends that the other begins. For example, Niskanen (1971) notes that,

“Written language was first used to record the directives and decisions of the

ancient Sumerian bureaucracy. The earliest Egyptian literature was dominated by

rules of conduct for young officials in the imperial bureaucracy, . . ..” (4)

There is no denying that communication technologies have been a pervasive

background underlying the activities of administrators throughout history.

Recognizing the need for efficient administration, the Emperor Trajan commanded

that positus (variously, ‘carriers’, ‘place’—but it is from which we get the word

“post” as in post office) be located at regular distances so that important documents

could be efficiently transported. Avrin (2010) in his history of the book before the

printing press notes the enormous use of papyrus by Roman administrators. (164)

The popularity of papyrus for writing led to its increasing scarcity at the same time

as Trajan’s rule. Innis argued this use led to the rise of the power of the Church in

using its of the only alternative medium, vellum, for writing.

The history of telegraphy would no doubt have been quite different if Samuel

Morse’s offer to sell the telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore for

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$100,000 had not been (fairly) summarily rejected by the Postmaster General

mostly on the argument that the US Mail was a superior and more efficient

instrument for information transmission.

These observations should give rise to some questions. We could, for example,

consider the claim by Harold Innis (1951) that “The radio appealed to vast areas,

overcame the division between classes in its escape from literacy and favoured

centralization and bureaucracy” in conjunction with the 20th Century growth of the

administrative state. The implications are worthy of consideration. Did, for example,

radio create the conditions or did it simply facilitate a will already in place? Was it

necessary as Innis asserts?

What may also obscure the overarching connection between communication and

information technologies and public administration may be that over the past two

centuries the systematic emphasis in developing communication technology has

been on more and more speed, that is, efficiency. There is thus potentially a dual

overlap in public administration and modern ICT technologies.

Pragmatic Evidence: No Time for Traditional Liberal Democratic Politics

Impatience, the need for speed in action, abounds on all fronts. Consider the

following: In January, 2012, President Obama adopted the brand “We Can’t Wait [on

Congress]” as he signed a raft of executive orders aimed at everything from the

creation of jobs for veterans, preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy

standards, curbing domestic violence, and more, (Savage, 2012; cf. Rosembloom)

Since then of course President Obama effectively enacted the Dream Act, ordering

INS officials to allow undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children

22

to remain without threat of deportation. By and large, he follows the academic usage

of the term “presentism,” a view that only present objects exist. In a temporal sense,

it means that “now” – this moment – is all that exists. He cannot wait.

The implications of a socially accelerated society that increasingly compresses

time into a successive series of asynchronous presents has serious implications for

our traditional liberal democratic political system within which public

administration is taught and practiced. In Liberal Democracy and the Social

Acceleration of Time, William Scheuerman notes:

The traditional liberal democratic separation of powers also includes a

decisive temporal subtext: legislation is prospective, or future oriented;

judicial activity is fundamentally retrospective, or past oriented; and the

executive is contemporaneous, or present oriented in its fundamental

orientation. (2004, 29)

Scheuerman develops a long and convincing analysis of this claim in the writings of

major political writers of the 18th and 19th century who influenced the thinking of

the Founders. That the basis of a system of checks and balances and separation of

powers fundamentally affirms this view should come as no surprise. A liberal

democratic system should have a clear vision of what it is with a past, present and

future.

What then, to make of this system in an accelerating social world? Sheldon Wolin

provides a succinct answer:

Starkly put, political time is out of synch with the temporalities,

rhythms, and pace governing economy and culture. Political time, especially

23

in societies with pretensions to democracy, requires an element of leisure,

not in the sense of a leisure class (which is the form in which the ancient

writers conceived it), but in the sense, say, of a leisurely pace. This is owing

to the needs of political action to be preceded by deliberation and

deliberation, as its "deliberate" part suggests, takes time because, typically, it

occurs in a setting of competing or conflicting but legitimate considerations.

(1997, np)

In short, our political system has not kept pace with our accelerating economic,

social, and cultural worlds.

Scheuerman argues particularly the inability of a deliberately slow legislative

process to respond to an accelerating world explains the passage of vague and

ambiguous legislation and cedes of the problem to the executive branch. In a world

of change, specific legislation to handle a problem long-‐term makes less and less

sense. But this is only to say that the future no longer exists in any meaningful,

understandable sense. And so, legislatures are frozen, unable to deliberate different

opinions and develop a process over time to deal with things because there is no

future in which that process can be readily seen.

With respect to the judicial branch: since the Great Depression in the United

States, both liberal and conservative courts have taken a more and more activist

position and attempted to continually update present-‐day problems that are

synchronically seen and not ones reflecting the past because the times are changing.

Each time they change, there is a new ‘now’ less and less linked to the notion of stare

decisis and its concomitant recognition of history. The likely decision by the

24

Supreme Court to ignore the Anti-‐Injunction Act and make an advance decision on

the Affordable Health Care Act would be one more decision for it to move away from

the past and into the present. It is not enough to say this is a new problem. But all

the players are in the same court. The plaintiffs (states) and defendant (Federal

government) agree this is a novel issue.

A mere nine years after the Court said it was permissible for the University of

Michigan to have preferences in place for minority admissions, there is a strong

likelihood they will reverse that decision by hearing was essentially the same case

pressed against the University of Texas at Austin. In a world where history counts

less and less, that was then, this is now and it is consequently, a ‘different’ case.

Fitting into this temporal framework, the growth of power of the executive branch

since FDR is reflected in the increasing compression of time. Recognizing the need

to act expeditiously, Scheuerman (2005, 2006a, 2006b) notes the myriad emergency

powers granted to the executive which are still law and discusses the implications of

the powers more generally in a liberal democratic system. For its own part, needing

to deal with issues more and more expeditiously, presidents have resorted to

executive orders at an increasing pace since Kennedy. The other argument for a

unitary executive, the signing statement which it tantamount to a line item veto of

legislation is now in play. If a test of this power of the unitary executive comes

before the court, it is difficult to say how they will decide.

Though President Obama pledged he would not, he has now resorted to the

unitary executive perspective. Recently, he branded his ramped up use of unitary

executive powers as “We Can’t Wait.” Frustrated with Congress’ inability to legislate

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he has executively ordered everything from the creation of jobs for veterans,

preventing drug shortages, raising fuel economy standards, curbing domestic

violence, and more. (Savage, 2012) The brand, “We Can’t Wait” and its obvious

narrowing of time to a more and more present is telling.

The implications for administrators cannot be overstated. As orders get handed

down, they may find themselves pressed to develop procedures and policies on the

fly. President Obama’s orders may have weight only until January of 2013. But even

if they endure longer until 2017, they will most certainly “expire” then. The issues

with signing statements are even more serious since they very much nibble at the

Court’s domain of judicial review.

Implications for Public Administration

The reason for a general lack of consideration for these larger issues open not

only political, but ethical issues as well, by public administration scholars is fairly

clear. Over the years of its development as a scholarly discipline, public

administration has also taken on an increasingly executive-‐centric perspective.

While this is not to deny that there is an effort to take in a larger picture of other

branches in a liberal democratic system, it is to suggest that such a picture has

become increasingly peripheral to that executive-‐centric focus.

If the logic of this paper is followed, it is hard to blame public administration

scholars since the discipline is only following a more general socio-‐economic trend

toward presentism that is part and parcel of an ongoing ICT ‘revolution’ that it is so

compatible with in the first place. Public administration, as it is part of an executive

branch, is more in tune with the times.

26

But even this is not without some serious implications. We take it as a given that

public and private administration are different because, foremost, the former occurs

in a political environment. However, as that political environment narrows down to

an executive-‐centric one where Congress is increasingly by-‐passed, that observation

begins to lose weight.

Following this hoary distinction between public and private administration,

consider Graham Alison’s classic, Fundamentally Alike in All Unimportant Ways.

There, he listed the differences noted by Dunlop and Neustadt between the public

and private sectors. At the top of both lists was the ‘time’ factor. Time was

considerably more constrained for administrators since they operated within the

(four-‐year) election cycle. It seemed patently evident that private sector actors

could move with deliberation and take as much time as needed to make the most

rational decision. Now, even a two-‐year election cycle now looks positively

luxurious in today’s socially/economically accelerated world where private sector

performance is judged quarterly and stock trades are paced in nanoseconds. The

most successful companies keep rolling out innovations on a demandingly fast pace.

The point is that the time available for dealing with problems in both the public

and private sector is more and more constrained. The private sector has met this

problem of constraint by accelerating and keeping pace in no small part because it is

setting it. Government has more difficulty because of the built-‐in design problems

discussed above.

A point relative to public administration proper should be made clear here. We

need to know more about how administrators are responding to the progressive

27

exercise of unitary executive powers. Clearly, there are issues here that are serious.

We can only speculate what some of these might be.

Though it is not the intent of this paper to thoroughly explore this issue, a brief

digression is in order here. With respect to signing statements that significantly

alter legislation (and thus legislative intent), major issues are likely to be the ethical

considerations of Constitutional roles. There may be those who argue that the

president is following his oath to that he “will to the best of my ability, preserve,

protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” by assuming a clearly

enumerated power in being chief executive. But there can be no doubt that this is

not what the Founders contemplated in vesting such power in the office. Clearly, the

use of signing states constitutes a movement away from democratically determined

and implemented legislation toward a model that is in more conformity with private

sector executive power. Administrators who believe in traditional checks and

balances and separation of powers are faced with a new dilemma in having to

decide to adhere to more monocratic (and thus bureaucratic) system of political

power. Moreover, since they do not operate in a political vacuum, they can be

construed by others as part of a clear political agenda which can undermine their

legitimacy.

As presidents exercise more executive power, they clearly have more investment

in the carrying out of their decisions. This inevitably leads to more centralization

and efforts to control from the top down—and more than likely in designated

important policies the use of appointee managers, a tension that has been in

evidence at least since Nixon. (Nathan, 1975) This will occur despite the fact that

28

Gilmour and Lewis (2006) provide good evidence that programs administered by

senior executives are “better managed.”

The charge that liberal democratic political institutions are becoming

increasingly relegated to irrelevancy in a socio-‐economically accelerated culture is

one that is being echoed by others in a much sharper way than Scheuerman argues.

For example, Leccardi (2003) referring to Castells’ work on ‘the rise of network

society’ and his observance of the collapse of time into smaller and smaller pieces

where “this type of present creates the conditions of for a drying-‐up of subjectivity

(and along the way, ethics and politics).” (Without temporalized time, there is no

possibility of creatively working on the world.” (36) Similarly, Marden (2003)

writes of the ‘decline of politics’ in the face of a globalizing, spatializing economy.

Affirming the penetration of the social into the political Boggs (2000) writes that the

deterioration of politics [H]as taken place during a period of accelerated growth not

only of the national economy but of higher education, informational resources, and

communications. (viii) We need look no further than the inability of those outside

the Tea Party to achieve any rapproachement with the most recent delegation

elected to the House. They send a clear message that all that counts is the present—

a compromise and then working over time appears to be consistently off the table.

Of course this is only one example of the gridlock that progressively characterizes a

system that wants all or nothing now. The result is a system that lurches from one

crisis to another.

Only a bit less strident, Hassan (2009) observes:

29

“Short-‐termism becomes the norm for planning and legislation, with there

being insufficient time to properly research, debate, and analyse the possible

consequences of legislation before it is enacted. Montesquieu’s ‘checks and

balances’ are relentlessly weakened in the deregulatory process. Liberal

democratic politics in their transformation to neoliberal organizations have

left the market to operate and globalize according to its own unpredictable

logics.” (182)

Elsewhere, Rifkin (2002) suggests the nation state is beginning to “crumble,”

that culture is now being absorbed into commerce (as in “social acceleration”) and

that the only possibility for politics is to recognize the traditional communities that

are defined by geography where presumably, attachments to others are built on the

same foundation. This, of course, flies in the face of most everything that is

happening.

Conclusion

In an online story published by Wired (UK), Matt Honan wrote about the

unveiling of “Google Island” by Google founder Larry Page’s (a Google founder)

during his keynote at the Google I/O meeting here in San Francisco at the Moscone

Center. Too much to explain here except in broad stokes, Google Island is a complex

virtual world where as Page explained according to Honan, the entire world might

look like “Places where there are no laws …. If you look at the laws we have, they’re

very old. A law can’t be right if its 50 years old. Like, it’s before the Internet. Here,

put on these glasses.” Page specifically referred to templates like contemporary

Somalia and Kenya.

30

One could perhaps argue that Page’s comments are not much different from

those made by President Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address where he opined

that government ‘was the problem.’ But to go one step further and say Somalia is a

template, Page takes this opinion of a need for less government into a new realm,

one of the Internet I suppose. The point here is quite simple. Page’s audience was

vast—and far beyond the number who were actually at the meeting. Approximately

5,500 attended the conference in 2012 but that audience grew vastly by virtue of the

fact that it was streamed across the world. The point is that Google is not just

working with governments across the world by marketing sophisticated ICT

technologies—it is also telling an audience where those same governments may be

both an impediment or irrelevant to a world-‐wide audience. With respect to the

United States, our cultural narrative no longer extends back to the Founding period.

It is now defined as beginning with the Internet. The time-‐frame of problems

collapses.

The same argument could be made about the very different and equally erudite

Internet site, Ted.com. There in the content that is problem focused, an issue is

defined and a solution is explained in less than twenty minutes. Frequently the

political content of Ted.com is optimistic if not utopian—less frequently dysutopian.

Dysutopian content works better in entertainment media. But Ted.com’s form of

twenty minutes or less dictates the content and causes even complex problems to

collapse into tighter and tighter time frames—more and more into presentism.

Or, the same argument could be made in observing the 2011 advice of Jim

Connolly that if they were looking for “…posts that will score well for relevant key

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phrases, I believe it makes sense to shoot for longer, information rich posts; 400

words plus.”

Segal’s (2005) work on technological utopianism as an aspect of American

culture suggests the idea goes back at least to the middle of the nineteenth century.

So, ideas about the technological sublime are not new in the US. What is new about

the new technological sublime is that it is occurring in a time where our cultural

narrative is progressively being collapsed into one of presentism. If it is the case that

that form of utopianism always diminished the role of government—it was

government after we achieved a utopian vision. Now, the technology is increasingly

making politics irrelevant in the collapsed present.

Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our brains.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Castells, Manuel. 2010. The Rise of the Network Society. Second Edition.

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Connolly, Jim. 2011. “How Long Does a Blog Post Need to Be?

http://www.internetmarketingjam.com/content-‐marketing/how-‐long-‐does-‐a-‐blog-‐

post-‐need-‐to-‐be/

Diamandis, Peter H. and Stephen Kolter. 2012. Abundance: The Future is

Better than You Think. New York: Free Press, 2012

Englander, John. 2012. High Tide on Main Street: Rising Sea Level and the

Coming Coastal Crisis. Boca Raton, FL: The Science Bookshelf.

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Evans, James A. 2008. “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science

and Scholarship.” Science. 321 (July 18, 2008): 395-‐399.

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http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/engineering/infrastructure/a-‐

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Lives. New York: Routledge.

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1981 – 1982): 59-‐78

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http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-‐05/20/google-‐island

http://www.elon.edu/e-‐web/predictions/150/1830.xhtml

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Rifkin, Jeremy, 1989. Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New

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Rikin, Jeremy. 2002. “The Age of Access: The New Politics of Culture vs.

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at:

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Rushkoff, Douglas. 2013. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New

York: Penguin Group.

Savage, Charles. 2012. “Shift on Executive Power Lets Obama Bypass Rivals.”

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