Kvond: I’m going to respond thematically I think, because this is a very big subject, but first I have to say that I’m not sure how you differentiate between “quality” and “intensity”. A change in intensity is a change in quality, take a trip to the dentist before you object to this.

I also want to say that I am not a fan of Fischer’s Dystopian view of Capitalism, which wreaks of afluence that does not acknowledge itself, dreaming that it is actually representing something other than a privileged circulation of text producers and text consumers.

As to change itself, and I am not one for “novelty” per se, as a category of measurement, there are quite a number of registers upon which rapidity of development, communication, connection become historical shifts of great margin (and I am not interested in locating “paradigms” either). To start with there are certain tempo barriers that condition the relativity of other tempo shifts. For instance, life spans though lengthening form a kind of margin against which rates of change taken on a frame of reference. This can be underestimated. If one changes careers once in a lifetime, or 12 times in a lifetime, there is a qualitative shift in the meaning of this unto the very limit of a lifetime. Couple with natural life-markers like generations and there are built in parameters against which tempo alternations create very different effects. To some degree alterations are framed. So yes, speeding up a tempo is one thing, but the tempo is in contrast to a larger music which is somewhat stable. The full effect of these intensifications is likely very difficult to measure, but I suspect that it is profound and permeating.
There are also lower-level thresholds of tempo. For instance when cinema was able to surpass the threshold of frame-changes and create the illusion of seamless continuity, and entire matrix of identifications (projective identifications) upon media has qualitatively changed. When alternations dip below cognitive thresholds, the way that the human subject can identify with projective or virtual effects is dramatically changed. As more and more communicative connection comes to be below the cognitive threshold, more and more of our virtual existence is enabled to appear “as Real”. The lack of “lag” is not simply convenience factor, but one that comes to inhabit our bodies, and eventually define their affective capacities. That text, image and response have come into great confluence under a regime of simultaneity is really stupendous for how subjectivity is framed and molded. To list a few meager differences. In the West 12 year old girls know how to literally “look like a movie star and fuck like a porn star” as part of their media-esteem feedback loop, for better or worse. Our virtuality also enables the body itself become more involved in problem-solving. Video game instincts become related to mathematical landscapes. I’m not saying that these are positive developments, simply that these extra-terrestrial changes are changes of significance.
A further development in human relations can be considered the way that cultural DNA is allowed to be recombined (to use a metaphor). In the past there strong geographical barriers (largely tranportational, but also linguistic) which allowed cultural development to occur in isolation, as if in Continents. Branches of human development occur with some independence from each other. One would seldom come in contact with what you are not. It was in a sense that sub species of culture did not cross pollinate except in highly idealized fashion. What changes with communications, speeds and intensities is that what was once far “over there” is “right here”. I can, or anyone can, identify with and interact with persons in very different situations. It is not just that viruses can spread across the globe, but also the cultural DNA of persons can as well. Related to this is that political actions, let us say the failure to act in terms tragedy, or the decision to bring war (to name an obvious two), now have a face, a literal face. This is to say, if bombs kill we may find ourselves face-to-face in identification with victims we would never have heard about, consequences we might never imagine. There are also inhuman consequences as well, video-game weapons and the whatnot, but I think it cannot be underestimated what it means for affective identification to have been extended, in real time, across the globe. Now is a time that affective consequences of policy leak out with great contingency. The face of the young lady shot in Iran echoes with reverberation that non-yet know. This is not just a change in speed or communication. It is change in the entire feedback loop of cognition and self-identification.
There are of course other very radical differences happening, the way in which the actual genetic code of ourselves is being re-written, with human beings becoming self-determining in fashions never before conceived. There are the ways in which communities are being built not simply due to race or class, but electronically (like our interaction here, that would never have happened in 1990).
All of these are vast differences in the way that human beings relate. And yes, it is true, trans-global companies are indeed changing the way that powers relate, subverting to some degree the powers of states (private blackwater, or Xe, armies are interesting). And yes, the Capitalization of the political process certainly is done in the context of these changes in human relations and redefinitions of identity. There are strong pushes for “status quo” (in the reactionary cultural sense, and also the urge for power to preserve itself), but these constitutive changes in human relatability run even deeper than that. In my view thresholds are being crossed.

Sorry for the long response.

But sure, the “status quo” that I was talking about is both on the level of the political and, more concretely, on the hedging of so-called “creative destruction” in the realm of economics via the co-opting of the state and its resources.