The Time of Computers: From Babbage and the 1830s to the Present

Abstract

This chapter argues first that Babbage and Lyell developed a similar, machinic view of human and natural time, with the difference engine for Babbage being at the center of this conceptualization. This view involved the smoothing of time socially and naturally to create a form of stasis. Second, it maintains that the ever-faster time of the computer, prefigured by Babbage, has led to the historical creation of a new ontological level at which events occur well below the threshold of human perception – and that this new level is associated with a drive to stasis.