Hartmut Rosa’s Social Acceleration Theory: A New Critical Theory of Modernity

Technological acceleration, which is supposed to produce innovations that give you more free time, does the opposite. Acceleration does not release us from speed but always seeks more speed. Gaining more time through acceleration will demand that time be filled with more actions, not fewer.

Acceleration also leads to exhaustion – because humans aren’t a version of Moore’s Law, where the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every 2 years, increasing speed and lowering price. Humans sometimes need to slow down. We run out of ideas.

The innovation of a meditation app allows for the quick convenience of dealing with acceleration itself. It doesn’t, however, promise to shift people away from the need for speed and the potential staleness that speed produces. It doesn’t oppose acceleration, but it does provide a way to quickly cope with the rushing pace of modernity.

Rosa shows how speeding up molds our cultural realities by affecting our sense of identity, even shifting our sense of the good life.

This leads Rosa to see three interlaced, interconnected, and mutually penetrating dimensions that are the source of our speed-up: technological acceleration, acceleration of social life, and acceleration of the pace of life