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Over the past decade, research on the so-called anti-globalization movement – better termed the global justice movement (GJM)1 – and on other aspects of transnational organizing, has grown substantially. Much of the recent thinking on the GJM emphasizes the role played by transnational information and communication technologies (ICTs), in particular the Internet, in providing what is seen as an unprecedented opportunity to build a virtual network of global citizens. According to these commentators, thanks to the new ICTs, social movements appear to be acquiring the organizational and strategic capabilities that may turn them into genuinely powerful political actors (e.g. Dartnell 2006; Meikle 2002; Rheingold 2002). As Nick Dyer-Witheford (1999) argues convincingly in CyberMarx, the Internet has permitted previously dispersed and isolated points of resistance to ‘rhizomatically’ connect and combine with each other. While it is important to acknowledge the instrumental value of ICTs for progressive social actors, the intention of this paper is to problematize the prevailing celebratory approach by drawing attention to the central role played by communication media in facilitating what Marx called “the annihilation of space by time,” and the associated cultural neglect of time. More specifically, my key concern is that the pervasive spatio-temporal imbalance fosters a mode of social consciousness that is short-term, unreflexive and ahistorical, in turn shaping the strategic propensities of political activists in advanced, “fast capitalist” societies in significant and potentially deleterious ways. The article is organized in three parts. First, I outline the article’s theoretical framework, which combines an approach to communication studies known as medium theory with the basic dynamics of capitalism as laid out in Marxian thought. The aim of this interdisciplinary framework is to facilitate a complex, historical understanding of how, in the broader context of capitalism, instantaneous media of communication shape the ways in which people conceptualize and organize social relations in space and time. The second part examines how capitalism’s systemic imperative to accelerate the turnover time of capital penetrates (largely hidden) temporal norms, and how it is ironically and revealingly reflected in the predominant forms of activist mobilization, which tend to increasingly privilege speed and spatial reach to the detriment of duration. Finally, the brief conclusion offers some tentative suggestions for moving beyond this short-term, myopic impasse.

Activism in the Fast Lane: Social Movements and the Neglect of Time