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Expanding Spacetime
Jun. 2nd, 2019 08:35 pm If I had drawn a tarot card this morning, I must have gotten the Chariot reversed. First thing I see on Google Maps is that the red line is blocked; a train has stalled out at Alewife and though crews are working on it, expect delays. Later, in a fit of nostalgia over my morning coffee I attempt to open my Google Drive folder and root through my writings from high school. The loading wheel spins and spins, before the page spits out the cryptic "504 Bad Gateway" message, an undiagnosable symptom, even for the tech savvy. It seems that all Google services are down; crews are working on it, but expect delays.
The Google outage is much more troubling than the T outage. The T grants access to space; the used book store I was planning to check out that morning now rendered inaccessible. My world shrinks to a mile radius. Which isn't that bad, as that radius includes an H-mart. But the Google outage denies access to the traversal of time, which we now take for granted. My high school writings are as inaccessible to me as the moon; I have only the dim glow of memory's light as a reminder of the things I once thought and felt.
David Harvey characterizes the condition of postmodernity as the compression of time and space. Global capital moves goods across the globe in a matter of days, and capital itself moves across wires in a matter of milliseconds. I must admit, I have yet to read Harvey's book; it sits on a shelf back in my parents' home, and my knowledge of it is limited to secondary sources. But I do wonder if there is a distinction between compression and traversal. And if compression is simply a result of traversal, why not focus study on traversal? Compression and traversal of space are easy to equate. The train stops running, so my subjective space expands. It starts running again, and the space between me and the used bookstore is shrunk down to nothing. But time is a little bit trickier to analyze time as such. Without technology, traversal into the past is all but nonexistent. And the advancement of technology does not compress the past closer to us, at least not in a literal way. Instead, technology increases the quality of backwards temporal traversal; as more data is captured, the picture of the past that we can construct becomes fuller (I know that this is a very debatable assumption). So maybe the right way to think about it is not that postmodernity compresses time, but that postmodernity makes increasingly possible the conditions from which time can be traversed and thus compressed.
But now the T is running again, and my world has compressed sufficiently for me to make that bookshop run. Maybe in the evening, I'll be able to travel back in time as well.
The Google outage is much more troubling than the T outage. The T grants access to space; the used book store I was planning to check out that morning now rendered inaccessible. My world shrinks to a mile radius. Which isn't that bad, as that radius includes an H-mart. But the Google outage denies access to the traversal of time, which we now take for granted. My high school writings are as inaccessible to me as the moon; I have only the dim glow of memory's light as a reminder of the things I once thought and felt.
David Harvey characterizes the condition of postmodernity as the compression of time and space. Global capital moves goods across the globe in a matter of days, and capital itself moves across wires in a matter of milliseconds. I must admit, I have yet to read Harvey's book; it sits on a shelf back in my parents' home, and my knowledge of it is limited to secondary sources. But I do wonder if there is a distinction between compression and traversal. And if compression is simply a result of traversal, why not focus study on traversal? Compression and traversal of space are easy to equate. The train stops running, so my subjective space expands. It starts running again, and the space between me and the used bookstore is shrunk down to nothing. But time is a little bit trickier to analyze time as such. Without technology, traversal into the past is all but nonexistent. And the advancement of technology does not compress the past closer to us, at least not in a literal way. Instead, technology increases the quality of backwards temporal traversal; as more data is captured, the picture of the past that we can construct becomes fuller (I know that this is a very debatable assumption). So maybe the right way to think about it is not that postmodernity compresses time, but that postmodernity makes increasingly possible the conditions from which time can be traversed and thus compressed.
But now the T is running again, and my world has compressed sufficiently for me to make that bookshop run. Maybe in the evening, I'll be able to travel back in time as well.
