This document discusses the issues of information overload and digital communication compulsions in today's cyberspace era. It argues that individuals feel compelled to constantly check messages and engage in pointless circulating of digital information beyond the pleasure principle. Additionally, it discusses how neoliberal capitalism has created an artificial precarity and permanent insecurity for workers, forcing creativity to occur only after official working hours. Finally, it raises questions around how to escape these issues and urgencies, proposing a new politics of security, time, and adventure.

1. Ghent 23/10/13
CYBERSPACE TIME CRISIS

2. Methods of Dreaming
Lucid explorations versus Urgencies

6. Urgencies: Overload
 “The acceleration of information exchange has
produced and is producing an effect of a
pathological type on the individual human mind
and even more on the collective mind. Individuals
are not in a position to process the immense and
always growing mass of information that enters
their computers, their cell phones, their television
screens, their electronic diaries and their heads.
However, it seems indispensable to follow,
recognise, evaluate, process all this information if
you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious.
… The necessary time for paying attention to the
fluxes of information is lacking.” – Franco Berardi,
Precarious Rhapsody

8. Urgencies: compulsion
Jodi Dean has convincingly argued that digital
communicative compulsion constitutes a capturing by
(Freudian/Lacanian) drive: individuals are locked into
repeating loops, aware that their activity is pointless,
but nevertheless unable to desist. The ceaseless
circulation of digital communication lies beyond the
pleasure principle: the insatiable urge to check
messages, email or Facebook is a compulsion, akin to
scratching an itch which gets worse the more one
scratches. Like all compulsions, this behaviour feeds on
dissatisfaction. If there are no messages, you feel
disappointed and check again very quickly. But if there
are messages you also feel disappointed: no amount
of messages is ever enough. Sherry Turkle has talked to
people who are unable to resist the urge to send and
receive texts on their mobile telephone, even when
they are driving a car.

9. Urgencies: work as religion
 “In the current age of machines … humans finally
have the possibility of devolving most productive
processes to technological apparatus, while
retaining all outcomes for themselves. In other
words, the (first) world currently hosts all the
necessary pre-conditions for the realization of the
old autonomist slogan „zero work / full income/ all
production / to automation‟. Despite all this, 21st
century Western societies are still torn by the dusty,
capitalist dichotomy which opposes a tragically
overworked section of population against an
equally tragically unemployed one.” – “Raidcal
Atheism” Federico Campagna

10. Artificial precarity versus
precarious life

11. Everyone is Peggy now
Neoliberal capitalism‟s version of
equality has had the effect, not of give
everyone a chance to be a Don
Draper, but making us all like Peggy is
in the early part of the first season –
forced to spend most of the day doing
administration, and to squeeze time for
our creativity and our thinking in the
hours after the official working day has
finished.

12. Urgencies: permanent insecurity
 the post-Fordist worker “lives in a world
marked … by short-term flexibility and flux
… Corporations break up or join
together, jobs appear and disappear, as
events lacking connection ... what‟s
peculiar about uncertainty today is that it
exists without any looming historical
disaster; instead it is woven into the
everyday practices of a vigorous
capitalism.” – Richard Sennett, The
Corrosion of Character: The Personal
Consequences of Work in the New
Capitalism

13. Indefinite postponement

14. From insecurity to where?
How do we escape and what do we
want to escape to?
A new politics of security and adventure
A new politics of time