Inflection

The experience of change, speed, acceleration and an accompanying sense of technological vertigo and culture (or future) shock may be a measure of the extent to which it becomes a progressively problematic cognitive task to track the multithreaded variety and intricacy of technical and (an associated narrative and psychological, subjective experience of) cultural change. Acceleration is a measure of a rate of change of a rate of change and as with any velocity, it is fundamentally measured relative to something (else). Cultural and technological change and progress is an acceleration measured relative to its own process, growth and a relentless efflorescence of iterating complexity. This recursive, reflexive “self-shaping” possesses an intuitive topology of accelerating technological process and cultural flow approximating more closely a Möbius loop or fractal (i.e. Koch) curve than it does a simple linear vector. It is a process fundamentally defined in reference to itself; a temporal metric inflected upon, into and reflexively through its own axes of measurement.