There is no single point when modernity emerged. Already in the twelfth century, Peter of Blois proclaimed that the moderns had gone beyond the ancients: "We are like dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, thanks to them, we see further than they." Still, as late as the end of the sixteenth century, individuals widely believed that the golden age was in the past and that the world was decaying. [1]

A tipping point emerges in the seventeenth century. In 1605 Francis Bacon opens the century with the paradox: " Antiquitas saeculi juventus mundi," antiquity was the youth of the world: "[t]hese times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient, ordine retrogado, by a computation backward from ourselves." [2] Accumulation (of both knowledge and things), Bacon senses, is growing and with it, the present advances away from the past. At the time, primitive accumulation of capital was starting to concentrate wealth in the hands of a rising bourgeois class in Europe, the spread of print was making it possible for information to be rapidly shared while giving rise to new ways of thinking about the organization of information, and cracks were showing in the edifice of feudalism as power re-oriented around courtly life. [3] Although they were not able to conceive of modernity, individuals like Bacon could begin to glimpse themselves as having broken from the world that came before. The quickening pace of life and the advancement of knowledge opened up a rift with the past, prompting writers to forge new ideas about periodization.

Economic development advanced slowly in the seventeenth century, when it advanced at all, and progress was far from assured. But with the scientific method coming together for the first time to challenge natural philosophy and even, tentatively, Christianity as ways of knowing the world, the days of the past were numbered. Toward the end of the century, the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes directly called the past's preeminence into question. In his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, Charles Perrault declares the modern age to be superior; after all, it has taken place under the rule of Louis XIV, the "most perfect model of all kings." Nevertheless, for Perrault the consequence of living in a new golden age was that decline would soon follow: "We ourselves are the ancients," he suggested, in a tone more melancholy than Bacon's. But by invoking "the century of Louis the Great," Perrault wound up reframing the word siècle from in its traditional use of a generation or an age associated with one ruler to refer to a hundred year span that he identified as having a birth, character, and death. Others would soon build on this chronological framework and claim it for their own centuries. In the December 1699 issue of Le Mercure galant, the most popular French journal of its day, Jean Donneau de Visé, a man of letters, would anticipate the coming century and its distinct character. [4]

This new interest in understanding one's place historically accompanied a greater attention to timekeeping in everyday life. The clock, which Karl Marx describes in a letter to Friedrich Engels as "the first automatic machine applied to practical purposes," began to subject individuals to its unwavering order.[5] By the fifteenth century cities competed to build impressive public timepieces, leading to the identification of urban life with clock time.[6] Soon enough, household clocks and pocket-watches spread and time ceased to be the sole province of church and town. In England, priests began to keep registers of births, marriages, deaths as well as significant events in their parishes.[7] [8]

Well past the tipping point into modernization, the eighteenth century would witness industrialization, secularization, fundamental changes in class structure, even uprising and revolution. Reinhart Kosseleck suggests that European exploration and colonialism not only allowed capital to accumulate in Western Europe to such a degree that it helped fund the investment that produced the Industrial Revolution, it also spurred historical thinking and periodization. When intellectuals in the West observed what Kosseleck calls the "contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous," they came to understand that there was a lack of historical synchrony among cultures and, as a result, imputed to their own culture a universal world history with a trajectory of progress.[9] Compounding this, with the antiquarianism of the seventeenth century giving way to archeology, the scientific study of the past, notions spread that the present was greater than the past and that historical evolution was natural. [10] At the close of the eighteenth century, thought itself transformed, historical ways of understanding replacing the classical explanation of the order of things in terms of taxonomies.[11] If the moderns of the Querelle still understood power-and with it, history-to reside in the sovereign, the progress of the subsequent century gave rise to the faith the modern idea of progress and with it, the idea that the subject of history was not the sovereign, but man and his liberation.' From then on, the world would be apprehended historically.

The nineteenth century was ruled by historicism. Secularized versions of Christian eschatology, progress and evolution produced a faith immanent to an age in which Marx observed "all that is sold melts into air."[12] Being, in a worldview dominated by historicism, was becoming. For Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield the nineteenth century is nothing less than "the Century of History" and this extends both backward and forward.^[13] To many of those living in the maelstrom, change was constant and radical, and it seemed plausible to imagine that one day soon, the good news would come and modernization would be complete, delivering paradise on Earth.^[14] Knowledge was thoroughly historical. Take Michel Foucault's "founders of discursivity," the thinkers who established the key discourses of modernism: Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, but also Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Charles Darwin, and Heinrich Wölfflin. Their discourses were all historical. [15]

One strain of modernism-epitomized by Futurism and dada but also by Soviet Communism-calls for the violent collapse of existing temporality, a break within time that ends continuity, and the unequivocal death of past orders. Even this project, however, relies on a historical model. Like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, the twentieth century moderns ameliorate the disorienting nature of change by grounding the present in a historical continuum with a telos. A direction is key, be it the emancipation of the rational subject, the liberation of the oppressed worker, the reunion of thinking and feeling through design, or the development of advanced technologies.

The moderns live in a world of the past, occupying what Jameson calls "a culture of incomplete modernization." [16] Not only is history the mode by which they justify themselves, it is the context in which they operate. Even as industrialization makes the life of the countryside obsolete, the latter is nonetheless still vividly present in modernity. The time of longue durée, the "Long Middle Ages" for Le Goff was not so much an era, but a civilization coexisting with the city. Le Goff suggests that the Long Middle Ages last until the nineteenth century, when modernity takes hold, but it's clear that they still remained, in pockets, well into the twentieth century.[17] For example, take Pierre Nora's observation that even at the end of World War II some 50% of France remained agricultural. Modernity was predicated on the division between a new, vital urban life and a dying, old countryside, the former inconceivable without the latter. Nor was the rural world forgotten to those who had left it for the city. After all, no mater how great the depictions of city life by the likes of Edward Degas and Georges Seurat, the afterimage of the countryside recorded by Vincent Van Gogh and Gustave Courbet was no less compelling and no less an image of modernity. After all, it is the backwardness of the countryside that leads the displaced peasantry to the city, that "consumer of men," in which they would become the urban proletariat, the diversity of their experiences a constituent part of the modern city's engine.[18]

Beyond the lingering persistence of rural ways of life, the moderns daily confront the detritus of the existing city, rapidly becoming antique. Wandering the detritus of early capitalism, they dreamt a world already modern. Here we could do little better than to turn to Walter Benjamin's description of the century-old Paris Arcades as the "ruins of the bourgeoisie." Paraphrasing Jules Michelet's observation that "each epoch dreams the one to follow," Benjamin elaborate, "in dreaming, [each epoch] precipitates its [successor's] awakening." ^[19]

Take Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's 1919 photomontage of his competition entry for the skyscraper on Berlin's Friedrichstrasse or Le Corbusier's photomontage of the Plan Voisin six years later. In both cases, the architect represents the existing city but proposes a dramatic rupture within it, a caesura that takes place not only in terms of the project proposed but also in the form of its representation. The crystalline modernist structures are of a different order entirely than the existing city, harbingers of an aesthetic, technological, and even political transformation that would one day be total, but still co-existed with the old city. In these photomontages, the modern object promises that the nineteenth-century city is a ruin that soon would be swept away. Just as Cubism preserves the corpse of the past by showing traces of representation, these architects had little choice but to acknowledge the persistence of the past: it was all around them. If nothing else, their experimentation was a Freudian process of working through, allowing the modernist subject to break free of the past by confronting it.[20] Such was modernism at its apogee, becoming rather than being, full of hope and promise for a new world.

Ernst Bloch sees modernism as the outcome of this clash of conflicting historical realities, the "simultaneity of the non-simultaneous." [21] In affirming modernity, the moderns set out to level the remnants of both court and church, deterritorializing the world they found and reterritorializing it with tools immanent to it. Still, as Perry Anderson points out, the term modernism is too broad.[22] It is a straw man coming late to the scene to reduce the diversity of the preceding era for ideological purposes.[23] After all, for many "modernists," modernity's promise was far from Utopian. Rather, in sweeping away the ancient structures of the premodern together with the obsolete traces of early modernity, progress threatened no end. At the end of his life, Benjamin saw modernity's progress as nothing less than a storm, "one single catastrophe," violently throwing up a growing pile of debris and wreckage.[24] Nor was he alone: negation was as an important a strain in modernism as the Utopian imagination. If the past was a heavy burden for some, its disappearance was traumatic for others-van Gogh or Marcel Proust for that matter-who registered the passing of a world. Still, whether figured as Utopia or negation, fear of the future or not, at base modernism assured itself that modernization had begun, a preliminary rupture with history had opened up that would be completed in the form of a second rupture that could only emerge when modernization was over.

But that moment has long since passed. With modernization over, so is our experience of modernity. As capital and the metropolis came to dominate all aspects of life, the lived experience of the pre-modern came to an end and with it too, the experience of modernization. The messianic promise of the disenchantment of the world, liberating us from the worship of ancestors and spirits failed to deliver us Utopia, even as modernity triumphed, obliterating the past. It is in this sense that at the close of the century, T. J. Clark inverts Bacon's paradox, declaring "Modernism is our antiquity." Once modernity fully arrives, Clark concludes, modernism becomes unintelligible: "the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are unreadable."[25]

As modernization completes in the West after World War II, modernism associates itself directly with capitalism. Communism had been irreparably damaged by Stalinism and many leftist modernists-from Walter Gropius to Clement Greenberg-saw compromise with liberal corporatism as an acceptable form of collectivism. Having lost their faith in an alternative order, these bureaucraticized moderns turned to affirming the status quo instead, negotiating improvements within the liberal postwar state, an aesthetic parallel to the end of ideology that Daniel Bell observed in political history. [26] But theirs was not so much a Utopia as a damaged condition: unwilling to produce a rupture within modernism, unable to claim that modernism could end the alienation created by mass-produced society, they could only deploy abstract, formal strategies for mediation and call for the autonomy of art even as that too was rapidly dissipating.

Such late modernism corresponds to a first phase of Ernest Mandel's late capitalism, the era in which capital finished colonizing the remaining pre-capitalist enclaves. Although Mandel identified those enclaves with the primitive agricultural areas of the developing world, Jameson understood postmodernism as the effect of capital's colonization of culture.[27] The postwar culture industry would be informed by the techniques of modernism while art would allow capitalism in, most clearly in pop art's direct references to the culture industry.

Employing intensity as a model of historical succession allows us to leave behind postmodernism's account of itself as a rupture with modernism to see it instead as a state in which culture is resynchronized with a modernized world. ^[1] Turning to Jameson's reading of postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, we can understand it as the era after transactions between culture and capital reach a tipping point and culture ceases to be a refuge from economy. In Jameson's model, with everything subject to being quantified and exchangeable for money or other items, there can be no exterior to capital, no place from which to critique or observe it. As a consequence, postmodern culture loses all meaning, any existential ground outside the market. Depth, and with it emotion, vanishes, to be replaced by surface effects and intensities. In this condition, even alienation is no longer possible. The subject becomes schizophrenic, lost in late capital's hyperspace.

Art under postmodernism is not just an industry but an investment market, and artists react by intermingling the high and low. With the art market demanding easy reproducibility and marketing and with authenticity and autonomy bankrupt as viable places of resistance, some artists begin to play with simulation and reproduction. Others, finding themselves unable to reflect directly on the condition of late capital but still wanting to comment on it, turned to allegory, foregrounding the fragmentary and incomplete nature of their work.[2]

With modernization complete, a historical progression towards a telos no longer makes sense. Read in this light, the postmodern attack on periodization and on master narratives changes from a decisive historiographic victory to a symptom of changed conditions. Take Jean-François Lyotard's definition of postmodernism as the product of the exhaustion of metanarratives, those historical arguments that modern forms of knowledge-such as science, philosophy, government, or economics-relied upon to legitimate their authority. Lyotard argues that growing scientific knowledge not only discredits the metaphysical positions these narratives are based on, its highly specialized nature means that knowledge is fragmented into a myriad of heterogeneous and incommensurable discourses. Postmodernism, he concludes, is "an incredulity toward metanarratives." [3]

But for Jameson, postmodernism's loss of historical grounding isn't limited to metanarratives: postmodern culture as a whole is defined by the "waning of historicity."[4] Irretrievably ruptured by modernization's end, history ceases to not only be a source of legitimacy, it ceases to be a lived reality. So if we follow Clark to admit that modernity is postmodernism's antiquity, any lived relationship to a deeper past is lost for good. More than that, Leo Marx observes, under postmodernism, progress is no longer assured. ^[5] Between 1960 and 1990, relatively slow technological advancement marks everyday life while continued environmental degradation, the end of the postwar boom, and the collapse of industry in much of the developed world hint that progress itself may have come to an end.

Jameson observes that unlike the moderns, postmoderns are more distracted, observing the new, but not making much of it. If postmodernism abandons historical narratives, save for the break with modernism, it still obsessively seeks to understand itself as a historical condition through theoretical means. No matter how damaged, history is fundamental to postmodernism. Unable to embrace progress or accept telos in historical narrative, postmodernist theory turns modernism's screws tighter, exacerbating the contradiction at root of modernism's historical conception of itself. Take the sentence with which Jameson opens up his book Postmodernism, or the Logic of Late Capitalism: "It is safest to grasp the concept of the postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place." [6]

As its architectural manifestation shows, postmodernism's break with the teleological history of modernism manifests itself as nostalgia for the outmoded and with the heroic period of modernism as well as with antiques and thrift store chic. Retro spreads through films such as Chinatown, American Graffiti, Grease, Animal House, the Sting, or Ragtime. Even science fiction appeals to the past by referring to earlier genres, such as the 1930s Flash Gordon serials that George Lucas emulates in Star Wars or the Hollywood noir that Ridley Scott recapitulates in Blade Runner.[7]

With Ezra Pound's injunction to "make it new" suspect and new technologies of reproduction emerging, appropriation becomes a key aspect of postmodernism with many artists adopting the role of Roland Barthes's mythographer, taking entire signs (that is, a signifier-signified pair) to reduce them to signifiers as a means of demystifying ideological beliefs. Thus, in reappropriating the Farm Security Administration photographs of rural white farmers in the American south by Walker Evans, Sherri Levine reframes them, challenging both the construction of artistic authenticity and Evans's own reduction of poverty to formal qualities while in her Untitled Film Stills Cindy Sherman points to a complex web of desire, social construction, and filmic genre that underscores the postmodern subject's existence in a thoroughly mediatized condition. [8] The architectural parallel is the mannerist appropriation of the formal language of the heroic modernism of the 1920s by the New York Five as well as by Rem Koolhaas, Bernard Tschumi, and Zaha Hadid. For all of these architects, the forms and imagery to point to the loss of the Utopian impulse in modernism.

Like modernism, postmodernism is hardly monolithic: a conservative strain promises to suture over the rifts of modernity and return to tradition even as populists seek a rapprochement between architecture and everyday life in the free combination of elements from history and popular culture. Jencks, the foremost proponent of populist postmodernism, describes the latter as double-coded, setting out to communicate with its public even as it addresses an architectural audience through a game of quotation.[9]

Whatever its allegiances, postmodernism operates in the wake of a doubled trauma, both the rupture with the modern and the modernism's break with history. Perhaps a need to reconstruct totality in the wake of trauma forces postmodernism to periodization, but either way Jameson, Lyotard, and the other postmodernists forge a new master narrative around networks of multinational capitalism.[10] Moreover, by embracing theory as a more complete form of demystification than historiography ever could be, postmodernism takes on the mantle of a master narrative, replaying yet again the Enlightenment idea of liberation through rational discourse and demystification.

That networks underlie postmodernism only demonstrates the mechanism of Michelet's dream at work again. The role of networks could only be anticipated in postmodern culture, the Internet still confined to small circles, not yet privatized or significantly colonized by capital and mobile technology was still new.^[11] Moreover, the complicated nature of network culture-for example, the growth of open source software, the rise of knowledge workers, the widespread piracy of informational commodities, the importance of bottom-up production, and the rapid decline of traditional informational industries such as newspapers-could not yet be foreseen. In the end, just as postmodernity emerges only when the process of modernization is complete, network society can only come after postmodernity has run its course. Today the fragmentation of the sign, the end of the subject, and the dissolution of any sense of authenticity in media are not traumatic conditions to work through but rather fait accompli. If postmodernism celebrates the shattering of the subject, network culture takes that shattering as a given.

Network culture eschews rupture, its atemporality intensifying attitudes anticipated-but not realized-within modernism and postmodernism. Where postmodernism seeks the Oedipal theater of overturning modernism, network culture just doesn't care. Postmodernism is extinguished, but its disappearance takes place with neither a celebration nor a whimper.

Instead of returning to the heroic avant-garde as the New York Five or their counterparts at the Architectural Association did, network culture turns towards a gentle, domestic modernism. With modernism's utopian claims long forgotten, architecture becomes a pleasant and relaxing way of life, a neutral and neutered style for an oversaturated world populated with high-tech objects. Where the computers of the 1980s and 1990s were beige boxes with rounded corners that seek to hide their technological origins, the industrial designs of the iconic computers of our day are modernist, epitomized by the polished aluminum and black glass surfaces of Jonathan Ive, the head of design at Apple Computer who unabashedly derives his designs from the work of Dieter Rams at Braun.^[12] But neo-modernism under network culture lacks either nostalgia or utopian ambition. It is decorative not symbolic: today neo-modernism, tomorrow mid-twentieth-century hunting lodge or French country style. The postmodernist idea of style as fashion returns, but any sense of positioning within temporality is foreign. The British firm FAT-Fashion Architecture Taste-are the foremost exponents of this turn, deploying figurative and eclectic forms to tweak the remaining boundaries of taste and vulgarity.

Domestic modernism is accompanied by the virtuoso architectural performances of iconic monuments. Where modernist monuments pointed to a fully modernized future, today's iconic buildings point only to their own shape, at most celebrating the technological difficulty of their construction. Far from Bruno Taut's statdtkrone, such structures don't act as a collective focal point for a city or a transformation of the order around them but rather symbolize that the city around them is plugged in globally, its business leaders hip enough to cater to the creative class. Created entirely within computer software, such buildings are a physical realization of the arcologies that William Gibson describes in Neuromancer, erupting into the city as markers of informational wealth.

Still, there is a peculiar connection between network culture and temporality: progress has come back. With the rapid pace of technological changes of the last decades we have ample reason to believe that the future will be different as a result of technology. Our version of the new is denatured, a fascination with fashion and new technologies, not the transformative promise of modernism. Rather than affirming our connection to the modern, neo-modernism only shows our distance from it.

Even as historians abandon master narratives and other disciplines turning away from historical models of explanation, a historical narrative is still subtly in play, this time as a means of legitimating neoliberalism. In this model, given form by Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man, the end of history validates Margaret Thatcher's slogan "There is no alternative." But where the postmodernist Thatcher is insisting on neoliberalism as the only operative political position, Fukuyama and the neoliberals of our day argue that all other alternatives are shut down. For Fukuyama, Hegel's idea of history as progress comes to an end after the collapse of Communism and the worldwide adoption of neoliberalism as a political ideology.^[1]

Jean Baudrillard, too, suggests that history has come to an end with the collapse of Communism, although he sees it causing the exhaustion of meaning and the heat death of civilization. Bereft of any direction toward an alternative or a future, Baudrillard concludes, history inevitably starts counting down toward the only remaining reference point, the only final possible moment of collective historical consciousness, the millennium. With the countdown complete, history expires and any sense of sequence is utterly undone: "the history of this century has already come to an end, because we are reliving it interminably and because, therefore, metaphorically speaking, we shall never pass on into the future."[2] 2000, for Baudrillard is not an end, but rather stands for the "illusion of the end." ^[3]

Beyond the collapse of the East bloc, Baudrillard sees the end of history as the product of the oversaturation of information: the endless, rapid circulation of signs undoes our capacity to make meaning out of life and prevents us from ordering time. Baudrillard explains

Now, through the impulse for total dissemination and circulation, every event is granted its own liberation; every fact becomes atomic, nuclear, and pursues its trajectory into the void. In order to be disseminated to infinity, it has to be fragmented like a particle. … No human language can withstand the speed of light. No event can withstand acceleration. No history can withstand the centrifugation of facts or their being short-circuited in real time…[4]

If both the contemporary city and information storage technologies produce hyperdensity, the omnipresence of the network, the spread of globalization, and the urbanization of the globe lead to a condition of equivocation, of horizontal spread and sameness. Information is simultaneously overdense and overdispersed. With everything available to us, our reaction is indifference. The wealth of "real time" information only amplifies this, Baudrillard concludes: "if we want immediate enjoyment of the event, if we want to experience it at the instant of its occurrence, as if we were there, this is because we no longer have any confidence in the meaning or purpose of the event." ^[5]

For Baudrillard, the closure of history marks not the triumph of the fittest but the onset of an era of "obscenity," governed by "an endless, unbridled proliferation of the social, of the political, of information, of the economic, of the aesthetic, not to mention, of course, the sexual." In this oversaturated condition, the result is nothingness, in which concepts can't be formed. ^[6]

Compelling as Baudrillard's analysis is, it leaves us with little prospect of analyzing network culture. Our ability to sequence time is undone, but this doesn't mean that we cease to exist. As Sterling suggests, network culture isn't a nihilistic chaos, it has distinct cultural manifestations produced by the collapse of the past and the future into the present. Such temporality may best be represented by the television show Lost in which the temporal sequence of the narrative is undone in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards. Instead of postmodern hyperspace, we have network culture's hypertime. Take the cinematic Matrix trilogy, in which the present is only a simulation produced by a dystopian future or novels like Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, cyberpunk author William Gibson turns away from projecting the future to carefully describing the just-past, a year or two before their date of publication. But network culture is marked less by science fiction and more by fantasy films such as the Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. Where J. R. R. Tolkien's trilogy was an allegory for total war-remembered in the Second World War and feared in the Cold War-the cinema version is a simulation of an alternate reality, temporally out of sequence with ours.

Our new attitude toward the past is the product of a change in memory. New technologies make it possible for us to displace our memory into the database. The increase in inexpensive forms of data storage-both in terms of free online e-mail services with high storage quotas and portable hard drives-allow us to keep records of everything. A particular event becomes unnecessary when it has been recorded in our e-mail program or calendar and can be recalled at a moment's notice. Much as Plato suggested that writing was simultaneously a poison and cure in allowing humans to record information on paper instead of committing it to memory, fast, inexpensive storage makes the past accessible to us even as it undoes our need to conceptualize it in our heads. We no longer have to remember what the past is like when we can see it in a proliferation of time-stamped digital images.

The changes in memory also affect the physical past: until the advent of the global market on the Internet, collecting traces of the past required effort and threatened failure. The past hid in used bookstores and antique shops, necessitating that collectors seek out such places. Today, however, the past is readily available via eBay and other online venues. Generations of historians have scoured the world's archives. The past no longer waits to be discovered and exposed, it becomes a matter of connoisseurship instead. This is the past we see in the television show Mad Men, in which the historical reconstruction is not so much a matter of nostalgia as of a game of obsessive reconstruction, which is then immediately annotated and, as necessary, corrected at Web sites like the Footnotes of Mad Men.^[7]

Under network culture, the past is revealed as ambiance, an environmental quality to be experienced. Take fashion, for example: the late 1990s and early 2000s are dominated by the supermodernist approach of haute-couture firms like Prada, Dolce and Gabbana, and Gucci, which used new fabrics and methods to produce clothing designed with performance in mind, but during the later part of the 2000s, fashion turns toward heritage, reviving classic brands like Filson, L. L. Bean, and Land's End, thereby turning obsolescence into commodified "trad." Unlike the 1980s preppy movement, this heritage turn makes no claim to class status or to continuity with existing traditions. Rather its fitted cuts indicate the arrival on American shores of a fascination with Ivy-League-college life that first emerges in Japan in the 1960s. ^[8] Although the heritage fashion movement relies on an obsessive knowledge of vintage styles, materials and techniques only possible under network culture, the past has also been thoroughly remade: items re-created with painstaking detail even as unfashionable flaws are removed, materials and cuts improved. The poverty of the past is as foreign to us as the smell of cigarette smoke that would have filled the offices of Sterling Cooper.

In our day, Bruno Latour writes

… we have changed time so completely that we have shifted from the time of Time to the time of Simultaneity. Nothing, it seems, accepts to simply reside in the past, and no one feels intimidated any more by the adjectives "irrational," "backward" or "archaic". Time, the bygone time of cataclysmic substitution, has suddenly become something that neither the Left nor the Right seems to have been fully prepared to encounter: a monstrous time, the time of cohabitation. Everything has become contemporary.^[9]

Our everyday experience of temporality has changed. Through the Internet, computers and mobile phones synchronize their internal clocks to accurate timeservers, establishing a common time with a degree of precision that only recently was reserved for scientists and the military.

This new degree of precision belies the looseness that technology makes possible. The strict regimentation of time under modernity-represented first by the pocket watch and then by the wristwatch-is undone. Modernity is marked by the rise of bureaucratized culture, timetables, schedules, event, appointments and the measure of time, a rationalized temporality from the railway station to everyday life. Although the omnipresent display of time on computer screens and cell phones may suggest a surfeit of time, mobile telephony also undoes the practical need for precise scheduling. Instead of planning to meet each other at a precise time and place, friends can easily make rough plans to meet and then get in touch with each other to coordinate the logistics, even choosing a time and a place while in transit. Mobile phones allow our schedules to soften: when running late, we can contact the other party to advise them. If time used to serve as a mediating device between two parties, mobile telephony allows more efficient continuous and direct contact between them.[10] With time both pervasive and more fluid, wristwatches are becoming superfluous, little more than fashion accessories.[11]

In part, the new looseness in time is due to the increasing demands of business for temporal flexibilty. The rigid modernist workday dissolves under network culture: constant on-the-go connectivity and globalization mean that the rigid division between work time and leisure time is undone. Workers take care of personal tasks and respond to personal e-mails during work time, but they are also asked to be always on call, always in touch. [12] In addition, a globalized world demands rapid response during what had previously been off hours, and for many, frequent travel across time zones. Instead of feeling prisoners to an inflexible system, workers are subject to oversaturation. ^[13] It's hardly any wonder that we lose the ability to sequence.

We can see the anti-temporal nature of network culture in its most distinct literary form, the blog. Organized as a Web site composed of a series of time-stamped posts, the newest first, older ones cascading downwards in reverse chronological order, blogs at first appear to have a temporal organization, but this is a ruse. By presenting material in reverse chronological order, blogs undo any potential narrative effect. In practice, one reads an unfamiliar blog in reverse, looking at the most recent post and then, if captivated, scrolling down a bit. Following a blog means catching it in mid-stream, skimming a little off the top and then adding it to an aggregator where it can be read in the future. Past entries are little more than an archive to direct traffic to the site via search engines.

Blogs are non-chronous: the precision of the time stamp is meaningless and, in general, bears little relationship to the actual chronological time (the exception being if the blog post corresponds directly to an event-generally a crisis of some sort-taking place in real time). Moreover, even the utility of the sequence is undone by uneven posting practices on different blogs. As one blogger posts much more than another, the latter's older posts may appear newer than the former's since greater frequency of posting ages older posts more rapidly. [14]

The changes in temporality that mark network culture are not without their effects for politics. When becoming is replaced by being, the possibility of transformation also disappears.^[15] But where the reactionary strain in postmodernism stressed a return to family values, today we have left only what Mark Fisher dubs "capitalist realism." ^[16] The new realism eschews the need for legitimation or critique. It just is, positing no alternative. The critique of industrial society's homogeneity that was common in art under modernism and postmodernism is now absorbed into management theory, the alienated factory worker replaced by the knowledge worker with the "freedom" of job flexibility (which also means no benefits or job security) and the privilege of self-expression as a member of the creative class. ^[17]

Today's self emerges from the network, not so much a whole individual as a composite entity constituted out of the links it forms with others, a mix of known and unknown others it links to via the Net.^[1] As its ground, instead of immediate, lived experience, the contemporary subject relies on the immediated real, a condition in which mediation is a given and life becomes a form of performance, constantly lived in a culture of exposure in exchange for self-affirming feedback. ^[2]

John Tomlinson comes to a similar conclusion about immediacy as the defining condition of twenty-first century life. Tomlinson observes that we've become accustomed to instant connection and rapid gratification. Our economy and work culture not only sustains but constantly accelerates this state. If this is still rather close to the mechanical speed of the moderns, he argues, immediacy also implies proximity, the disappearance of a middle term (Tomlinson observes that the Latin "immediatus" means not separated). Under network culture we experience the "'closure of the gap' that has historically separated now from later, here from elsewhere, desire from satisfaction," the gap that was the very aim of modernization to close. Invoking Zygmunt Bauman's idea of a "fluid modernity," Tomlinson posits that the melting of solids is no longer just a stage on the way to a newer condition, but rather is an end in itself. Tomlinson concludes, as I do, that immediacy invokes the powerful role of media in the way we shape our lives. Although these last two terms appear contradictory, he writes, electronic media hide their status as media, seeking to become a seamless part of lived experience.^[3]

The collapse of time has also led to crisis in capital, which always relied on temporal progression for its profit model. Postmodernity marks not only the end of modernization, it marks the end of manufacturing as the dominant sector of capital. Network culture, in turn, marks the end of knowledge work and the service industries. Like industry, these couldn't offer enough profit for spectaculars demanding ever-accelerating rates of return. Instead, capital is dominated by financialization, investment aiming to produce profit with no intermediary commodity. Today, Marx's old model of M-C-M' becomes M-M'.^[4] At the highest levels, the levels that dominate the economy, capital is speculative, a game of time given over to ultra-high speed networks.

With capital unable to rely on tried temporal models, crisis results. During both the dot.com bubble that marked the start of network culture and the more recent real estate bubble, analysts ran economic models that discounted older data, feeding their models only information from the recent past, leading to the conclusion that prices of securities or real estate could only go up. ^[5] Since these models proved faulty, capital now turns to new forms of trading that take advantage of the immediate present to extract profits at a speed that no human can process. High-frequency trading dominates the market, as investors in possession of massive amounts of capital seek to hide their trades by atomizing them over a short period of time with software that distributes the trades in minute quantities. Such investors hope to mask their decisions, thus taking advantage of lower buying and higher trading prices while algorithmic traders seek to identify high frequency trades, buying and sell shares to produce profit at the expense of the high frequency traders. All this takes place at the level of milliseconds. With 70% of trading now high frequency or algorithmic, the exchange's trading floor becomes obsolete except as theater. No human can participate in such trading once they have given an overall command to buy or sell. Instead, computers talk to computers in data centers located at an intersection of real estate prices and network speed. The fastest algorithms, most-efficient machines, and lowest latency networks win. Time is all-important in trading today but it is a time at a scale no human can conceive of. We stand at the event-horizon of capital, at the point in which time is thoroughly compressed, unable to see any further. ^[6]

Regardless of whether network culture will lead to what Gopal Balakrishnan calls the "stationary state"-a protracted period dominated by a damaged capitalism, generating profits at ever higher levels of complexity-whether that complexity will lead to collapse, or whether as Sterling suggests, it will come to an end in a decade or so when we surpass it by learning to live more in tune with the network is still unclear. ^[7] Still, if our goal is to develop a political strategy for network culture or simply to find a way to map it, we need to face up to the temporal condition of the present and, as I have suggested in this essay, go against the grain to instead follow Jameson's imperative of dialectical thought: "Always historicize!" ^[8] For as Neo learns from the Oracle in Matrix Revolutions, "everything that has a beginning has an end."