“We have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing space and time as far as our planet is concerned,” wrote Marshall McCluhan in 1964.  Decades later, humanity’s artificial nervous system has reached a pitch of intensity and distortion that would have made even McCluhan, the so-called ‘godfather of cyberspace,’ balk. Today’s clock runs 24 x 7: the info-revolution has conquered natural rhythms, banishing darkness and nighttime beneath a permanent neon glow. While rampant species extinction, ecosystem destruction and pollution threaten the planet, humanity’s new technological nervous system has become hooked on speed.

Wired-up for information overload and maximum speed of transmission, our technological overdrive is dislocating cultural and natural diversity. Even historical time is being dismantled in the face of an impending technological singularity. “We are making a switch from the extensive time of history to the intensive time of momentariness without history,” muses philosopher Paul Virilio. Invoking childhood games of spinning round and round, faster and faster, Virilio likens our dizzy tech-driven speed culture to a toddler that is messing up its playpen in a reckless abandon. Reassembled into a litter-strewn Vegas-like fun-park, humanity’s playpen is a delinquent urban sprawl strewn with industrial feces. The mess has spread way beyond the scope allowed to any other organism on Earth, mushrooming everywhere like a planetary eczema. Emanating like dense electromagnetic smog from our urban playgrounds, the warped frequencies of our televisions, computers, playstations and cellphones relay the dizzying miasma and pervasive paranoia of manufactured and sped-up reality.

Utilizing a dazzling barrage of images that transcend language, the media’s use of the moving-image, the montage, the time-lapse sequence, and the instant replay reflect the mind-state of a junkie species. Accentuating movement so that days appear to pass in seconds, shadows seem to lengthen in an eye-blink, and parking lots seem to replace forests in less time than it takes to yawn, time lapse photography presents an image of nature made palpable for speed freaks. While scientists use photomicrographs to capture the supersonic world of atoms and electrons, neurosurgeons have caught the subtle pulses of cognition in the brain with positron cameras. Satisfying the human craving for velocity, these glimpses into the subtle events of energy and motion seem to reveal the secrets of time. Graphic interfaces and faster processors have even enabled us to throw open the REM gates of sleep and digitize the neuronautical flare of dreams. Not content with our own imaginings we have turned our machines toward the outer darkness to capture the radial pulsing of galaxies, black holes and dark particles. The twisting curves of time-space that these cosmic bodies have signaled to us have rocked our conception of the universe. Yet, all these insights are potentially wasted on addicts whose only concern is the next fix. Cosmic insights are invariably dulled by the endless streams of junk continuously injected into our hungry veins.

As global flows of information, products, peoples, and simulacra gush into our immediate life-worlds, they erode our sense of standing on solid ground. Drifting ahead into randomness and instability, we are increasingly overcome by feelings of un-rootedness. But this affection of impending doom could be more than the craven paranoia of an addict. An obsession with speed is, after all, the gut reflex of any sentient species who feels its time running out. Our instinct tells us that cataracts lie ahead in history’s path. Perilous and filled with dangers for a species who has barely come into its own, riding over the falls of historicity in a tub requires a certain naïve bravado that only a junkie or drunkard could muster.

Whether we have crafted our own demise or are the victims of an evolutionary experiment that has neared its explosive climax, we need to face up to the inevitable. The distortions that lie ahead in our turbulent future demand a wild daring. If we survive we will need to fearlessly ride tidal waves of change and cross thresholds of distortion without blinking. Speed is the art of our future. The dials will be turned up even faster and we will need to draw new maps of the quantum warps and intensities achieved. Rampant changes – technological, environmental and otherwise – are inevitably and irrevocably coming.

Our post-everything world of technological tampering and multiple unfortunate ecological accidents is an insane and schizoid manifestation of a speed addiction. Our dizzy and drugged-up chemical conflagration of post-humanity is a gaseous expansion, an uncertain explosion into realms beyond the parameters of traditional organization. The past is now firmly behind us; ahead lies only the unfamiliar, the alien and the scary. Somewhere in the distance a magical destiny beckons, but we are hardly there yet … and when (and if ever) we arrive it’ll be with the biggest hangover in history.