Need for Speed: Practicing Speed in Times of Ecological Collapse

Abstract

This article theorizes the climate hack as a space of overlapping and clashing timescapes: indebted to speed; set against catastrophic climate change and slow institutional change; and threaded with care, community, and collective intelligence carrying different temporalities. The case study examines a Swiss-centered, globally-dispersed group of climate activists, tech entrepreneurs, software engineers, designers, researchers and students meeting weekly since 2021 to build climate technologies. Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how participants negotiate temporal dissonances in their hacking practice. The online meetings employ agile methods oriented towards speed, efficiency, and disruptive action. The urgency of “the hack” promising to “do something now” clashes with slow legacy infrastructures and bureaucratic systems, alongside contrasting temporal outlooks like long-term planning. Participants prioritize start-up methodologies to “get stuff done”, yet acknowledge this model’s imperative for action is part of the late capitalist timescape that accelerated climate change. Expanding on cognitive dissonance, we introduce temporal dissonance and propose that living with conflicting temporalities is a condition of climate action. Beyond recognizing that any space incorporates conflicting timescapes, we suggest addressing the climate crisis “now” means dealing with potentially unresolvable temporal dissonances. In the hack, temporal dissonances are side-lined to synchronize action. Efficiency-based temporal orders dominate despite investments in alternatives. We argue that not foregrounding temporal dissonances risks reproducing entrenched, privileged temporal orders that may accelerate rather than mitigate the climate crisis.