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Parisian would endorse.1® “A man returning after years of absence would have known, with his eyes shut, that he was in that ancient capital and imperial city, Vienna.” To really get a feel for that age, watch just a few frames of Russian director Dizga Vertov’s jittery 1929 black and white film Man with a Movie Camera’, Each moment of the movie is alive with the tension of a new, rushing and industrial age. You won't be surprised Vertov’s list of requirements as he prepared to start filming began: “1. A rapid means of transportation.” His aim was to immortalize urban speed on the new medium film; he knew he needed to be fast.184 To know a city by it’s pace. Musil was touching something deep here, an instinct that beats in each of us and runs from this fact: The speed of an event affects how we perceive it. The difference between what you will notice when walking up a hill - chirping bugs, tiny rocks, changes in color and gradient - and driving up that hill is so complete as to be almost different experiences entirely.!®° When the whole world tumbles upon us at fiber-optic speed, when invasions and revelations and accidents all spread at the rate of WiFi or cell phone radiation, our sense of time blurs. You have to wonder what Simmel would have made of a smart phone. “It is not merely that the medium is the message, but the velocity of the medium,” Paul Virlio observed once in one of his many studies on speed and mind.1%6 Life in our connected age is both instant and always on, what Simmel might have called “the technique of network life.” This demolishes an older, easier sense of pace. Computers were once switched on at 9 and off at 5 — just like their human masters. But digital activity is constant now. The networks are paying attention all the time. They have to. Our machines - tractors and trains and cars - used to echo our pace of life. Now we echo theirs. The machines, the New Caste, the black boxes - they tick along constantly, ever faster. We rely on them, as we've seen, for our safety. We want them to be fast. To be instant. But what is this doing to us? Is completely unhooking us from any sense of time really a good idea? It was certainly true, as Brand insisted, that the Clock of the Long Now was meant as a reminder, as a kind of constant totem to the fact that we’re all just a small tick on 182 “Cities can be recognized”: Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities Vintage (1996) 3 183 To really get a feel: Vertov’s movie is shot in Moscow, Kiev, Odessa and Krakow. In 2003 The Cinematic Orchestra produced a modern soundtrack to accompany it. 184 “A rapid means”: Jonathan Dawson, “Dziga Vertov” Great Directors March 2003 Issue 25 185 Ajahn Brahm of the Buddhist Society of Western Australia tells a wonderful story in his Dharma talks about a day in which he decided not to be driven up the road to his monastery in Perth, but instead walked the road. He was flooded by the sensations of nature, all invisible from the inside of a car. One way to change your perspective, he means, is to change the speed at which you are moving through life. See the Buddhist Society of Western Australia website for a catalog of his talks. 186 “It is not merely that the medium”: Paul Virilio, Information Bomb trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2000), 141 131 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018363