Jonathan Curiel: "The society of speed is a society of disengagement"

Jonathan Curiel is deputy director general of M6 programs in charge of magazines and documentaries. He just published Vite! (Plon, 2020).

FIGAROVOX.- You got the idea for this book when you realized that you were no longer listening to voice messages on your phone. Why? What happened?

Jonathan CURIEL.- I gradually realized that I found it difficult to read an entire newspaper without frantically consulting my phone, that I had the same trouble reading a book, that everyone had their eye on his cell phone in meetings at work, in transport… and that I did not actually take the time to listen to voice messages on my phone! Which, however, are not very long.

At the same time, I felt the sensation of information that constantly chased the other, of a permanent tumult of the news. We celebrate the moment and then make a clean sweep. We go, in this society without memory, from the departure of Meghan and Harry in Canada to pension reform through the escape of Carlos Ghosn and the coronavirus. We only talk about this for a few days then ... We forget everything.

According to you, we would have entered "the society of the Quick". When did this development date? Is it the consequence of social networks, news channels? When did this development date?

The phenomenon of time acceleration and the primacy of speed is not new. Capitalism carries speed within it for the simple reason that capital must rotate, and quickly. The very notion of "productivity gains" inherent in capitalism is directly related to speed. It's about working faster for less.

The consumer society in which we live is closely linked to speed and immediacy. Expiration dates, desirable products, instant availability of the product, creation of a new desire ... Everything is subject to time and its acceleration. Technological innovations are also deploying much faster today: 175 years passed between the invention of the typewriter in 1714 and its worldwide distribution, between 30 and 40 years for inventions such as the refrigerator and the vacuum cleaner. an iPhone deploys today in just a few months!

What is interesting to note is the concomitance in a few years of different factors contributing to an acceleration of time, even more important since the early 2000s in my opinion.

Transition from the seven-year term to the five-year term which has had consequences on French political life and the possibility of registering for the long term. No more question today of "leaving time to time" ...

September 11 where we all witnessed behind our television screens the collapse of the towers, experiencing a generalized synchronization of affects, even "a globalization of affects" , according to the formula of Paul Virilio, thinker of speed and time acceleration. The advent of reality TV in 2001 in France, the first media appearance of total immediacy; development of continuous information channels and the famous “real time” (what is unreal time ???); buzz imperatives to gain a place in the audiovisual content market, primacy of social networks and the reign of emotion.

And obviously, an acceleration of globalization and exchanges with the rise in power at the time of the BRICs (Brazil Russia India and China) and a more vigorous technological development in the early 2000s with the Internet.

Would you say that this is a real anthropological shift?

Yes, because this speed has direct consequences on our lives and our society. We are living more and more in a society without memory. “The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting, ” Kundera says nicely in La lenteu r. This is the example of Trump's tweets that say one thing and its opposite the next day.

The Vite society is a society of disengagement: we want to be everywhere but in reality we are nowhere, we no longer invest, we no longer engage. We no longer accept an invitation to a dinner or an evening but we "try to pass" . Paul Virilio spoke to him of "dislocation of daily life" , a loss of meaning and bearings, due to speed and acceleration.

Society which is also experiencing the development of pathologies linked to speed, such as burnout, partly linked to the pressure of emergency and speed. The cult of performance, which is indexed today on the management of repeated emergency situations. The stress that "everything, immediately" and "always faster" can impose.

In your opinion, this has particularly upset economic life, in particular that of the company. In what?

From a macroeconomic point of view, we note that the management of recent economic crises (subprimes, Greek crisis) have placed immediacy and speed at the heart of our lives. How many last chance summits, ministerial meetings and international institutions ended in agreements in the middle of the night, at the very last minute!

Regarding businesses, the ones we hear about the most today are those that aim to perpetually reduce the waiting time and fully satisfy our desire for immediacy. Amazon, Uber, Deliveroo, Waze ... always faster! "Anything. Anywhere. Anytime ”is Amazon's promise. Everything, everywhere, all the time. It is no longer the big who eats the small but the fast who eats the slow.

Finally, within the company, speed has an important influence. Responsiveness matters as much as activity, an email drives out another, an emergency drives out another. The expressions common in the business world like "ASAP" ( as soon as possible ), "I will come back to you very quickly" or "it's for yesterday" when we inquire about a deadline, are not not trivial. They reflect a good form of immediate pressure.

You explain that the very notion of crisis, which is supposed to reflect a short time, is now paradoxically long-term. Is the fast-paced society a society of permanent crisis?

A symptom of immediacy, the very notion of crisis has become a permanent state, a stationary state. Supposed to be only a moment, according to the etymology of the term crisis "krinein" in Greek (moment of rupture or separation), it has become a permanent situation. What must pass quickly no longer passes. The end of the welfare state, the glorious thirties and its high growth rates which marked the prevalence of the state on the market, from long time to short time have accelerated this state of permanent crisis, in any case felt as such by the French, especially those of my generation.

We have since grown accustomed to relative economic stagnation. We have since been rocked by crises, monetary, financial, real estate, oil, technological. We have grown accustomed to a state of permanent crisis. We are used to experiencing periods of calm between different crises, false dishes a few kilometers before the mountain passes that mark the difficulties. All the French decline theories for 20 years, to which I do not personally subscribe, have moreover accentuated this perception. The crisis has become our economic back-store. Immediacy has finally settled.

The quest for meaning can, however, lessen this perception. Symbol of the financial crisis, Jérôme Kerviel, following the setbacks that we know, had started a long march on his return from the Vatican. He had left the crisis behind him. The march had replaced the market. Sense and slowness had supplanted the anomie and speed of the financial markets.

Also in politics, meaning, through a certain story telling aiming to shape reality, give it flesh and give it a direction, is a counter-fire to the immediacy and the dizzying urgency of daily.

In the era of social networks, is it also a society of permanent "clash"?

In the large market for attention and content, today you have to stand out to emerge. The clash allows it. This is the case on social networks or even in certain programs.

In the era of buzz, social networks, twittering, you have to be quick and short. In the era of buzz and social media, context no longer matters. We have entered the world of “de-contextualization”. We often remember the little sentence, the one that creates the clash, the one that is repeated and highlighted throughout the day.

"I cleave therefore I am" is a new golden rule on networks. Long developments, contradictory arguments find it difficult to exist. The society of the immediate condemns the nuance, the interval, the breach. It favors the coup de radiance, the monolithic block, the shocking and peremptory argument.

Networks have the particularity that they allow the expression, sometimes, of a certain violence. The speed and immediacy that I describe in the book desecrate the writings, give them an ephemeral character, bet on the total self-destruction once published. But that is only an impression. The writings, tweets or Facebook posts remain in reality.

Clivant is not a buzzword for nothing. There is no longer much room for moderation, long and mature reflection, consensus. On the contrary, we have entered an era where consensus creates boredom. Moderate thinking over the long haul, without a stick effect, creates boredom.

Social networks are, in fact, a volcano that operates by successive eruptions. Boring neutral pure information does not trigger an eruption. Anger, surprise or humor: yes. Motivation and infatuation are lower for an outdated truth. The advent of Trump, Johnson or Bolsonaro is not fortuitous. This new type of leadership clearly plays with truth and emotion; they even made it their business.

Do you think the era of fast has also profoundly changed the media world? In what?

First of all, the audience for the previous day's television programs drops every day just after 9 a.m. It is rare for a professional sector to obtain the result of its actions from one day to the next. Time is therefore de facto very short and collected. This necessarily induces a way of thinking based on immediacy, reactivity and speed.

Reactivity also linked to current events: tributes broadcast to certain missing personalities, deprogramming due to an important event, agile positioning in relation to the competition's offer.

This immediacy is also marked by the news channels, of which it is the core business: to be permanently at the heart of the event and to inform continuously.

Finally, the immediacy is manifested today by what is called the "buzz": to stand out thanks to roughness: shocking sentences, splitting debates, laughter, "slippages", disruptive moments, adjective also very popular ...

In the end, the media plays a double partition in this society of speed and instant. They are both vehicles of speed and of the moment: continuous news channels, reactivity to current events, hastily organized debates, new cult of series, pure product of speed in their form and scenario… And at the same time they constitute a benchmark for the public who find them at fixed intervals, and for whom the media are beacons in their lives. It is an in-between between immediacy and permanence.

Note a certain appetite for slower and long-term content in the media, major documentaries, in-depth investigations. It is a new and reassuring trend.

What does the operation of the news channels inspire in you? Have you, as a media man, changed the way you work? The economic stakes are such that the race for immediacy has it not become inevitable? The fast-paced society has also changed politics in recent years. In what?

Take Trump's tweets: an eloquent example of immediacy in politics. A tweet has immediate consequences on the other side of the world. International relations have always been a matter of patience; today they are a matter of brutality and suddenness.

Building on the long term is more difficult today, it needs immediate results. Which is difficult if not impossible. Schroder's Hartz 1 and 2 reforms to the German economy produced their effects only under the Merkel government. Difficult to transform society without the possibility of projecting into the future and transcending the notion of urgency. It is also interesting to note the number of times the word "acceleration" has been spoken for 15 years by political staff, it is always necessary to accelerate whatever the subject!

Politics today is very much in the daily management of the emergency and in the related communication. You have to speak, show yourself, act, in a very short period of time. Each President also has his own relation to time and his way of positioning himself in relation to him: embracing the spirit of the times and accompanying the flow of speed, ignoring time or even exceeding it by trying to keep it at a distance , without undergoing the immediate dictate.

Finally, the reign of emotion, a vector of immediacy in politics, has real impacts on our political life. The example of the arguments often erroneous during the campaign in favor of Brexit are an eloquent illustration of this. But they were all taken back because they generated strong emotions and positions.

Long before Brexit, sociologist Hartmut Rosa said: "It may well be that words, and even worse arguments, have become too slow for the speed of the world of late modernity". This is a great political upheaval ...

Does this new situation make our societies simply ungovernable?

You even see in the Yellow Vests crisis the consequence of a divide between the "active speed" and the "passive speed" ...

The symbolism of the yellow vest is interesting. It is normally a tunic that we put on the side of the road so as not to be hit by those who drive at full speed. Metaphor for this fast-paced society that leaves a fringe of the population on the shoulder while the others are rushing, caught in the flow of speed, instant and urgency.

The fast society is cut in two: there are those who can register and those who cannot. This society mainly concerns the ultra connected urban elites, assaulted by their smartphones. Two categories of population are therefore distinguished: those who submit to the frenzy of the moment in a kind of voluntary servitude, who sometimes pretend to escape to better embrace it and those whose lifestyle does not consist in multiplying activities, which are subject to a more essential life urgency. There are those who master the "art of liquid life" according to Bauman, "those who feel at home in many places, but in none in particular" and those who constitute the losers of globalization, flow and speed. The fast and the slow. The makers of speed and those who suffer from it.

Are we all becoming Kundera's “leaning man on his moped”? What does this metaphor mean? Is it a form of alienation? How to find the sense of duration?

A certain slowness allows you to regain a taste for things. Not to be caught in the tumult of immediacy and speed, not to suffer the passing of time as a failure. Darwin defined himself as a "slow thinker" ; Einstein could spend 8 hours in a row in his Princeton office staring at the ceiling; Sherlock Holmes found the ultimate evidence of a crime in a state of almost meditative slowness ...

"All men's misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to stay at rest in a room" writes Pascal. Man needs to be entertained to escape boredom and this inability to "stay at rest" . The reality is that in our societies, boredom is banished. We never stop hunting for downtime, we must make the most of our time, never lose it. Always Kundera, in La Lenteur , who considers that "in our world, idleness has turned into idleness, which is quite another thing: the idle is frustrated, bored, is in constant search of the movement which missing ” .

The child's brain is formed a lot through phases of boredom, many specialists say, while we tend to over-solicit children, to offer them as many activities as possible to "keep them busy " . We no longer accept boredom; it is synonymous with failure. We must relearn boredom and cultivate a certain art of free time. The State through long-term investments and protection from the speed inherent in the markets; business through stability and inclusion in future strategies; the media, through content soothed over a long period, have their role to play in protecting us from immediacy and regaining a sense of duration.

Read also: Performance measurement, a new tyranny?

Have you yourself been disconnected since writing your book?

It's difficult but I try.

No more "permanent alerts" on the phone (what a worrying word, by the way!), I prefer to give the alert myself and go get the information I want to deepen rather than being inundated with overflown information. Social networks with more moderation even if they are useful. Walk rather than run, disconnect when I can.