Immediacy

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."