Adam describes how modern efforts at time-control have undermined time-control: “For clock time to exist and thus to be measurable and controllable there has to be duration, an interval between two points in time. Without duration there is no before and after, no cause and effect, no stretch of time to be measured.”

With the development of transportation and communication technologies, intervals have been reduced to the vanishing point:

“The control of time that has reached the limit of compression has been shifted into a time where notions of control are meaningless.” In the electronic world, information is transferred and power is exercised from no-where (where is the Internet?), in a state of perpetual simultaneity, a now-here, and the no-where and now-here have become interchangeable. The “knowledge and modes of being” demanded in this new world “are alien to the industrial way of life,” organized by clock-time.

Adam sees analogies to “the realm of myths and mysticism,” which may ofer “more appropriate ways of being in the realm of instantaneity.”

This is very perceptive, and gets at key elements of the social reality sometimes described as post-modernity: In some ways, we’re talking about hyper-modernity - speed and modern time-control carried to its extreme. But hyper-modernity undermines modernity - absolute speed is absolute stasis, since there is no interval between here and there, now and then. And once we approach absolute speed, we’re losing control, since our time-piece has nothing left to measure. And this technologically-achieved hyper-modernity opens up interest in primitive mysticisms.

Vapor of vapors.