An opportune time to talk about acceleration, something taking place abstractly in the world and which had a paradoxical effect on many people. They felt their lives were stagnating. Or going backwards. Or just stuck in a loop. Or simply couldn’t catch up with the speed around them. You wanted to install a voice-operated computer in your home or a robot hoover to crawl around your ten square meters—but it wasn’t any faster, because the mind’s limits are already set. That nothing in their existence was gliding toward a glittering, luxurious future; instead everything more difficult, more unpleasant, and more hopeless. Was. Only the upper echelon of the populace was entitled to services; the rest toiled with online reservations, used self-check for airplanes on which they squatted in their compression stockings, waited on hold on their devices just to get information from a fucking robot, no longer knew who governed them or why, who ruled the world, didn’t understand Alphabet and the delivery drones, the electronic cars that had increasing numbers of strange accidents, the headaches that disappeared when one took one’s pills, and worried about their jobs, for good reason. The number of people who died of overwork was rising, the number of unemployed was rising, poverty was rising; they became more radical, less human; it was the time of acute housing shortages in big cities around the world, the time when tent camps sprang up in industrial wastelands, the time of total surveillance, of surveying the brain, the watching, recording, evaluating of people, classifying them as valuable and worthless, the flowering of neo-Fascism, because perplexed people wanted clarity, please, clarity. They didn’t understand the developments anymore. Artificial intelligence, that nobody had ever seen but that dictated everyone’s daily life, collected their data, made them transparent. Arrests, being fitted with electronic ankle bracelets, elimination, increased due to errors made by artificial intelligence; cash was phased out, same for animals and insects; floods became more frequent, the climate was irrevocably out of balance; the raw materials needed to manufacture all the wonderful servers and computers and batteries dwindled, no problem. Whatever. As always, it didn’t matter to people. The important thing was what affected them—in their daily lives, their narrow surroundings. The oddly slow-motion way things became ever more unpleasant and harsh while the transformation of the world, in case it hasn’t been said, began to pick up pace.

So, the increase in speed

“The aforementioned concept, discussed by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann in the 1950s, that the exponentially accelerating progress of technology will converge in a finite amount of time in a technological ‘singularity.’ In 2014, I discovered a beautiful, incredibly precise historic exponential acceleration pattern that wasn’t about technological progress alone but rather reached back all the way to the Big Bang: the history of what are perhaps the most important events from a human perspective seem to suggest that