The Treadmill Knew Your Name

Colvile's thesis was simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker, which is itself a kind of proof: everything is getting faster, we know it's getting faster, and we have chosen the speed anyway. Published in 2021, *The Great Acceleration* arrived at a moment when the world had just experienced something unprecedented — a forced deceleration, a global pause that should have been the book's undoing but instead became its best argument. The pandemic proved that slowing down was possible and that almost no one wanted to keep doing it. Within months of vaccines rolling out, the treadmill resumed at a higher setting. Colvile understood this not as a failure of willpower but as a structural inevitability, a kind of social entrainment where the pace of the city, the market, and the feed synchronize individuals into a collective sprint. He was right about that. What he could not have anticipated is how dramatically the sprint would change direction.

The book's most prescient insight is its treatment of acceleration as a phenomenon people *actively choose* despite knowing its costs — the stress, the addiction loops, the erosion of attention. In 2026, this reads less like social commentary and more like a clinical description of how billions of people adopted generative AI tools in under eighteen months, fully aware of the hallucinations, the job displacement, the epistemic rot, and kept going. Colvile's framework of entrainment — the unconscious synchronization of pace with one's environment — maps almost perfectly onto the way organizations adopted AI not because they wanted to but because competitors did, and then the competitors' competitors did, until opting out became a form of economic suicide. He got the mechanism exactly right. What he missed was the specific accelerant. The book treats technology as a general force multiplier for speed, but it has almost nothing to say about artificial intelligence as a distinct category of acceleration — one that doesn't just make humans faster but begins to replace the human in the loop entirely. In 2021, this was forgivable. In 2026, it is the book's most conspicuous absence, like writing about combustion and forgetting to mention the engine.

The blind spots run deeper than AI. Colvile's model of acceleration is overwhelmingly Western and urban, rooted in the rhythms of London, New York, and Silicon Valley. He acknowledges urbanization as a global force but underestimates the degree to which acceleration would become geopolitically asymmetric — the way China's regulatory crackdowns on tech in 2021-2023, followed by its aggressive pivot to state-directed AI development, created a fundamentally different tempo of acceleration than the market-driven Western version. The book also treats acceleration as essentially continuous, a one-directional ratchet. It has no vocabulary for the strange lurches and reversals of the mid-2020s: the supply chain decouplings, the re-shoring movements, the deliberate technological slowdowns imposed by export controls and sanctions. Acceleration, it turns out, is not just a speed but a vector, and vectors can be redirected by states with sufficient will. Colvile's framework bends but does not quite break under this pressure; it simply reveals itself as a theory of capitalist velocity rather than a universal law.

Where the book sits in the larger intellectual lineage is instructive. It inherits from Ritzer's *McDonaldization* the idea that rationalization and efficiency are self-reinforcing systems, and from Markoff's *Machines of Loving Grace* the tension between automation and augmentation. What it passes forward — to Lee and Qiufan's *AI 2041* and even to Russo's *The Cryptopians* — is the notion that speed itself is a value system, not merely a byproduct. This is the book's durable contribution. Not the specific examples, many of which already feel quaint (the breathless treatment of high-frequency trading, the concern about Twitter's news cycle), but the underlying claim that acceleration is a cultural commitment, something closer to an ideology than a condition. That idea has only grown sharper. The passage on entrainment — how walking speed in cities predicts economic output, how individuals unconsciously match the rhythm around them — reads now like a parable for algorithmic feed design, for the way recommendation engines set a tempo that users internalize as their own desire.

If Colvile were writing today, with five more years of evidence, he would have to confront a question his book gestures toward but never lands on: what happens to the concept of choice — the book's moral anchor, the insistence that we *chose* this speed — when the systems doing the accelerating are no longer legible to the people being accelerated?