Dromology: The Politics of Speed

Most discussions of organizational speed treat it as neutral—a capability to be optimized, a competitive advantage to be pursued. Faster is better. Agility is virtue. The race goes to the swift.

Paul Virilio disagreed.

Virilio, the French cultural theorist, spent his career analyzing speed as a political phenomenon. He invented the term dromology—from the Greek dromos (race, running)—to name the study of speed's role in society. His argument: speed isn't just a metric. It's a form of power, and its acceleration has consequences we barely understand.

Organizations might benefit from taking his warning seriously.

The Core Argument

Virilio's thesis is unsettling: speed is the hidden dimension of power.

Throughout history, the faster force has dominated the slower. Cavalry over infantry. Railroads over horse-drawn transport. Telegraphs over letters. Jets over propeller planes. Fiber optics over copper wire. The pattern repeats: acceleration confers advantage, and the advantage compounds.

But this isn't a neutral development. Speed doesn't just enable—it transforms. And at sufficient velocity, it destroys the conditions for human meaning-making.

Virilio identified several phenomena:

The dictatorship of speed. When speed becomes the supreme value, everything else subordinates to it. Quality, deliberation, depth, relationship—all become obstacles to be overcome. The fastest actor sets the pace everyone else must match or be eliminated.

The pollution of distances. Speed annihilates space. When you can communicate instantly anywhere, place loses meaning. When you can travel anywhere in hours, location becomes arbitrary. But humans evolved in spatial contexts. Remove distance and something essential disappears.

The accident as essence. Every technology produces its specific accident. Ships produce shipwrecks. Planes produce crashes. And speed technologies produce speed accidents—catastrophes that unfold faster than human comprehension or response. The faster the system, the more catastrophic its failure mode.

The tyranny of real-time. When everything happens in real-time, there's no time for reflection. Instant communication demands instant response. The premium on reaction time eliminates the space for considered thought. We become hostages to immediacy.

The Organizational Translation

Virilio was analyzing military technology, urban planning, and global systems. But his concepts illuminate organizational dynamics:

Speed as competitive moat. Organizations often pursue speed as strategy: faster product cycles, faster decision-making, faster customer response. This creates pressure on competitors to match the pace. The result is an arms race in which speed itself becomes the battleground—regardless of whether the speed serves any deeper purpose.

The elimination of slack. Faster systems have less buffer. Slack—the capacity to absorb variation and disruption—disappears as speed increases. Just-in-time everything means no margin for error. The system becomes more efficient and more fragile simultaneously.

The real-time trap. Real-time dashboards, instant notifications, always-on communication—these technologies promise responsiveness but deliver reactivity. When you can see everything instantly, you're expected to respond instantly. The tempo accelerates; reflection time vanishes.

The speed stratification. Not everyone can move at the same pace. Fast organizations create internal hierarchies based on speed capacity. Those who can't keep up are marginalized. Slowness becomes stigmatized, regardless of whether it produces better outcomes.

The fast-failure cascade. In high-speed systems, failures propagate faster than responses. By the time you understand what went wrong, the consequences have already spread. The 2010 Flash Crash—a trillion-dollar stock market plunge in minutes—exemplified this: algorithms operating at speeds beyond human comprehension producing outcomes humans couldn't prevent.

What We're Observing

When we look at organizations through Virilio's lens, certain patterns become visible:

The acceleration treadmill. Organizations that compete on speed often find themselves running faster just to stay in place. Last year's fast becomes this year's slow. There's no equilibrium—only continuous acceleration or elimination.

The deliberation deficit. Strategic thinking requires time. But organizations optimized for speed often can't allocate that time. Long-term planning degrades into extended short-termism. The urgent perpetually crowds out the important.

The burnout equation. Speed costs energy. Sustained high-speed operation depletes human resources. The organizational demand for acceleration often exceeds human capacity for sustainable performance. The gap is closed by individual sacrifice—until it can't be.

The depth sacrifice. Fast work is often shallow work. Building deep expertise, developing nuanced understanding, cultivating complex relationships—these require time that speed-oriented organizations won't provide. The choice for speed is often implicitly a choice against depth.

The winner's trap. Organizations that win through speed become dependent on speed. Their competitive advantage is their acceleration, so they can't slow down without losing position. Victory becomes a cage.

The Critical Question

Virilio didn't offer solutions. He was a diagnostician, not a therapist. But his analysis raises a question most organizations avoid:

Is faster actually better?

Not "can we go faster?" (usually yes) but "should we?" Not "are we faster than competitors?" but "what does our speed cost us—and them?"

This is uncomfortable because speed is so thoroughly valorized. Challenging it feels like advocating weakness, defending inefficiency, making excuses for inadequacy. But that's precisely Virilio's point: speed has become ideological. It's no longer questioned. It's simply assumed.

What to Look For

In your own context, you might observe:

• Where speed has become a value rather than a means—pursued for its own sake
• Whether competitive acceleration has eliminated deliberation time
• How much slack remains in systems optimized for speed
• Who sets the pace and who must follow
• What's sacrificed to maintain velocity (depth? quality? wellbeing? relationships?)
• Whether speed accidents have occurred—failures that propagated faster than response
• If there's any acceptable reason to be slow

The question Virilio raises isn't "how do we go faster?" It's "what happens when we can't stop?"

That's a temporal question most organizations aren't asking—because the acceleration itself prevents the pause required to ask it.

Temporacy is investigating the hidden temporal structures that shape organizational life. Virilio's dromology offers one lens for seeing what's usually invisible: speed as political force rather than neutral capability. We're exploring what this means for organizations caught in acceleration they may not be able to survive.