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Synopsis:
To propagate, capitalism seeks to annihilate space by time. (Marx, Grundrisse). Development of technology is key in this process: from horse to car, from car to plane. Internet is even more emblematic. Ultra-distant resources are available at the millisecond. The routes they take to arrive at your computer are selected oportunistically by algorithms. And packets may transit all around the globe to recompose a resource on your screen. Packets don't follow the shortest route but the fastest one. David Harvey describes this phenomenon as time/space compression. By compressing space by time, abstract spaces are created. It doesn't mean that space is absent but that it is transformed into abstraction (airports, highways). Consider digital networks. We forget about the machinery and the materiality that is necessary for them to operate: the composite of hardwares, cables and electricity leaves place to a global impression of a never-ending text. The uniformity (Uniform Resource Locator) of the World Wide Web comes at the price of abstracting its material structure to turn it into a large document that we 'browse'.
Interconneted hardware devices act therefore as time/space compressors. And they are not without paradoxes. Although they are supposed to help build an abstract plane on which capital can flow indifferently, they carry insisting questions. Cellphone users keep asking: Where are you?
Another paradox lies in their relationship to time. Built to compress space by time, they are themselves quickly obsolete. It is as if the speed they allow to gain over material resistance make them subject to aging proportionally. Hardware devices, like the portrait of Dorian Gray, pay the price of the maintenance of global communication as an abstract plane.
What is, then, the potential for these devices to become de-compressors of time by space?
How, by opening their circuitry, their sealed envelopes can we re-localise them? What is their potential for re-materialisation?
What would be instant communication if every packet transmitted would keep the trace of the level of freedom of expression of all the countries it crosses to arrive to your screen?
What would be entertainment if every graphic card would sing the names of the maquilladoras who assembled them?