The Ones Who Will Be Remembered.

• Position: Editorial

If the history of humanity were compressed into 24 hours, the Industrial Revolution would have occurred in just the last 10 seconds, and the so-called Information Revolution in just the last one second. Our evolution has not prepared us for the suddenness of the changes those revolutions have brought. As a result, we live in precarious imbalance between the natural cycles of the biosphere and the ever-accelerating speed of modern life. As Payal Sampat noted in a recent WORLD WATCH article, an aquifer may take over a thousand years to flush, but we can poison it with an injection of toxic waste (often a deliberate one, by industries pumping their waste deep into the ground) in a matter of hours. It took the Earth an estimated 10,000 days of photosynthesis to produce the fossil energy we now burn in a single day. Our species, which evolved through eons of interaction with its surrounding plant and animal life, is now immersed-- "24/7," as the phrase goes--in the psychological blitz of our fast-track, technolog ically mediated life. It's no wonder, really, that so many of us feel so out of synch.

It's symptomatic of the precariousness of our condition, perhaps, that we live in an age of cultural ephemera--of hot products that come and go, hot stocks that rise and crash, hot-button issues that arouse passions one year and are forgotten the next. And of course, nothing has been more ephemeral than celebrity. When Andy Warhol said everyone will have their 15 minutes of fame, he was presumably being comically hyperbolic, but in fact he wasn't too fir off the mark. The man who "won" the contest on the inaugural "Survivor" TV show was everywhere in the media for a few days, then gone. Ditto that Florida Secretary of State who was so suddenly thrust into the spotlight to preside over the U.S. presidential balloting battle--what was her name? Ditto the various hip-hop entertainers, home-run kings, dot-com billionaires, et al., whose images appear in the pages of People or Caras and then are gone.

When the historians of the 22nd century tell the story of our time, they won't remember most of these celebrities whose faces are now everywhere on our magazine covers and TV shows. They won't remember most of the fhds, or the hot-button issues or scandals that so preoccupied our populace. What they will vividly recall is that we were infatuated with speed. They'll see that ours was a society in which people who had money were driven to build, as fast as they...