Martina: We have talked a lot about speed so far, and there is another aspect I would like to go into with you: the platformization of the world in which we live. You also wrote a book about apps recently (Eriksen, 2022). What is the connection between world of platforms and the overheating approach?

Thomas: We are immersed in platforms, marinated in algorithms, and there is definitely a very strong link between the huge development that has occurred in platforms and apps and the acceleration of technological developments. But then there are many ways in which we can frame the phenomenon. We talk about platformization, but the studies using that term are still very fragmented and often tentative. But certainly interesting, although they respond to different sets of questions. My book, called ‘Planet of the Apps’, mainly takes a phenomenological approach, emphasising global and local diversity in the use of smartphones and how they make life both freer and more constrained. Others focus on corporate power, surveillance and standardization. These questions need to be asked separately in order to avoid muddled thinking. The world of algorithms and mobile communication is multifaceted, and to begin with, it is important not to mix the levels even if both are overheating phenomena coming from the same source. Let’s be a bit more specific. So platformization represents a multifaceted transformation of globalized societies thanks to the Internet and the affordable, now almost ubiquituous devices that connect the world. It is really quite important to understand how platformization works and to create new imaginaries that help re-design relations at all levels, not least to salvage personal and interpersonal autonomy. In all this we are always immersed in the platforms thanks to the smartphone which has become an extension of our bodies at an astonishing speed. And we have to deal with this every day. There is no simple answer to the question whether we become dumber or smarter because of the smarphone. But certainly its uses from an anthropological point of view should always be studied from below and within to begin with, taking users – which include you and me, and more than four billion others – seriously. There is great diversity; the smartphone adds something to your life, it removes something; it magnifies something else, and so on, but your use of the apps will necessarily build on and articulate with your pre-smartphone life.

Smartphone and Refugees

Thomas: It can be liberating to get a smartphone. Think about refugees. The explosive spread of the smartphone coincided almost exactly with the civil war and exodus from Syria. People who were forced to flee got one, sometimes immediately before leaving. On the whole, it was a blessing, enabling them to keep track, stay in touch, find their way and cherish memories, among many other usages. The situation for refugees nevertheless remains one characterized by uncertainty and waiting. It is said that refugees are people on the move, but most of the time, they sit and wait. Their time is less cumulative, less structured, and less directed than they would have wished for. Again, we can see how the smartphone sugars the pill by facilitating the filling of temporal gaps and enabling social communication, but it does not remove the more inert and sluggish structural conditions shaping the unstable temporal conditions under which undocumented migrants live. So the material world remains inert and resistant, no matter how digital you become.

Martina: Digitally mediated forms of service are increasingly normalized and are rapidly transforming work and daily life by creating new digital-social-spatial relationships. The platform economy, in particular, offers new ways of working and new means of consumption. For me, we must not forget that all this is part of surveillance capitalism and that imply the additional precarization of labor forms. How are these two aspects connected in your opinion? Are they parallel forms of overheating and cooling-down processes?

Thomas: Yes, absolutely. So before we move to corporate power and surveillance capitalism, which others have written well about – I’m thinking of people like Evgeny Morozov and Sushana Zuboff (Morozov, 2013; Zuboff, 2019) – let’s think about how amplification has affected work. The points you make are important. The Uber phenomenon would have been impossible without apps and smartphones. Getting an Uber cab is so frictionless and easy now that we have almost forgotten how frustrating it used to be to call a taxi. The flip side is that Uber drivers have to make themselves available continuously since the company takes a substantial slice of their income, and they teeter on the edge of misery. In South Africa, most Uber drivers are from Zimbabwe. Why? Because they have difficulties finding proper jobs owing to ethnic discrimination. Not because it’s a great job.

This also applies to other parts of the gig economy. Food delivery services are a good example, since they, too, rely entirely on apps and smartphones. Just as with Uber, having a meal delivered has become affordable – for the global upper and middle classes – and fast, efficient and frictionless. For the people carrying out the deliveries, or the restaurants cooking the food, the situation is different; their slice of the cake is thin and diminishing owing to the aggressive competition encouraged by the system. It is a spiral of ruthless runaway competition, bad for workers, bad for the environment, but good in the short term for the end-consumer.

And since you mention surveillance capitalism, let’s linger a bit on that too. As they say, when a service is free, it is because you are the product. Increasing consumption in the general population has never been easier. The giants, from Tencent to Amazon, have a lot of knowledge about how to push the right buttons in order to make people buy more; but so do the smaller actors, who also accumulate a great deal of knowledge about what they call the market, but which used to be people. This kind of overheating, combining worker exploitation with aggressive marketing, naturally contributes to another, which we’ve spoken about earlier, namely environmental destruction and climate change. So a question that should be raised is about the connection between the smartphone revolution and the global environmental catastrophe.

Smartphone and Time

Thomas: But let’s return to the question of the smartphone and time. People managed their lives perfectly well before they were colonized by the smartphone, but suddenly it has become indispensable. Someone I know was unlucky and cracked the screen on her iPhone the other day. I offered to take it to a repair workshop I knew, but she hesitated. She might then have to relinquish it for several hours, which would have been impractical. Life did have a different rhythm as late as the 1980s, before the internet and mobile phone revolution took off. Perhaps the forms of social interaction haven’t changed that much, but it is quite clear that the smartphone lets us run multiple processes at the same time, so that you can fill all the gaps with virtual networking, even when you are with other people physically. We are all familiar with this syndrome, I believe. But there is not just a simple just-so story to be told. The smartphone compresses and destabilizes time and space, but it also has the potential to expand space and make time more flexible. The smartphone makes consumption, communication, and production more efficient. But at the same time, speed differs by country and context. Acceleration, fragmented time, and the addiction to speed clearly are conducive to stress. This is a problem in the affluent classes in overheated countries, and that’s where all the worried newspaper columnists and authors of worried books about brain pollution and concentration loss come from. But at the same time, in a vast number of places, especially in the Global South, there is too much slowness and too many gaps – the hottest countries are often the least overheated ones. The contribution of the smartphone to the economy and overall speed is potentially very significant in an African town where the formal sector of the economy is non-existent, people do not have bank accounts and the logistics of work used to be sluggish and leisurely. But even there, not everything accelerates: think about family organization, religious values, cooking practices, these important aspects of life may not have been affected. The fast rhythms required by the smartphone clash with the slow rhythms in the natural and physical world. Life is polyrhythmic, and the smartphone can only sync a few slices of it. Similarly, Habermas wrote already in the 1960s about the colonization of life-worlds by the market, but 60 years later, most of us are still capable of protecting important parts of our lives from the transactional logic. So we mustn’t underestimate the agency of ordinary people like you, me, African market dealers and teenagers on TikTok.

Martina: So, let us return to a theme that has been present since the beginning of your works: time. The smartphone pushes toward a fragmentation of the time we live. We find ourselves living continuous temporal regimes superimposed on each other, isn’t it?

Thomas: In the 2020s, the smartphone is a good place to begin because it concerns some of the ways in which temporality has been affected by the penetration of it into people’s life-worlds. We have already spoken about the very substantial variations, but let us for now focus on generic, structural features of the smartphone, which apply in comparable, often similar ways everywhere. Before the mobile revolution, many relied on coin-operated phones. We always carried coins, while today, some societies are moving towards a cash-free economy, which mainly makes it cumbersome to release a shopping cart in supermarkets. In addition, for many years, only a minority of households had their own landline in a great number of societies. In a country like Britain, millions of people had to go to the pub to make their phone calls, long after they got their radio and telly. The rhythms of life were different then. When we went on holiday to Rome or Crete, we might buy a stack of postcards on the first day, write them during the next couple of days, buy stamps, and put them in the mail. In the early years of this century, there was always some excitement as to whether the cards would reach my mum and mother-in-law before we returned from vacation. The postcard was then phased out. It still exists, but it is unlikely that many of the cards that are purchased now are actually sent, they probably end up on fridges, in drawers or as gift cards. In its time, the postcard nevertheless represented acceleration and enhanced efficiency. Writing and sending it was faster than writing a letter, and one got a pretty and evocative photo on the back as a bonus. Other future-oriented technologies were rendered obsolescent more quickly and frequently because they were replaced by other inventions that performed the same tasks with increased speed and efficiency. The airship may have been the most spectacular of all. Zeppelins have been compared with dinosaurs, with the safer and more flexible aeroplanes playing the metaphoric part of mammals that got lucky after the meteor strike 66 million years ago. But the comparison is imperfect and unfair to our saurian relatives. A long succession of dinosaur families and species dominated life on the planet for nearly two hundred million years, while the airship was a brief interlude, a poorer alternative to the aeroplane. Even today, one lineage of the dinosaurs live on in the shape of birds. The smartphone is – among many other things – an entertainment machine, a bottomless and endless source of encyclopedic knowledge, a news service, an atlas and a weather forecaster. This aspect of the smartphone, which concerns information, can make it appear as a younger, shrunk, and deterritorialized relative of the newspaper, the cinema, and the television set. It miniaturizes, simplifies, standardizes and accelerates. To refugees who find themselves in one of their liminal phases, the smartphone may to a greater extent be a descendant of the landline and the phone booth, the letter, the postcard, and the physical meeting at the railway station or one of the other sites where newly arrived male migrants typically congregate. It has turned sockets and free wifi into scarce and coveted resources, precisely because it is a multifaceted lifeline. What these two otherwise very different groups have in common is that the smartphone in both cases contributes to the destabilization of time and space. It is an overheating device par excellence, and this is why the two most significant objects for defining the present decade are the smartphone and the container ship.

Between Synchronization and Desynchronization

Martina: It seems to be impossible that there was a time when we did not all have a smartphone. How did we manage without it?

Thomas: You know, this rhetorical question has become commonplace, often accompanied by a self-ironic smile. It is a well-established fact that people managed their lives well before they were colonized by this new piece of mobile technology. But as I said, life had a different rhythm then. Appointments might be fixed days or weeks ahead. No microadjustment was possible, whereas it is now common, and has entered into everyday routines, to send a text from a bus or tram if one is a little late for an appointment. Before this possibility existed, there needed to be more flexibility, in other words gaps, elbow-room, empty time to be filled with anything you fancied. You were free from the constraints of micro-coordination when you were not in and unavailable, and you were allowed to fill the temporal gaps with anything or nothing. The temporal flexibility was, in other words, greater before the mobile Internet, while the spatial flexibility has increased.

The smartphone is what has been called a polymedium (Madianou & Miller, 2012), a powerful, pocket-sized multimedia computer. Precisely this versatility makes the smartphone a promising candidate for comparative research; the device is more or less identical everywhere, but it is put to use in locally distinct ways. In the space of just a few years around the turn of the century, social life was reorganized by the (pre-smart) mobile phone, and it happened in such a frictionless and comfortable way that most of us barely noticed it; until, that is, we discovered how unpractical and unpleasant it was to leave it at home–or, conversely, what life it could be to spend a few hours offline, without the pressures created by the 24/7 connectivity.

Martina: So, the smartphone, we could say that is a synecdoche of hybrid time regimes created by it. or by the use we made of it.

Thomas: That’s a great way of phrasing it. Time and space are compressed in this way. Where you happen to be does not interfere with your online activity, and this is highly significant for people who are on the move and rarely sleep two nights in a row in the same place, such as refugees, but also small-time criminals and others. A landline would have been useless to them. I mentioned research on refugees and the smartphone. To refugees, the smartphone may function as an archive and a personal museum. It is not just used to fill the present and plan the future, but also to sequence and memorize the past. Just consider what your electronic address book says about your life. Getting your hands on it would be a major scoop for your future biographer, but if you are an undocumented migrant, it is also highly interesting for the police in a country where the state has an expressed ambition to know as much as possible about those who find themselves within its boundaries. This ambition became even more urgent after the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic. The online person shrinks and compresses time, spreads it out (as when we wait for a day or two before responding to electronic messages), watches an entire season of a TV series at a single sitting rather than watching one episode every Thursday at 9 p.m., and micro-coordinates with friends and family to dodge the need of shoehorning appointments between existing appointments. So this gadget is a generous gift and lubricant to global capitalism, relying as it does on increasing speed and efficiency.

It is therefore worth reminding ourselves of the fact that the smartphone can also help you reducing the speed, as when you sit abandoned and cold in a refugee camp on a Greek island, killing time by watching music videos from your youth or reading and rereading messages from friends, NGOs, relatives, and others; you may play old games or read about the poet Rumi on the Farsi version of Wikipedia. The nature of the mobile-phone encourages the here and now at the expense of the there and then. It strengthens the tyranny of the moment, but it can also be used to draw long lines backwards, sideways, and forwards in time. Specifically, synchronization and acceleration are some of the most important effects of the smartphone, whether you are a refugee or safely settled rich or poor, old or young. It is not least an indispensable tool for anyone who is engaged in an economic activity which requires coordination with others, especially in countries where the formal sector of the economy is weakly developed. In the Lusaka market, Zambian women who buy and sell anything from vegetables to fabrics use WhatsApp to increase their productivity. Like one might expect, they may spend some of the quiet moments of the day chatting with friends and calling their mother, but they are also able to stay in contact with customers and suppliers in real time with the new gadget, which has spread rapidly in Zambia, like many other African countries, since around 2015. Let us imagine that you have a vegetable stall and have run out of asparagus beans before lunch. Just a few years ago, you would have to wait for the delivery boy to pass by on his rickety scooter some time in the next day. You can now text the wholesaler and promise a 20% bonus if he can deliver the beans in 1 h. Turnover increases for both parties, and the farmer who supplies the entire saler has an incentive to weed and fertilize a bit more than usual. As I mentioned the affluent classes, complaints about excessive speed are common. Everything is too fast, is said; it becomes difficult to concentrate on one thing at the time; life is already too overheated, and there is a great demand for brakes such as meditation centres, courses in mindfulness, and apps which tell people to stand still and breathe slowly once an hour – apps that are meant to liberate us from apps!

We now rotate our touchscreen a couple of times and wait for about 5 min before the taxi appears. With a similar app, inactive taxi drivers in an African city could receive bookings instantly, and when there were none, they could have spent the unproductive time helping their uncle in the peanut field or selling soft drinks to tourists on the beach. The problem in such settings is not acceleration and stress, but rather that there is too much slowness and too many gaps. Now, calculating the contribution of the smartphone to the economy in different countries would have been an impossible task, not least because much of the increased productivity takes place in the informal sector, thus passing under the radar of those who measure GDP. Its economic contribution is nevertheless, beyond doubt, very considerable where it is implemented, owing to improved logistics and increased overall speed.

Between Personal and Social Time

Martina: Given that digital technologies both shape and are embedded in everyday life, I would like to take our conversation on the relationship between time and technology on a more individual level. Zerubavel as early as 1987 pointed out how private time was getting smaller and smaller; the quality of being always accessible nevertheless remains a powerful symbol of a rapidly dying traditional social order and is still strongly cherished and admired within traditional domains of social life such as family and friendship. The extent to which one approximates an ideal-typical state of ever-availability remains a most common criterion for evaluating how committed a parent, child, sibling, or friend is (Zerubavel, 1987, 343–350). Do you see in this a form of resistance to accelerated acceleration? Is it a form of protection from it, a kind of slowness in caring for the relationships most important to each of us?

Thomas: Important point. I mentioned Habermas and his warning against the colonization of life-worlds earlier, and we should not forget that in fact, important chunks of our life-worlds haven’t been colonized. We continue to live in different temporalities – some long, some short, some fast, some slow. So there is no one-way street here, towards the overheated acceleration of everything, even in the individual lives of middle-class people struggling with their time budgets. This does not mean that there are no problems. Temporal regimes clash, and the fast tends to get the upper hand over the slow. There is an historical irony in the fact that we now live much longer than our ancestors, but think shorter. The antidote, or resistance, to the dying social order Zerubavel refers to, could be twofold. Prioritize the slow and cumulative, such as planting an oak or being married; but also being present in the moment, in the here and now, without having your gaze fixed at a point 10 s in the future. For these resistance strategies to be viable, and I think they deserve to be since they give back some of the autonomy that has been taken away, a systemic critique at a higher level is necessary as well. In the final analysis, it is the growth economy that steals our slowness and what Zerubavel calls private time. Perhaps we should be clearer about this, since all good social science – and we could include social critique – goes beyond the mere symptoms to the causes.

Martina: Let us take a step back by going back to Durkheim, one of your favorite authors that we have in common between sociology and anthropology. Using his concept of ‘moral density’ of our relationships (Durkheim 1966, p. 198–202, 1984, pp. 201–205) – measured by the frequency at which we actually meet one another, talk over the telephone, or exchange whatsapp messages and e-mail-is also commonly regarded as indicative of the degree of social distance or intimacy that characterizes them. So, my favourite list of chat or my favourite gmail contacts tells me their relative significance in her life and the relative degree of my commitment to each of them on-line and off-line. In a overheated society, it is quite difficult managing different time regimes every day in which we are immersed, but, to me, the same important symbolic significance persists online and offline for these privileged and personal relationships. What do you think about it?

Thomas: Hmm ... if you are talking about the same relationships, to the same significant others, activated online and offline, I agree. Not returning someone’s call, or message, can be just as rude as not showing up at their party. But if we distinguish between the people we know both online and offline, and those we only know in one of the settings, we might reach a different conclusion, and this is where Durkheim’s excellent concept of moral density comes into its own. One might begin by classifying social relationships along an axis of personal involvement or – as some might prefer – investment in social capital. Pressing ‘like’ costs you less than two calories, but getting out of the house, taking a bus or tram somewhere, ringing a doorbell and so on, is more demanding. Picking up the phone to make a call is intermediate in terms of personal investment. But this is not merely about being physically present or not. You can get quite deeply involved with people whom you don’t meet physically, and indifferent about people you do meet. I guess this answers our question about chipping off moral capital when not fulfilling your side of the moral contract. The difference that makes a difference is not digital versus analog, but degrees of involvement. Perhaps Giddens was only partly right when he said, around 1990, that presence-availability was becoming a scarce resource (Giddens, 1991), simply being present in the same place. Yes, as not least the pandemic taught us, there are many registers of communication that are only activated when we are in the same place together. But we shouldn’t be too rigid. There will also be contexts where purely digital relationships are also immensely meaningful and give substance and depth to people’s social lives. I am thinking, for example, about physically disabled people whose mobility is limited. They can have quite rich and fulfilling social lives online, often in gaming communities.

Martina: I would like to come back to the origin of the overheating approach using our academic experience. As we discussed in the conversation of the fast and slow academic, we often experience the conflict between different time regimes. If I am not mistaken, somewhere you wrote, we fight between two temporal regimes: the pressure to produce more this year than last year, and the expectation that we should do a good and thorough job. Life is a mess, and – always quoting you - life is polyrhythmic, and the smartphone can only synchronize small bits of it while reminding us of our desynchronization because it regularly shows, with minute precision, that we are actually out of synchronization. So, my question is: have you ever thought of a semiotic perspective on time regimes in your overheating approach? I remember that in The Tyranny of the Moment, at one point, you distinguish the characteristics of slow time and fast time ... I was thinking something similar about time regimes.

Thomas: Absolutely, slow and fast times have distinct phenomenological characteristics; but I must admit that I have not thought about this distinction in semiotic terms although I use semiotic tools in other contexts. Let me think. Quite clearly, the time regimes we speak of digitalization can often be seen as slow versus fast, but sometimes an elaboration is necessary, such as fragmented versus continuous time; the Greek distinction chronos vs. kairos, the flow of time versus the opportune moment for action, also tells us something interesting about temporalities. We all live in nested, sometimes contradictory temporalities, right? — and so the fast, fragmented, urgent time cannibalizes the slow, continuous, organic time. This is happening all over the place. Fast-growing pigs and wheat are preferred to those that have a more leisurely pace. In an accelerated temporal regime, the exchange of signs is frantic and continuous. That is a familiar problem in an overheated, over-saturated information society. Conversely, a slower time regime permits fewer signs to be exchanged – semiosis is slowed down – but as a compensation, it allows for more depth; each act of signification becomes more meaningful. Yes, we could work out a semiotic analysis along these lines, and connect it to other aspects of speed and slowness as well. The slow growth of the forest oak versus the fast growth of the plantation tree. The speed of the airplane versus the slowness of the sailing ship. Let us think more about this.

Towards Hybrid Time Regimes?

Martina: If we tried to make a pattern, we would see ideal types hybridizing with each other. I always come back to the Tyranny of the Moment because for me it is the seedbed of the overheating approach. When you wrote about new tensions that supplement the old ones (2001, 29), we could reread them through what you just said. So, the process out of control can be depicted as a set of dichotomies interrelated with each other. From left to right, you can find acceleration ideal typi and the counter-reactions.

Acceleration world

Cooling-down reactions

1. Fast time

1. Slow time

2. Freedom

2. Security

3. Unpredictability

3. Predictability

4. Individual

4. Community

5. Impulses to act

5. Roots

6. Ambivalence

6. Fundamentalism

7. Immediacy (present of present)

7. Future of future

8. Continuous change

8. Cumulative and linear growth

9. Youth

9. Maturity

Among all these elements, I would like to stay with you always on time, that is, number 7. It seems to me that the only possible alternative to respond to this unstable acceleration is to go back to the sense of time. It is impossible to stop a car at high speed if you are without the handbrake. But if we began to experience the present as a small piece of the imminent future, we could produce what someone called “small incremental changes”. What do you think?

Thomas: Thank you for this, Martina, you always help me clarify my sometimes muddled thinking, this is great. I would first like to comment on your ninth cell. The tendency in our time to glorify youth and bracket aging is a symptom of fast change and advanced systemic amnesia: It is as if everything is here and now, nothing there and then. It makes us stupid to argue that young people should have more political power. We old men and women should instead strive to become good ancestors for them, role models and teachers. I’m not saying that we should stop listening to the young, but if there is a common belief that truth always comes in the shape of a young person, the implication is that neither experience, knowledge nor reasoned reflection are of any value. All that matters in this kind of breathless presentist society is openness to change.

In most historical societies, adults and old people were respected by their juniors owing to their superior knowledge and experience. In complex modern societies, old people do not have a particularly high authority by virtue of age: they are no longer achievers and are therefore less valuable. Exceptions still exist. In contemporary Japan, old people still enjoy high rank owing to their superior wisdom and experience. You know, when Tesla were working on an accident algorithm for its self-driving cars, it became apparent that they had to apply different criteria to the USA and Japan. If the car had to ‘choose’ between crashing into a child or an old person, it would save the child in America, but the retiree in Japan. Japanese society, in its way super efficient and fast-paced, has found a balance between the slow and the fast, the moment and the longue durée, which differs from that in youth-worshipping societies.

But let me return to the relationship between the present and a future that stretches way beyond your lifetime and mine. Presentism is a recipe for hedonism and stupidity, and the lack of a historical awareness is not just a problem for an understanding of the past, but also for thinking constructively about the future. As Orwell reminded us in 1984, those who control the past control the future. Presently, historical awareness is quite weak. We do not seem to have a credible story about the transition from industrial society to information society, while there were some standard narratives – debatable, but useful in their way – about the earlier great transformations in human history. As a result of this amnesia, it is hard to think constructively about a future. The new and not-so-new social movements, from Occupy to Fridays for Future, do not offer a recipe; they propose no solutions, utopias or ideal models for society. Their critique of the current world order, that it is unjust and destructive, is well taken. But then what? As late as the 1980s, serious blueprints for a more sustainable, fairer and more equitable society were developed. They were swallowed up, eaten alive, by the presentism of the overheated information society.

Small incremental changes are good, but are they sufficient? As you can guess, my answer is no. To my surprise, the General Secretary of the United Nations, Antonio Guterrez, has given a series of speeches in the early 2020s where he proposes something more radical. In essence, he is saying that if we are going to succeed in saving the planet, we need to build societies which are fundamentally different from the ones that dominate today. His views are really very radical. Reading Guterrez from my vantage-point, I see him as urging us to change our value sets, our economic systems and the dominant views about the good life; slowing down and cooling down, scaling down and ensuring that our descendants will be able to revere us as good ancestors.

But as you suggest, Martina, charity begins at home. Eating more sustainably, taking your bike or tram instead of the car, restricting your air travel to a minimum – yes, such changes in consumer habits represent a value system which is compatible with a more humane and responsible world society. But how about making some incremental changes in settings which are not defined by consumerism? Work, everyday life, socialising? There are many possibilities. De facto, we have more freedom than the state and market want us to believe. A less overheated world, and less overheated lives, have to be created from above, from below and sideways. And one enduring lesson from the pandemic, which is not particularly popular among the ruling classes, is the realization that the things that matters the most in life, that which makes life meaningful in a deeply fulfilling and enduring sense, those things are free and climate-neutral. That could be something to build on.