Rush to nowhere
It was speed that sank the Titanic and it’s turbo-capitalism that’s consuming the earth – fast. Richard Swift wants to
slow down.

How corporations steal your time
What not to buy from the company store.

Boo to Captain Clock
Potentates and pencil-pushers try to regulate our time. Jay Griffiths celebrates the long history of subversion.

American karoshi
Matthew Reiss wonders why New Yorkers have borrowed from Tokyo the bright idea of working yourself to death.

RUSH TO NOWHERE – THE FACTS

Suffering and smiling
Dicing with death on the streets of Lagos, Nigeria, Ike Oguine observes a pitiless
race that’s run mostly at a standstill –
in traffic jams.

The hurried child
The faster you grow up, says Kathleen McDonnell, the more you have to leave behind.

Slow activism
Slow food, slow cities, less work... A guide to the practical possibilities.

Enclosing time
The anarchist who wanted to blow up Greenwich Mean Time may have been mad, but C Douglas Lummis thinks he was on to something.

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One should be careful when doing an issue of the NI not to climb on too high a horse. The very things you criticize in the wider world are often things that you are guilty of yourself. This issue, about our desire to go ever faster – a desire shaped in large part by turbo-capitalism and its technological possibilities – is a case in point.

I rail long and hard against the consequences of incessant speed-up. But am I one to talk? Most people don’t think of me as swift, despite my name. Teachers used to make bad jokes over the irony of it all. But sometimes I do go too fast: I don’t think enough about the small pleasures of the moment; I don’t fully appreciate what life is dishing up, jumping too quickly to what is coming next. It’s a common enough fault, I guess, but it can rob you of the potential happiness of the here and now.

A deferred pleasure is often a pleasure lost. One danger is that this becomes habit-forming. We end up skipping over the lingering sunset or the small kindnesses of a friend or neighbour, concentrating instead on the big dreams – financial success, status, the newest electronics or some other consumer goodie. While this helps to stoke the economy and propel us into a future of ever-expanding Gross Domestic Product, it also tends to submerge the things that make us more than simply worker-consumers. The seductions of ‘slowing down’ are more subtle but they are pleasures we at least have a chance of discovering for ourselves.

Richard Swift
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
rswift@newint.org