Slow is Good

An interesting examination of the importance of being slow. Here's what Bruce Sterling had to say:

The science-fiction author Bruce Sterling says “pace layering”—the idea that different layers of a structure or a system move at different speeds—is an interesting notion when considering slowness, as it helps to explain the various rates of change associated with different sectors of society.
“The slow movement imagines itself to belong by rights to the cultural layer”—a slow-moving layer of society—“but it’s still in the layer of fashionable activism,” he says. “An earthquake is rapid and shocking, it seems, but the underlying forces are geologically slow. So it’s actually our perception of pacing that’s odd, not pacing itself.”
Much of our philosophizing about time is based on the human experience of it, despite the fact that the entire human experience of time to date is a tiny fraction of the actual duration of time. “Humans perceive things in embodied ways,” Sterling explains, “because our perception is an embodied phenomenon. We naturally tend to relate time to the experience of our own bodies. Every time we temporally stretch one of these abstractions—my grandparent’s generation, the American nation, Western civilization, modern Homo sapiens, the Devonian geological period—some apparent relevance drains out of it.”