The modern world is defined by its attempts to overcome space through transportation. Our methods of traversal define our relationships to our world. Modern human history is a record of increasing speed. There is an effective relationship between time and space, an increase in speed leads to a decrease in travel time and thereby travel space. As a result, the world shrinks as we continue to advance, until nothing is left of the globe.
Modern human history is a record of multiplying speed. With the advent of every new transportation technology, - trains, cars, and the digital —
our world increases in scope, but we become more distant from what and who is around us. We once knew our world, our town, in its entirety—
geography, history, culture, and people. We experienced places as having a tacit presence, as being, in some tangible sense, “real.”
Then railways were built, and our speed of travel quadrupled. At once, the remote became readily accessible. The world became divided into
destinations—places of arrival, neatly marked by railway stops—and travel space—the space in between. As traversal became trivial, travel space
began to lose its significance.
The automobile expanded easy traversal beyond what the railway could. Destinations became far more minute—grocery stores, places of work, home.
As a result, the very places we lived in ceased to exist. The travel space between destinations grew, and so more of the world was eroded of its tangibility.
The digital and its incomprehensible speed have not altered but destroyed the time-space paradigm. The speed of travel has become instantaneous,
making the notion of traversal irrelevant. Time and space no longer extend outward. In the unreality of the internet, we are alone.
We traverse un-spaces, mutilated and reconstructed by unseen algorithms. Time ceases as long as we continue to scroll, to watch, to consume.
There is no traversal. There is no time. There is no space. There is no humanity. There can be no destination.
