July 2023

20 Minute Read

Volume 2. Issue 6.

By Ted Harrison

The Pace

Must Go On

All the small things.

True care truth brings.

I'll take one lift.

Your ride best trip.

I’d guess you read that more like:

“All the. Small things. True care. Truth brings. I’ll take. One lift. Your ride. Best trip.”

The root of any well-rounded conversation about why a song “just hits” is the beat. The melody is a more accessible starting point, sure, but the ebb and flow of the music is the foundation. Pace plays an essential role across the arts. Movies, shows, poetry, music, theater, and stand-up comedy are obvious examples, but pace can even be found in the non-obvious: the flow of oil-on-canvas, still-life photography, and so much more. We often recognize the pace before we are able to identify the title of the artwork, feeling the tempo of Van Gogh’s style before connecting the brushstrokes to the sunflowers spreading out of a vase. Pace is so fundamental to our understanding of what surrounds us that the lyrics of a familiar tune can be punctuated in a different way and yet stick in the same tempo as they’re delivered in song. It’s as much of the meaning as the words themselves.

Pace is essential to the arts, therefore it's essential to life, and for anyone paying attention to the pace of the 21st century, the sirens are wailing.

I’ve been editing video and film content since I was 12. I’m more than twenty years into this hobby-turned-livelihood, and I still find myself cutting, trimming, and rearranging real life moments for my memory bank. This mental process of logging what is happening to and because of me, cutting those scenes, arranging them in a coherent way, and finally exporting them for later review has always felt like a superpower. Yet, I notice that the pace of these memory clips is increasingly untenable.

In Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he covers four decades worth of curated historical moments. The song heavily implies that his generation has been on a whipsaw of epic proportions, and when it was released in 1989 there was no doubt that the previous forty years had brought about an overwhelming amount of change for the humans who lived through it. As we can see with the benefit of nearly 35 years of hindsight, Joel predicted more of what was coming with globalization via technology rapidly increasing the speed of life. In 2023, a single week’s worth of headlines could fill an extended version of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”.

For any non-believers, I wrote one in just 5 minutes:

—

Joe Biden, Keanu Reeves, Red Russia, Cardi B.

South Pacific, Thomas Friedman, Giannis Antekokounmpo

Kev McCarthy, Donald Trump, Hewlett Packard, Pump and dump

North Korea, South Korea, Robert De Niro

—

The original lyrics featured verses that spanned decades, so it's overwhelming to think these topics were featured within just the week of April 3rd of this year, and again the following week, and the next, and well...you get the point. The cycle is set at such a blistering pace that we could discover sapient life on other planets and it would be old news by Tuesday.

It’s not just the news. Pick any category. Speed serves as the primary indicator of success. Supply Chain? Swift. Fashion? Fast. Internet speeds? Quantum. Delivery? Same day. If I can’t get it now, do I even need it later? The pace of everything has made the synapses in our brain incapable of understanding the synopsis of a topic, let alone the full story.

I recently found myself placing a food order, playing a game of chess on my phone against an opponent in India, awaiting confirmation from someone in San Francisco that a project was complete at work which would allow me to sign off for the day, as I was doing the dishes and listening to the latest news in sports. For anyone counting, that’s three productive acts in three different areas of life, and two modes of entertainment in two different areas––all at once. As easy as all of those things were to do it was infinitely more difficult to stop doing them, and believe me, I tried. As I recognized what I was doing, panic consumed me, only to be quickly overruled by the impulse to move my knight to f3.

Humans weren’t made to absorb or communicate information at this rate. Discovering that a gunman terrorized a city, Taylor Swift broke up with her boyfriend, the groundhog found his shadow, and a deadly disease broke out in a village they barely knew was on the map — all in an hour, if not minutes. Should we really be surprised that depression has nearly one in five of us in a death grip? That the trend line for the Google search “existential dread” is up and to the right? That our pace is out of control? Say it ain’t so.

In Ross Hockrow’s Out of Order: Storytelling Techniques for Video and Cinema⁠, he posits four essential elements to pacing a film for editors: pattern, symmetry, flow and timing. While these are critical, I contend there is a fifth element that, fittingly, supersedes: power.

A powerful cut in a powerful moment can turn an average scene into one for the Dolby Theater at the end of awards season. Think of editor Verna Fields cutting together scenes with the iconic visuals and music of Jaws versus Peck Prior’s 2002 dud The Master of Disguise⁠. The role power plays in pacing is immediately evident. Steven Spielberg entrusted an auteur of the craft to stitch together the iconic tale of a shark terrorizing a New England town. Director Perry Andelin Blake partnered with Prior to let a bizarre character from the script itself dictate the pace, leading to disaster and a 1% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Power is a deft tool when wielded quietly. It’s terrifying and confounding when it takes the reins.

Power and speed have always been congruent, but we fail to recognize that they are interchangeable with pace. You must have the other two in order to have one by itself. Pace, Power, Speed; Three-in-one. They are the Father, Spirit, and Son of progress, and we handed the reigns of humanity to this trinity without any oversight. In a world spinning ever more powerfully on the back of Moore’s Law⁠, Red Bull, and endless methods of communication, it has become plainly evident that the tail is wagging the dog.

The speed at which we consume, produce, and even rest has become the object of our existence, and that speed is forgotten as a tool with which to make a better one. The world no longer has Verna Fields assembling film strips in a dark room with meticulous precision, choosing when to push the pace or pull it back. Unlike Spielberg, we have given the authority of the film’s final product to the animatronic shark used on set, and it has decided it needs countless angles and hapless, thrashing cuts to leave the audience in hysteria. All for microseconds of attention.

I will not go

There remains a finite amount of power that humans are capable of possessing, yet even as many in power desperately hang on the world is laughing at their fruitless efforts to solidify their slipping grasp.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the 117th United States Congress. Whether it is Senator Diane Feinstein of California pretending to legislate at 89 with declining health, or Representative Richard Hudson of North Carolina earnestly asking a tech CEO if his app accesses the home WiFi network––the speed at which we move has overtaken the reach for the traditional power they worked so hard to possess. Pace does not concern itself with your political affiliation, only with forward motion.

It simultaneously makes no sense, and complete sense, that Senator Feinstein was confused by the Vice President’s attendance during a session just last year because she is losing her mental faculties. The same is true for Representative Hudson, whose questions repeatedly expose that if pressed he might actually say “magic” when asked how the Internet connects the world. We’ve come to expect and even gawk at the spectacle of ineptitude on the world’s most consequential stages. It's a foregone conclusion that the pace has moved beyond the Washingtons and Genevas. Technology and culture have so far surpassed our government institutions that its members are hardly aware.

Other elected officials are not immune either. If 2073 feels far away, try to take solace in knowing that it’s closer to this day than when President Joe Biden first stepped onto the senate floor 51 years ago––in 1972. That was three years before Bill Gates gave us new Windows to view the world and Jaws was released in theaters. The current president has never used a computer outside of a political setting. It’s not his fault though, they just hadn’t been invented before his political career began. As many urge our governing branches to consider the ramifications of Artificial Intelligence in upcoming congressional sessions, I am more concerned that they are still connecting to the Internet with AOL free minute CDs.

If at this point you’re thinking we ought to maintain hope because the best and brightest have always stood outside the political sphere, allow me to apologize in advance for dashing any hopes you had that at least those people might have the ability to expertly wield this power.

Jeff Bezos recently made headlines for appearing at the Coachella music festival with the Kardashians wearing an outfit clearly picked out by an alien who just arrived on earth and was immediately forced to come up with “something Gen Z would wear.” Sam Altman––the current face of AI––maintains a bunker full of guns, gold, Israeli gas masks, and potassium iodide for fear of the world ending. Even the nondescript geniuses among us like Christopher Langan (believed to possess the world’s highest IQ for a living person) is caught up in 9/11 conspiracies and bizarre opposition to interracial marriage.

These three serve as the basis of burgeoning archetypal characters when facing the pace of the 21st century: party on bro, just survive, and paranoia. Let’s face it, none of these responses to the pinnacle of modern life leave these men powerless in the world. It’s the pace at which they arrived respectively at divorce, bunker building and conspiracy theories that should heed warning. New girl, new underground gardens, revitalized fear of ethnic groups different than one’s own. None of these have the ability to carefully stitch together a scene, let alone the timeline of mankind. Everyone appears to be pretending to hold on while ultimately caving to an inevitable power––that happens to be the pace itself.

At some point humanity hit the “play” button so it could hop into the film, only for the “play” button to press fast forward without our knowledge. Now we can't seem to reach the stop button from our cellulose frame, either because we’re afraid of the whiplash or because we don’t know how. The pace itself is in control.

But there’s a bewildering beauty in the dark poetry that lies behind this conclusion. That it was power (and therefore speed & pace) itself that usurped the human ability to possess it seems almost codified amongst the scholars, philosophers, and literary thinkers throughout the ages. Somewhere beyond fiction’s greatest antagonists — King Agamemnon, Javert, or Darth Vader — there was always power itself.

We’ve been given an incredible gift in the technological advances of the last century, but instead of reading the user manual we immediately turned everything on without understanding how to manage the equipment. Progress is calling and who are we to stand in its way?

The truth is we were never going to stop the timeline, and we were destined to arrive at our current predicament. The inevitable end was always over-power, out-pace, speed-past. These characteristics I have repeatedly personified here intrinsically win out by the very nature of their definition. Yet as with all inevitabilities, it is what we do next that defines the story and the outcome. Remarkably, humanity’s pièce de résistance is a light switch. As Congress, business leaders, and the intelligentsia falter, the light at the end of the tunnel can be found in switching to darkness. In the void, there is hope for us yet.

Light and time have an interesting relationship with one another. Theoretically if you were to travel faster than light, then you would be traveling backward in time. If given the opportunity, it's something we might all be inclined to take advantage of to start something over, fix something that happened in a painful part of our past, or even go back to prevent the fast forward button being pressed upon the world in the first place.

The theory of special relativity gives us faint hope that we might be able to one day in the future, relive the past. This makes light, by which we can see the observable parts of the universe, a standard for both the measurement of time and of distance. Time and distance just so happen to be the standard-bearers of progress, so we must begin to understand that light is then the standard by which we make or slow our progress––in time and in distance––and only then may we begin to regain the control we desperately need.

This is all a fancy way of saying that our understanding of light may just be our loophole outta this mess. While we may have left the controller mashed on the fast-forward button underneath a bucket of popcorn somewhere outside our reach, if we are in the movie on the frames speeding through the projector then our last bastion of control is how much light we allow onto the screen and frankly, we need more darkness.

At present, we're submitting to the pace of progress in every way imaginable and so we're using light in only two ways:

1) We believe that if we were to just replace the bulbs with a higher wattage we will be more prolific in our accomplishments.

2) We believe that by keeping all of the lights on at once, it makes it easier to jump into any of the rooms in our lives without missing a beat.

In the first tendency we conflate brightness and intensity with gaining time, like consuming all the bad news available for us to read, hear, or watch at once to get up to speed only to spiral into a depressive state. In the second we conflate having more options with achieving distance, like working, playing and resting at the same time while ignoring the inherent impossibility and thus constantly complaining to our therapist about being busy. And in some instances we choose both, foolishly believing that we can double our progress when it more often leads to halving it, like when I moved my knight to f5 while ordering food, finishing a work project, doing the dishes and catching up on the latest NBA trade drama, only to box myself squarely into checkmate. These two tendencies or the combination thereof only serve one master: the pace.

Our charge then, is simple. Forget the dimmable bulbs, the Philips Hue offering the entire spectrum of color, the 100,000 watt emitters, and a switchboard that controls every room in the house. We just want there to be light or no light. The multitude of options the world has provided are no longer for us, we just need a single choice to make. Now it’s much easier to understand the need.

Shut it down. Blot it out. Turn. the. light. off.

The only way to slow down the world around us is to shut it out on occasion. Intentionally seeking darkness, stillness, and peace of mind.

There are a multitude of metaphors that one can choose to make this blatantly obvious, but the reason light serves us well is because things don’t disappear in the dark. Children begin understanding this when they turn just eight months old, but as adults we forget that progress can be made in the dark. By turning off the lights on our momentum we are not removing its existence, we are protecting it from being overexposed. This is why we should know when to turn the lights off––consuming and producing multiple things tirelessly begets just more tired consumption and production. A mess of humanity.

If the light is always on or burning too brightly, our lives and the world appear to be spinning out of control. Stop complaining and turn it off.

Turn the lights off

Now that we got some time back, we might recognize a second problem that could arise: If the light is always off there is never any visible movement.

Yikes.

So then, how do we ensure we are getting a healthy and appropriate dose of both? In economics, tempering inflation in the economy doesn't equal deflation. In the same way, we're not setting about our attempt to slow down the pace with the goal of reversing it. After all, we don’t want our progress to stop completely. That would signify it’s all over––pushing that Google trend line for existential dread logarithmically up and to the right rather than flattening the curve.

In the not too distant past humans across the world were forced to be satisfied with their family, friends, the tribe around them, and a hard day's work. Now, thanks to the electronic boxes in our pockets and purses, what's around us reaches far beyond a few humble miles, extending as far as the James Webb Space telescope can see. So much information is available that even the notion that we take a break feels tired or overplayed, which has led us to believe we lack anything to contribute to the world around us. “It doesn’t matter because it’s out of my reach.” “Someone tried that.” “Been done.” Inevitably leading to, “I might as well just exist.”

The best way to stop existing and to start living is to recognize one’s own agency. The ability to turn the light off, or on, is more important than its current setting. Only you can determine what is the appropriate amount for you, but it has to be you flipping the switch. I am actively trying to do one thing at a time instead of injecting my mind with constant attention from multiple directions. I’m not any good at it yet, but in the moments I succeed life is much less stressful.

The path carved by the speed, power and pace of the modern day world is marked by unearned hits of dopamine telling me it’s okay for life to happen to me rather than because of me. So I must intentionally deprive myself of brain chemicals that are so easily accessible in an attempt to slow my tempo and better see the world around me.

Keeping all the lights on is merely existing. It should come as little surprise that subtle and intentional deprivation is proven to be good for our mental health and stability. Turning off lights is an act of resolve as we search for a simpler pace. Hitting the switch is important, life-giving work that is forced upon us by being born into this age.

Not a single cohort of human life has moved in and out of their time on this planet without holding the idea that they lived in a unique era––history repeating itself in its themes, but changing its characters. That we should take a break is not novel. The artwork that paints the picture of the previous century made this statement ad nauseam. An imploration to turn the lights off is not equivalent to Picasso inventing cubism in a Parisian flat, or Andy Warhol turning the Campbell’s Soup can into a symbol of consumerism. There will also be a generation in the future, if not every single one, that cries out “Slow down!”

So, difficult as it may be, if I’m after anything unique it’s this: carry yourself home.

I’ll be watching. waiting. commiserating.

Carry me home

Ted Harrison is the head of production at Twitter. His past work has ranged from animation onsite in Iraq to award winning Super Bowl commercials to script coverage for Academy Award winning director Jonathan Demme. You’re most likely to find him on a hike with his wife, creating things, or cheering on the Baylor Bears.

The Hart & The Cur

“Y’know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites ya. And those black eyes roll over white, and then... oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces.”

- Quint as portrayed by Robert Shaw, Jaws, 1975