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The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster

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Flash crashes. Speed dating. Instant messaging.From the devices we carry to the lives we lead, everything is getting faster, faster.But where did this great acceleration come from? And where will it lead? In this vitally important new book, Robert Colvile explains how the cult of disruption in Silicon Valley, the ceaseless advance of technology and our own fundamental appetite for novelty and convenience have combined to speed up every aspect of daily life.Drawing on the latest research, this book traces the path of this acceleration through our working and social lives, the food we buy and the music to which we listen. It explains how it's transforming the media, politics and the financial markets – and asks whether our bodies, and the natural environment, can cope.As we race towards the future – into a world packed with new technologies, new ideas and new discoveries – this scintillating and engrossing book is an invaluable, must-read guide to the wonders and dangers that await us.

401 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 17, 2016

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Robert Colvile

2 books5 followers

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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for Clare O'Beara.
Author 22 books362 followers
November 21, 2016
I enjoyed this well-written, fact-packed book which looks at how our modern lives are being speeded up in many ways. We cram more in but feel that we have no time.

An interesting survey looked at how fast people walk. City people always walk more quickly than rural ones. I could add that city people talk more quickly. A Californian psychology professor, contrasting Brazil with America, spent three years in the early 1990s visiting 31 cities worldwide. The more industrialised and advanced the economy, the more fast-paced the culture. Western Europe and Japan hurried, Asia, Africa and Latin America dawdled. East Coast America was faster than West and the heartland ambled. In 2006 a UK psychologist revisited the experiment and found that worldwide, people were covering the same length of ground in ten percent less time than in the 1990s. Asia in particular had speeded up so that Singapore and Guangzhou matched the hastiest Western capitals.

Media and politics, inextricably connected now, get a chapter; when a message doesn't have to go to print and then be distributed, but can be tweeted and retweeted and published on a news website, politicians are on the spot to react quickly and issue statements which can be analysed, reacted to and responded to in a short space of time, leaving the rest of the day for the world to comment. No wonder political leaders age quickly these days.

Journalism now means filing three stories of some kind a day, we're told, with phone film clips and soundbites added. While the author glosses over how much copy is now written by computer, it's a lot, especially where sports results are concerned; brief quotes are plugged in to make it look personal. More stories are entirely from PR sheets with no journalism involved. All the more reason to praise the real journalistic work which sheds light for us into corners which the denizens of the corners would rather stayed dark.

Computers are getting faster and cheaper according to Moore's law, and people are hard wired to explore, connect, crave novelty and learn. With faster computers and more easily shared knowledge, we can experiment, create, improve.

The author points out that food and goods production and distribution around the globe is our outstanding achievement. Containers were the game changer here as any dock worker can tell you. Not having to load and unload a ship or truck piecemeal changed everything from the structure of ships to the location of ports and numbers employed. To grow food or make a good, using parts drawn from many countries in many operations, and ship it around the world to where it is needed when we need it, requires an immense web of trade and co-operation.

How about socialising? How fast we can make online friends, how much or little is known about people on line. How often do we meet real friends, relatives, neighbours? As we walk, do we hold hands and talk, or hold and stare at phones? Dating gets faster and more risky, an adultery site turns out to have almost no real women but automated chat bots keeping the paying men interested. We're congregating more into cities because young people don't want to work on farms or down mines. Crowded together we can help one another but we also see more crime, unemployment, antisocial behaviour, and we can spread disease faster. Yet large numbers make a hospital or school economical to run. Mega-cities are wasteful but recycling everything from waste to rainwater is increasing.

The book is packed and there's too much to read in one go; I wasn't that interested in the section on stockbroking and had recently read about it in another book on a similar theme, but those who like to analyse the markets will want to understand how and why computers now make most of the trades.

Notes and references in my hardback run from pages 329 to 374, with an index as well. I found 85 names I could be sure were female among the references. The author is a journalist who specialises in technology.
I also recommend:
Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford
The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age by David S. Abraham
The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth by Robin Hanson
The Closing of the Net by Monica Horten
This Machine Kills Secrets by Andy Greenberg
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom.
Profile Image for Brian Clegg.
Author 212 books2,842 followers
April 8, 2016
With the subtitle 'how the world is getting faster faster', this is a Gladwellesque exploration of the way that, primarily driven by information and communication technology, we are getting increasingly frantic. And yet, somehow, Robert Colvile (or Collie as my spellcheck insists on calling him) argues that this is a good thing. Arguably, the mark of the book is how persuasive he is in his cheery acceptance.

In echoing the books of Malcolm Gladwell, I am referring more to a fast paced (appropriately) throwing in of examples, overwhelming the reader with context - but I'm glad to say that Colvile is much better at acknowledging sources as he goes.

In each of the main chapters, Colvile takes an area of life - socialising, art, news, politics, finance etc. - and looks at the way that our increasingly high speed, always on, connected world has radically transformed the nature of each area. The format tends to be very much the same chapter to chapter - so much so that it was getting a little samey by the end - in each case we first discover all the scary and worrying implications of acceleration... then Colvile tells us why it's actually okay, or, rather, better than okay because the benefits outweigh the risks.

One big message is something the publishing world has been aware of for a long time - but Colvile makes a convincing argument that this will be the case in all fields - the squeezed middle. In publishing, there used to be a healthy living as a midlist author. Now you are either a bestseller writer or earning peanuts. (And that mostly means earning peanuts.) The same applies all over, Colvile suggests. One side effect of the acceleration is the tendency to have megaplayers and tiddlers and very little in between. And as Colvile points out, although the idea of the 'long tail' has been around a while, it's a lot longer and thinner than was first predicted. Meanwhile the Disneys and Apples and Googles and Amazons of this world trample over everything. This is quite scary - as Colvile points out, this process inevitably results in massive loss of good midrange employment, leaving a few very high paid placements and a lot of minion jobs.

This makes it difficult to be totally supportive of Colvile's enthusiasm for the process, and sometimes the examples given entirely fail to convince. In the news section, for instance, after showing the decline in traditional news reporting, Colvile holds up Buzzfeed (where he used to work) as an example of how things are actually better now. No, really. He says 'it's easy to mock Buzzfeed's viral news posts if you have not seen the craft that goes into them' - but this is a bit like arguing that something is garbage, but it's still wonderful, because it is beautifully polished garbage.

Similarly on the news agenda, the book is full of enthusiasm for the wonders of citizen journalism, but there's very little about the way that the vehicles for this process control the agenda. And though Colvile does acknowledge the increasingly strong effect where we tend only to see news and views that agree with our own viewpoint, he dismisses this as being insignificant. Yet I don't see anything in his description of the future of news that gives the degree of balance of something like BBC News - yes, they get it wrong sometimes, but they are trying to be balanced, which is absolutely not the case of the examples given as the future of news reporting.

I am sometimes criticised in my books for being overly positive about the impact of science and technology on the future, but Colvile takes this to the extreme, time and again putting up really worrying outcomes of the ICT acceleration - and then dismissing them with counter-arguments that have far less weight. Yes, in some cases the counter arguments are convincing - for example in the impact of social media on young people. But in some areas, such as finance and politics, the 'positive spin' end of the chapter really leaves a lot to be desired. At the time of writing we're discussing possible UK exit from the EU and there is so much uncertainty in the benefits and risks it's difficult to make a decision. The same was the case with the pros and cons of acceleration.

It doesn't help that occasionally Colvile comes across as very much someone with high tech London-based blinkers. For example, he makes the remark 'Services such as Uber... will bring the taxi of your choice to you at the moment of your choice... Particularly in cities ' - no, that would be only in cities at the moment. Us hicks don't have Uber.

Although I was not convinced by many of Colvile's 'it will all be fine in the end' arguments, I still very much liked the book. He has an easy, readable style with a Transatlantic tone, but British enough that it doesn't feel like something imposed on a UK reader by a US guru. In a way, the solutions are not the issue. What matters here is that Colvile is bringing up in area after area of our everyday lives how speeding up is changing us and what we do. Some of it you may well like (I certainly do). Some - particularly his bizarre generalisation that we don't really care about eating any more and would prefer to just shovel in anything as long as it's quick - doesn't really work. Some - for instance the way the financial system is pretty much out of human control - should scare the pants off us. But all of it is worth discussing. That's what makes this book so valuable. All this stuff is happening, and apart from complaining about teenagers' inability to concentrate on one thing, we tend to ignore it. Colvile opens our eyes - and that is an essential service.
Profile Image for Jeff.
116 reviews
December 30, 2017
A curious book. Generally good at outlining current trends and speculating about future scenarios, the author is also breathlessly enthusiastic about the increased pace of technology and society. He seems to be a fan of "creative destruction" in the context of capitalism, or is at least sure that it's true, and uses it extensively in his scenario building. While describing the downside of accelerated economies, technological changes, population growth, and ecological consequences, he remains an optimist about the ability to fix the problems created by the very things he says are speeding up. He appears to embrace (or at least enthusiastically describes) contradictory trends, such as more humane factory farming (!) and the elimination of meat altogether, presumably letting the market decide who will be the winner in all this. AI is his one bugaboo, where he does worry about the replacement of humans entirely. Fascinating but frustrating reading.
Profile Image for Gaylord Dold.
Author 30 books21 followers
November 30, 2016
Colvile, Robert. The Great Acceleration: How theWorld is Getting Faster, Faster

Throughout much of UK journalist Robert Colvile’s new book, “The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster,” our author adopts the fawning attitude of the now-familiar innovation-revolutionary. No technology emerges that Colvile doesn’t admire, and apparently no problem exists that can’t, through the adoption of the right methodologies, right strategies, and right applications, be solved. Surely, we’re told, overpopulated countries won’t starve because genetically engineered food will rescue their teeming millions. Why not rocket soot into the atmosphere to slow global warming? If our oceans become too acidic, surely there’s a nano-organism that can turn the tide. Colvile’s optimism that a faster world will be a better world stems from his analysis of a biological trait called “entrainment”, a phenomenon that anyone can observe on a city block anywhere in the world. “Take a look at people’s feet,” Colvile counsels. “Pretty quickly you will notice that wherever you are, however large the crowd, they are marching in perfect lockstep.” Our natural rhythm sense is so genetically strong, Colvile writes, that living creatures naturally fall into unison, a pace determined by the nature of the environment. The larger the city, the faster people move, and so forth. People living in big cities, when asked to describe the length of a “pause”, will claim it lasted twice as long as those from farms or small towns. Colvile’s conclusion also exhibits his prejudices in favor of speed: “What single quality best defines how our society is changing? Is it that life is becoming fairer, or more equal, or more prosperous? No: as the experiment above suggests, it is that life is getting faster.” Strangely, Colvile never questions the unexamined hypothesis that faster is better, that entrainment is OK, or that inequality is less defining than speed. In fact, Colvile doesn’t even recognize inequality as a possible “defining” quality of our society. “In area after area, technology was making life quicker, more convenient, more friction-free—not least as more of it moved online.”

This is not just retail bull, but a Wal-Mart full of bull. In a book choked with optimism for faster pace, Colvile stumbles over two inconvenient topics: Journalism and Politics.

Despite the death of print journalism, the lowering of reporting standards, the emergence of “fake news”, the rise of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and the pressures of the 24-hour “news cycle”, Colvile argues that the acceleration of the news industry, while chaotic and often cataclysmic for news providers, has “resulted in an explosion in quality journalism.” As with popular culture, he argues, “there are engrossing long reads and important investigations being produced alongside the quizzes and click-bait—arguably in greater profusion than ever.” But, really, the rubber begins to hit the road when Colvile notes that speed in journalism sometimes isn’t so good. Print readership and revenue have collapsed. Online journalism from traditional sources is slim-hipped, compared to its fulsome progenitor. Colvile admits that the death of print media has sharpened the sense of turmoil and dislocation in the media, concluding that “after all, very few of us can be certain that our jobs, or even our companies, will exist in a decade’s time.” Falling revenue has put new demands on remaining newspaper staff. Increasingly, those who want their “news,” want it all the time, in any format, on any device, at any time of day. It isn’t enough to gather serious news for the next day’s paper. Stories “develop” in real time, followed by Twitter, followed by comment, criticism and blog reaction, an online news stream that generates an endless cycle of reports, thus creating a sense that “something is always happening.” Or, Colvile could have said, that nothing matters. The pressure to “publish” means that fact checking and truth are always the first casualties, and “page views” are the currency of the day. Stories become click-bait, sensational stuff up front designed to “go viral”, that is, shared countless times on social media. This, Colvile admits, “is an environment vulnerable to manipulation.” No kidding. Farther down the line come “semi-stories”, “developing stories”, and the rise of the “talking heads”, commentators and pundits, most often partisan, who gather on TV for shout-fests, news as loud opinion. The trouble, even Colvile knows, is that “on live TV, it is far harder to challenge guests or muster contrasting evidence, not least when the presenter is flitting between topics with little time to prepare.” Lastly, but surely not finally, an ingenious way around the limits of actuality is “future news”, a phenomenon that occurs when newsmakers release speeches in advance, items which then become fodder ahead-of-time.

“There is certainly a strong argument,” Colvile concludes, “that the great acceleration has created a coarse, chaotic culture, in which a slicker, shallower, and ever more speed-obsessed media generates much heat but little light. And matching the pattern seen elsewhere, there has also been a shift towards gigantism—the longing for “big stories” and “epic events” that can attract a distracted and divided audience. It can be argued, and Colvile does argue, that journalism these days always gets to the bottom of every story, eventually. Leaks are part of the phenomenon. People no longer buy newspapers (as people no longer buy record albums); they buy stories (as people now buy songs). But, just so, people often buy the stories they want most to hear, from sources they know won’t disappoint their expectations, sources that will cater to their prejudices and emotional needs. Demagogic stories. Stories from the Echo Chamber.

When it comes to politics, Colvile is hip to the “permanent campaign”. Bill Clinton’s guru James Colvile insisted that politicians must always be ahead of the news cycle, a dictum now raised to the “status of holy writ.” Politicians must anticipate and pre-empt their opponents, keeping them on the defensive, a strategy best pursued through ad hominem attacks, innuendo, strident cliché, and outright lies. As Democrat strategist Joe Trippi points out, “the most effective ads are the ones that make the community a worse place to live.” Lie and move on quickly. Create a hyper-condensed soap opera as the campaign, exhaust an opponent in turmoil and contradiction, Twitter the guy to death, plan and execute in a hurry, no matter the cost; govern as fast as the flow of information itself. The net result is no time to think things through and policies that are half-baked and oversold.

Politics at warp-speed generates worn-down politicians whose physiological systems can hardly cope with the demands of the job. A modern leader, Colvile observes, “needs to have the right temperament to cope with such pressures.” Colvile thinks that these demands require leaders who make quick decisions and stick by them. Actually, the truth is rather different. Perhaps leaders now must make speedy serial decisions, sticking by none of them. Perhaps they must “say what’s on their minds”, even if what’s on their minds today contradicts what was on their minds yesterday. Perhaps the modern politician must be addicted to “action for action’s sake.” In short, while today’s environment requires the steady hand of a deliberate politician, it favors pretty faces. Instant snap judgments of voters (Malcolm Gladwell’s “blink test”) are powerful determinative tools in the hands of a demagogue like Donald. Even Colvile admits that superficial politicians like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage “seem to speak as tribunes for the everyday man.”

In journalese, saying what’s on his mind is a politician’s way of “going clear”, speaking always on the record in a completely unfiltered way, lies, hyperbole, hate-speech, sex-attacks and all. It’s all just data smog anyway, or, perhaps, Locker Room Banter.

Colvile’s book is a primer on breakdown, a GPS for the notion that the here and now isn’t good enough any longer, and can’t be found anyway. After all, he says, some critics argue that Western history consists of more or less successful efforts to rid ourselves of “commitment devices”, social structures such as family, friendships or religious beliefs that prevent us indulging our most immediate desires.” The effect is the destruction of hierarchy and the erosion of legitimate authority. Technology gives these forces a huge push. If the here and now is gone, what sense is there in a fireside chat about fear from the President? Aren’t we all longing for a midnight tweet calling somebody we dislike a dirty name? Isn’t that what politics is all about?

Colvile reaches a dead-end where technological optimism meets current reality. To his credit, Colvile abandons his sanguine views when he finally confronts the blank wall of economic and social reality. It is worth quoting his conclusion about political reality at length:

“One near-certainty is that the disconnect between rulers and ruled, and the gap between efficient firms and sluggish state, will continue to grow…Yet a less obvious but ultimately more powerful trend will be an increasing divorce between those parts of society that embrace and profit from speed—the highly educated and technologically literate inhabitants of the big cities—and those left behind, forced into low-wage jobs and threatened by automation…The result (of a geographical and social disjunction between elites and others) will be a dwindling of the ties that bind rich and poor, north and south, given the prevailing sense among those in the fast lane that their rewards are the direct product of their efforts, a cultural shift from ‘No Child Left Behind’ to ‘Devil Take the Hindmost’.”

Sadly, Colvile fails to understand the very real structural impediments to reforming the American government in ways that might help underprivileged workers and artisans, to rationalizing the tax code, and to enhancing democratic institutions like elections. His list of “solutions” to the problem of inequality includes mostly technological fixes, ignoring law-making, regulatory and international obstacles to change.

Donald Trump didn’t figure out his “thing” from reading McLuhan or Foucault. He’s a pure product of the system, a sociopath in a suit and tie at the right place in the right time. If, as McLuhan says, we first shape our tools and then our tools shape us, then Donald Trump is our conclusion and not our premise. It isn’t that he “understands” anything or has thought anything through; it is only that he gets it and it works. He moved from building buildings to renovating buildings to putting only his name on buildings somebody else renovates or builds. He’s intuited himself as pure symbol, all brand. He’s ahead of the news. He spends other people’s money and showers himself with publicity, hogging TV network time that comes free to him and is gladly given by image mad companies puffed up on profit. He thrives on aggression, speed, attitude, and Pretty Face. He knows nothing and says what’s on his mind. A lie to him is just another kind of truth, as conditional as one’s promise, one’s contractual obligations, one’s honor. According to some reports by those who know him, he may be wise to his own game and he may not, they can’t tell.

Donald didn’t spend hours honing his spiel in front of a mirror the way Hitler spent hours on his hand gestures and tone. He lives and breathes the thing. The way Jeb Bush gasped and sputtered when the Donald swam by. The way Little Marco sweated bullets and began to gargle on his own words. The way crowds chanted, “Lock her up!” The way swastikas came into fashion.

We’ll be lucky if the worst that happens is the trains run on time. What’s worse than that is anybody’s guess.















Profile Image for Kayte.
3 reviews
August 14, 2018
Good breadth; less depth. A fun quick view of how the world is changing in different sectors; media, politics, and the stock market. However this book lacks depth and real analysis. I actually bought this book by accident, I was supposed to be buying Social Acceleration by Hartmut Rosa, which was recommended to me as a deep analysis of the effects of acceleration on human behaviour, so I'm excited to contrast the two books!
Profile Image for Sean Goh.
1,491 reviews93 followers
February 2, 2017
Not the most snappily written of books, but certainly very ambitious in its scope. Didn't realise until I flipped back to the first couple chapters to write down my notes and wow it was like I had changed book. From politics and government to finding a partner to agriculture to music to pace of life to transportation to supply chain, this book really touches on (what feels like) everything. Dry at times, but he does provide balanced viewpoints, even on stuff like Buzzfeed and high-frequency trading, which is good!
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The greatest sign of the bicycle's influence is that it spurred the same moral panic as every transformative technology from facebook to steam locomotives: there were dark warnings of the sinful consequences of unmarried couples taking rides in the country, and the dangers of 'bicycle face', suffered by women who tried to pedal against the breeze at high speeds.

Two things about our brain: that they are lazy (or thrifty), in that they constantly look for ways to save effort. And that they are junkies - constantly craving particular chemicals and sensations. Especially dopamine. Our basic biology, in short, programmes us to be fervent, even frenzied consumers of novelty and information (this is why a return journey on a trip to a strange place always seems much shorter - the brain is fascinated by new data, but sets aside the familiar.

Memory is not just memory, it provides the cognitive parameters for our reasoning and understanding. To form new memories literally enlarges the brain, providing the space for new connections and new thoughts to be made.

Disruption to the sleep cycle is so debilitating that shift work has actually been classified as a probable carcinogen by the WHO.

One reason the effects of acceleration are often so insidious is that they are so welcome - because they make our lives more fulfilling and exciting. What we need most is not to slow thigns down, but to develop right strategies to cope.

Some scientists have linked the growth of narcissism and decline in empathy not to the dominance of online communication, but to the absence of the offline kind. For it is interacting with each other, face to face, that we stimulate the mirror neurons that teach us to mentally mimic, and appreciate, others' thoughts and feelings.

The great acceleration gives people ways to show that they are broken, it does not break them in the first place.

A data-driven culture in which performers mimic what has gone before risks privileging craftsmanship over genius, and making it harder for genuinely original performers to make their mark.

The paradox of acceleration is that while it renders culture speedier and more superficial, it also provides space for complexity and quality to shine through. It also produces more people who are clamouring to be part of the cultural conversation - and gives them more chances to do it.

Although the internet has proven hugely disruptive to journalists, for consumers, who now have a wider choice than ever of news sources and ways of accessing them, it has proved an almost unqualified blessing.

Just as the single as displaced the album, so has the story displaced the newspaper. (Unbundling)

Polls can only tell you how you should communicate what you want to do. They can't tell you what you should do. Every policy creates a minority of losers, yet it is always the losers who are best organised and most vocal, particularly in an online arena.

What we probably will have to say goodbye to in such a world (of citizen journalism) is the media's role as a referee of what we read and what we don't. The task of selecting and ordering the news is one of the most sacred and priestly duties in a democracy (said the newspaper editor)

With anyone's phone a potential recording device, politicians (and other public figures) have a need to be constantly wary, and it keeps them and their staff in a state of constant jitters. And it contributes hugely to what is the main problem with modern government: a lack of time, or willingness, to think things through.

(on increased transparency) The process of government is often not very inspiring - and now we have glass windows around the sausage factory.
While transparency lets you catch mistakes, it also breeds cynicism about the whole process. It's like creating a big Amazon rating system for government taht only allows one or two star reviews. (TRUF)

The larger and more authoritarian the organisation, the better the chance that its top decision makers will be operating in purely imaginary worlds.

If you improve the transport networks in a major city, you will not see total travel times fall: instead you'll see the rings of gentrification spread out into the suburbs, as people relocate along the new express routes to bigger homes which offer roughly equivalent travel times.

At the time of writing, self-driving cars are at the 'dog-food' stage. Rather good, but still not quite ready for human consumption.

The same processes that make the supply chain tighter and more efficient make it more vulnerable to disruption.

(NOT GENERALISING) In China, even marriage has a strong transactional element. One woman on a Chinese dating show: I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on a bicycle.

It has been estimated that 69% of pork and 92% of poultry sold in US shops is contaminated with E. coli, because it is simply unaffordable to keep it out of the food chain.

(On starvation in Africa) Africa's problem is bad agriculture, not too many people.
Profile Image for Sally.
194 reviews3 followers
July 3, 2017
It's true - almost every paragraph has an interesting fact. This book tells you about technology and how advanced it is already. It is a scary and positive book at the same time. Problems and innovative solutions can each come from the same areas. It explains how every area of life is getting faster and more connected and we cannot reverse the clock. Blows your mind - do you like science fiction? You will love this. Are you concerned about the planet, financial markets, politicians? Learn more about the worries and the ways to fight back. Very readable - a book for everyone.
Profile Image for Mjke.
Author 17 books17 followers
September 13, 2023
Terrific book. Highly recommended. The world is getting faster. Everything - the internet, the way we consume news, our finances, the stock exchange... even the speed we walk. Robert Colvile explains why, and explores the possibilities and threats that will come about if we continue on this road, as we surely will.
Written in 2016, before Covid, but you'd hardly notice, since the likelihood of a major pandemic is just one of the many predictions on offer that result from our need to live faster. He got this one right, so there's no reason to doubt the rest of it.
Profile Image for Mario Vanhoucke.
49 reviews6 followers
August 17, 2017
Interesting. The book offers a very optimistic view on the great acceleration. I sometimes had the feeling that the same arguments could have been used to promote a more pessimistic view. Nevertheless, I prefer to read the optimistic version.
14 reviews3 followers
August 3, 2018
A great book about how the world has changed the last century and where it's headed
10 reviews2 followers
August 11, 2021
This book should have been titled "A guide to essential talking points for modern technocrats".
Profile Image for CNR.
16 reviews
September 30, 2023
This book makes you want to put down your phone and go plant flowers. Really, the place of everything is staggering. I lost interest 3/4 into it as he speaks about the market. A great read.
Profile Image for Melanie.
845 reviews49 followers
January 23, 2023
I apparently shelved this in April 2016, forgot about it for years, and was reminded about it when reading Johann Hari's book in early 2022 (though he misspelled the author's surname). Local library didn't have it so it came in interlibrary loan. Was curious about its staying power since it is pre-covid. (My chapter notes are more thorough than the review text will be.)

This book is achingly slow. For a book about everything speeding up, it itself doesn't read very snappily. The author takes the position that everything is getting faster, that this is inevitable and unchangeable, and that people can mostly adapt to it, even though speed and stress and the relentless pace of work and boundaries being overrun are all measurably harmful to people and society as a whole.

A few parts of this book are very rose-colored, looking back on it. He believed that polarization by the news was not a major issue (again, pre-covid and even pre-Trump), and while he believes that climate change is an issue, he totally seems to underestimate the ecological impact of poor countries wanting to develop and be like wealthier nations. He also seems to think that HFT (high frequency trading; something that is apparently too complicated for almost everyone to understand) has no negatives, despite the fact that it skims money off of investors while conferring zero benefits whatsoever. He's also a big fan of mega-cities, or cities containing 10MM+ people. Yeah, they may be efficient, but they're also a great way to spread disease quickly.

While he is resigned that the pace of innovation is not going to slow down, he seems to think it's not all bad, so we should embrace it as a society. There is a bit of exploration of the downsides of like, people letting their brains merge with machines, but he seems to be a bigger fan of Ray Kurzweil (who gushes over techonology) than anyone more of a Luddite. Not a lot of exploration of the ethics of acceleration or consumerism or ecological mismanagement or technological encroachment, and ethical issues abound.
Profile Image for Steve Stanton.
Author 16 books30 followers
March 12, 2017
This debut performance should not be missed by anyone who cares about the future. Robert Colville presents a very ambitious discussion on many converging fields, offering both pessimistic and optimistic possibilities!
Profile Image for Ellie .
21 reviews14 followers
July 12, 2022
Slavish and sycophantic, full of very surface-level explorations of problems that carefully avoid digging even the tiniest bit deeper where we might find solutions that require us to actually do something.

Just remember, everybody, no matter what problems technology and modernity causes for us, fawning technocrat Colvile, promises us that a bit more technology will solve it all.

Tech ruining your sleep? There’s a technological solution for that and you don’t even have to put your smartphone down. Tech causing communication issues for kids? More tech, just the good kind, guys.

Fairer and more equitable food distribution and a focus on necessary foodstuffs rather than cash crops, and maybe a push on agroecological methods of farming that don’t deplete the soil? Nope. GM crops, of course - but please don’t look at how they can cause super weeds (*cough* Round Up *cough*) or require more water than normal varieties (BT cotton, anyone?) or don’t actually deliver what is promised in the lab (golden rice).

And the big one? Climate change? Not a problem, no need to worry, and certainly no need to actually make meaningful changes to how we live on this planet - technology will save us. Please continue as you were, spending wildly and working yourself into an early grave, while we wait for some techno-geek to find these miraculous solutions nobody has yet. This is the only way, you see, anything else might require we *gasp* change how we live or go without frivolous, unnecessary items, and that wouldn’t be good for the economy, so we can’t do that.

The icing on the cake, for me, was in the conclusion, when Colville claims that it’s always easier to look at the negatives or the bad things that might happens rather than the good or to assume things are basically okay. Concern about teenagers’ tech use age vs “they’re doing okay, leave ‘em be”, and I’m supposed to believe the majority are in the concerned camp? A lot of these problems arise in the first place precisely because we assume things will be okay, that they’ll be sorted out, that everything is fine. Humans are hardwired to pick the path of least resistance, which offers that? The path that says everything is basically fine and we don’t need to change, or the one that requires introspection and for us to some make (sometimes drastic) changes in our lives? It’s blindingly obvious which option most people go for.
Profile Image for Randolph Hsu.
1 review1 follower
February 10, 2017
In our modern era, it seems that things can radically change on a time-scale as short as months, days, or even minutes. From the adoption of YouTube and Twitter as media outlets, and the normalization of computer controlled stock trading, it's increasingly harder to keep up with the contemporary. This book was rife with great examples, and paints a sketch for what our future will bring, as we continue to drive technology and innovation further and further, and offers a terrifying scenario in which our short-termism orchestrates our doom before we even start to realize what's happening. 'The Great Acceleration' deals with our rapidly morphing societal standards, and helps one to parse where we are now, and where we are going. Whether you feel we are greedy, hungry humans destined to deplete the planet of natural resources, or tech-savvy wizards ready to embrace unimaginable technologies to feed our desire for the novel, Colvile offers evidence for both prosperity and destruction that allows the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Profile Image for Biggus.
311 reviews3 followers
January 10, 2017
Nicholas Carr 1: Robert Colvile:0

To mention this guy's name in the same sentence as Malcolm Gladwell is a laugh, as is this book. Gladwell offers simple logical observational explanations of things, not pie in the sky dreams. Talk about a contradictory nonsensical set of arguments. Some of the stuff this guy comes out with makes me wonder if he is from a parallel universe. In 39 years, when I turn 100, I might re-read this. It should then be almost as funny as Three Men in a Boat is today :) That's if we are still here :(

He seems to think that technology is the answer to our problems, which in fact it is technology that caused them in the first place. Talk about Dunning-Kruger :)

That said, it is always good to take in the other side of the argument. Pity Colvile can't make a decent one. I reckon his address is somewhere in la-la land :)

Profile Image for Nilesh Jasani.
1,051 reviews187 followers
February 1, 2017
The book is almost a purposeless rant on the new world we live in without solutions and descriptions of the obvious. It moves from a topic to topic, almost wherever the author missed the good old times or have gripes with the new. Whether this is in news media, the faster technologies, food, financial markets, product marketing or communication, topics were covered without any real connection and in the name of ever rising pace of life. Not much of what the author states is wrong factually. Perceptions are his prerogatives, and some of them quite right too but the discussion comes out meaningless in the way it is handled.
Profile Image for Sambasivan.
1,014 reviews33 followers
May 9, 2016
Highly topical subject deftly handled with a plethora of examples to prove the point. It is indeed true that we are accelerating faster by the day as human beings. Is this acceleration leading to constructive destruction or destructive obstruction is what the author tries to answer. Extremely readable and go for it.
109 reviews4 followers
October 16, 2016
A slightly less entertaining Gladwell style read. Some chapters were better than others. I appreciated how it wasn't all doom and gloom about the future like a lot of books these days
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