Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything by James Gleick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"I put instant coffee in my microwave oven and almost went back in time."
(From a Steven Wright's stand-up routine)

It is quite depressing to read a nineteen-year-old book that focuses on one of the things that are obviously wrong with our civilization and realize that the problem has gotten much worse since the publication. James Gleick's Faster was published in 1999 and its subtitle - The Acceleration of Just About Everything - aptly describes the topic. Mr. Gleick is the author of the wonderful Chaos: Making of a New Science, where the mathematical chaos theory is explained in a way accessible to general audience. I am also planning to re-read and review his Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman. While Faster is not on the same stellar level as the two other books, it is well written, absorbing, and readable. And of course the main thesis of the book - that we want to do things too fast for no reason whatsoever - is even more relevant today, in the age of Twitter.

The book starts slowly: in the first 80 or so pages the author focuses on various topics related to time, like time standardization, time travel, watch technology and watch fashion (here he predicts the arrival of smart watches), slow-motion film and stroboscopic photography, but the only item that stands out for me is the critique of multi-tasking. These days people take pride in multi-tasking even more than in 1999, but at least today studies are available which unequivocally show that multi-tasking either does not save us any time or that the tasks that have been executed simultaneously with others are not executed as well as they would have been if we focused on one task at a time.

Things get really interesting when the author begins discussing the Internet. It is nice that in a book that is almost 20 years old the observations about the Web revolution - these were its early days - do not sound dated at all. But it is a pity that the author could not talk about one of the most idiotic things that our civilization has ever produced - Twitter - as it was created in 2006. Twitter, the perfect embodiment of our "religion of speed," allows short (140 characters) messages, which transform any actual, potentially worthwhile content into superficial and worthless "sound bites." The author offers quite an interesting perspective on the psychological and sociological ramifications of sound bites, which supports the contrarian point of view - one to which I wholeheartedly subscribe - that if anything can be said in a short sentence, it is not worth saying at all.

Further chapters in the book focus on the issues related to "saving time." Mr. Gleick points out the illusory nature of time savings obtained by reading faster, cooking faster, and eating faster. He ridicules the time-saving-driven attempts to measure how much time we spend for all kinds of activities and perversely asks "How much time can a person devote to time-saving?" The passages that satirize the self-help genre of books like 365 Ways To Save Time are hilarious.

One of the more interesting chapters is devoted to "hand-held antiboredom devices" like the remote. Mr. Gleick quotes Saul Bellow who saw a modern human's mental state "an unbearable state of distraction:"

"Remote control switches permit us to jump back and forth, mix up beginnings, middles and ends. Nothing happens in any sort of order... Distraction catches us all in the end and makes mental mincemeat of us."

While Faster is not a great book in that it contains too much peripheral stuff and lacks cohesion, it is a really worthy read that may cause one to pause and think "Wait, do I really need to hurry?"

Three and a quarter stars.


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