New book: Asynchronicity

De Gruyter (Berlin) yesterday published my latest book, which is an exploration of time production and its relationship with the informational swamp in which we are drowning.

Details of the book are here.

And here is an excert to give a sense of what the book is about.

In 1955, the famed Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung published a lengthy essay with a short title, Synchronicity. In it, he tells the story of the wife of one of his patients who, on burying her mother and grandmother, was surprised both times by birds gathering outside the windows of the death chambers. Sometime later, when the husband had nearly completed his treatment with Jung, he developed some physical symptoms that the doctor suspected might be serious. He referred the man to a specialist, who found nothing of concern; however, after the visit the man was returning home when he suddenly collapsed in the street. He was taken home dying but his wife was distraught even before he arrived because an entire flock of birds had alighted on her house: “She naturally remembered the similar [occurrence] that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst.”[1]

This would appear to be little more than coincidence, of course, if a little uncanny. Jung does not think these things are causally connected, but this does not mean the coincidence is not meaningful. He writes:

If one considers, however, that in Babylonian Hades the souls wore a “feather dress”, and that in ancient Egypt the ba, or soul, was thought of as a bird, it is not too far-fetched to suppose that there may be some archetypal[2] symbolism at work.[3]

In case one thinks Jung is reaching a little too far to find meaning in this coincidence, he offers other more rationally empirical examples to support his claim that things that can be meaningfully connected without being causally so. For instance, he describes at length the work of J.B. Rhine, the American founder of “parapsychology”, whose experiments with guessing cards have some notoriety in popular culture.[4] In essence, Rhine’s experiments consisted of asking a subject to guess the form of hidden objects – often cards with picture symbols randomly arranged in a pack. “The experimenter naturally does not know the order in which the pack is arranged, not has the subject any opportunity of seeing the cards.”[5]

Subjects could be asked to guess many hundreds of cards in sequence, with the aim being to achieve a “success rate” higher than that predicted by chance. Success was not always achieved, of course, but some people were able to beat the odds and to do so often enough to suggest that they weren’t simply being lucky. Jung reports that neither space nor time seemed to affect these skilful guessers. Experiments were conducted with experimenter and subject separated by many miles and even over continents. Jung was particularly taken with one experiment in which the subject guessed cardsbefore they had been drawn, with results that “point to the psychic relativity of time, since the experiment was concerned with perceptions of events which had not yet occurred”.[6]

Jung’s argument in Synchronicity is that some phenomena cannot be explained causally by the physical sciences, but also cannot be dismissed simply as chance occurrences. Such happenings are “meaningful coincidences in time”, alignments that can make sense if one is prepared to dig deeper into the archetypes and the mysticism of the collective unconscious. The wife may not understand how the birds are connected to her loss and misfortune, but she feels certain they are. We might not understand how a subject can guess pictures on hidden cards and be anything other than lucky, but probability calculations suggest that they can. “Synchronicity therefore means the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one of more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state – and, in certain cases, vice versa.”[7] There is an entire dimension of being beyond the material, a mode of understanding that is largely hidden but occasionally revealed to us through our coincidental perception of this latent temporal order. 

I was gifted Jung’s Synchronicity by my aunt during a period when a younger me was struggling with some existential confusion. I don’t believe I got very far with it. I struggled with Jung’s mysticism and, if I am honest, with the weirdness of some of the archetypes. I think I largely forgot the book and the ideas that gave it its title. Synchronisation was a word that I encountered occasionally, and it always referred to the pairing of watches, or to timing in electrical circuits. Being in sync simply meant being together in time. Many years later, though, I was reading a different book for a project, which a colleague had written, and I encountered a word that seemed familiar. After a moment of reflection, I could vaguely recall Jung’s idea, but the meaning of this new word seemed diametrically opposed to it, and the first syllable was different. 

Asynchronicity is “temporal ‘mismatch’”,[8] according to Robert Hassan, “a smashing of the uniform and universal linearity of the clock into a billion different time contexts”.[9] This is a definition that seems, on the surface, opposed to the meaning of synchronisation, rather than anything Jung might have meant, yet the stem of the word mirrors not the familiar term but the more obscure concept. The smashing that Hassan describes is something that he sees effected by the divergent speeds and the hyper-connectivity of the internet. Whereas social life had been ticking along rhythmically and nearly uniformly under the overwhelming influence of the clock, it was now fractured between a multitude of publics and tasks and scattered widely (and opaquely) around the globe.  

The subject of time, and the influence of the internet on its production as well as our experience of it, has been of interest to me since I observed during my doctoral research that the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) value, which is the timestamp attached to most social media data, really had no universal or coordinated meaning.[10] Download a post from a social media website and it will almost always have a timestamp attached to it, which usually corresponds to the second at which the post was first encoded into the company’s database.

Technically, this is quite a precise meaning, and a relatively understandable one, but the problem is that it doesn’t really correspond to anything meaningful in the life and times of the post itself. It doesn’t capture when the post was written, in part because writing happens over a period, not at a single indivisible moment, but also because there is latency – a delay – between the instant the user presses “publish” on the post and the instant the post is uploaded and encoded into the database. More difficult still, the post is not seen by anyone immediately; it must be parsed and distributed to the feeds and timelines of other users, and mostly they will not see it immediately anyway. So a single post, a data-event with a single timestamp, is actually created and recreated across many moments, a long distribution of timelines, which vary considerably between posts. The timeline of a post from a popular user is very different from a post published by an account with no followers.

More broadly, it seems as though the internet has weird effects on time, or at least on our experience of time, which has grown familiar under the hegemony of the clock. Generally, the internet – alongside other technologies – is thought to have greatly accelerated our experience of the world, perhaps shrinking or compressing it towards constant immediacy or ever-presence.[11] Such ideas are commonplace in the literature on network time,[12] and I will spend some time discussing them in the next chapter. However, a narrative of universal acceleration is unsatisfying for many reasons. First, it seems clear that not everything accelerates all the time, and the evidence of universal, predictable effect is far from certain.[13] Second, it is not wholly clear in many accounts what exactly is accelerating. Is it simply the things we do and the speed at which we do them, or is time itself speeding up in ways that are possibly complex and confusing? Finally, does it matter whether things are speeding up, or indeed whether time is weird online, because frankly, in most cases, we are perfectly happy to accelerative life, to receive things quickly, to get more for our time?

Nevertheless, it absolutely seems to be the case that people feel as if time is changing in ways that make meaningful alignment more difficult to perceive, a trend that was exaggerated hugely and cruelly by the COVID-19 pandemic.[14]All of a sudden, populations that were accustomed to the accelerated speeds of commerce, labour and social life found themselves stuck at home and isolated by emergency public health orders. In Australia, Melbourne became the most “locked-down” city in the world in 2021 after its citizens had spent 262 days under mandatory stay-at-home order over the previous two years.[15]

The pandemic was a dislocating and disorientating temporal experience, a “a liminal time – a time between times” in the words of the Australian sociologist Genevieve Bell.[16] Finding themselves “outside” of normal time, people felt confused, lost and separated from each other.[17] In my personal experience, a period that began as productive and focused seemed to wane and hollow the longer it endured, until eventually days were passing and I was barely noticing their drift. I remember hating the grim rhythm of the government press conferences and the wait for daily case numbers. There was a sense that life was frozen but also slipping away, under-lived and under-valued. 

Was it purely coincidental that it was during pandemic that first journalists, and then politicians began to warn of misinformation, conspiracy and extremism circling widely online?[18] The accounting of pandemic falsehoods and manipulations is easy enough. We had the Wuhan lab leak and bioweapon rumours, the Ivermectin idiocy, the culture war over masks, the anti-lockdown urge and the spiralling Sovereign Citizen and Freedom Rally movements, which then fused with anti-vaccination conpiracies that at one point seemed genuinely to threaten the hopes of bringing the virus under control. In Australia, celebrities started sharing antisemitic memes and peddling far-right propaganda. In the United States, QAnon[19] suddenly became famous, even winning an endorsement from the President and a Netflix mini-series. By the time the world began to emerge from the acute public health crisis, Russia was readying its invasion of Ukraine and informational uncertainty was set to become a tool of warfare. 

Such accounting suggests that a combination of lockdowns and the internet fundamentally undermined public trust, devalued truth and cast journalists and politicians as purveyors of falsehoods and distractions, but I think this framing is dishonest. These trends were well established long before “coronavirus” entered the public lexicon. The “pizzagate” conspiracy flourished during the 2016 US presidential election cycle, when conspiracy and insinuation were a fairly significant component of one candidate’s platform. Donald Trump was branding the media “fake news” throughout his presidency, whenever there was a story he disliked. There was lots of concern and analysis about “post-truth” politics.[20]It is absolutely not the case that the pandemic initiated any of these problems.

It is also important that we do not assume that all informational problems are of the same type or the same making. In this book, although I will use the phrase “information crisis” to describe many different types of discursive problem, I do not mean that they are the same thing, or that they have the same effect. However, nor do I not think they are entirely separate or distinct phenomena. Conspiracy theories are common in populist and extremist discourse and frequently deployed in disinformation campaigns.[21] Often, they target specific out-groups or locate the other as threatening or divisive, so they are also implicated in affective polarisation.[22] Misinformation is profoundly anti-deliberative. Groups use different discursive strategies to achieve different ends, and so often many types of informational problem are co-located in text, on websites and within communities. Consequently, I use the term “information crisis” to refer to a broad spectrum of communicative phenomena that I consider co-located and anti-democratic, by which I mean that they transgress or undermine the normative differentiation of socio-political systems. 

I think there is a case that the pandemic exacerbated these types of chaotic and transgressive communication, or at least moved them further into the mainstream,[23] so the information crisis has now become an acute concern. In January 2024, the World Economic Forum (WEF) reported that misinformation and disinformation were the leading “global risks”, ahead of climate change, war and terror, based on insights from “nearly 1,500 global experts”.[24] According to the report, “two-thirds of respondents predict that a multipolar order will dominate in the next 10 years, as middle and great powers set and enforce – but also contest – current rules and norms”.[25] The report is noteworthy not because disinformation is necessarily the most pressing global threat, but because it betrays how certain groups (embedded in an established order) are increasingly preoccupied with the information crisis.[26]

For those concerned with the liberal order, and especially Enlightenment democracy, the information crisis appears to be an acute threat. An extraordinary number of books have been published in recent years – for both academic and general audiences – lamenting the informational threat and the gullibility of voters.[27] Meanwhile, the US government is launching a “global alliance to counter foreign government disinformation”[28] and the Australian government has opened an inquiry into civics education with misinformation as a key concern. What is happening here? What has alerted these academics and politicians – who presumably were unfamiliar with media studies and cultural criticism – to the possibility of hyperreality?[29] Why do we think that now is a moment of acute information crisis?

That is the question I will attempt to answer in this book. My working hypothesis is that asynchronicity is revealing itself through these different types of transgressive communication. I think temporal weirdness and informational weirdness are deeply interconnected – partly because of acceleration but also because of more complex and interactive temporal dynamics that are influenced by digital media.

[1] Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 32.

[2] “The archetypes are formal factors responsible for the organization of unconscious psychic processes; they are ‘patterns of behaviour’. At the same time, they have a ‘specific charge’ and develop numinous effects which express themselves as affects.” Ibid., 29.

[3] Ibid., 32.

[4] The Ghostbusters are parapsychologists at the start of the first movie, and Peter Venkman is conducting a Rhine-type experiment with a couple of subjects.

[5] Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle, 23.

[6] Ibid., 25.

[7] Ibid., 36.

[8] Hassan, Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society, 11.

[9] Ibid., 91.

[10] Pond, “Software and the Struggle to Signify: Theories, Tools and Techniques for Reading Twitter-enabled Communication During the 2011 UK Riots”.

[11] Berry, Messianic Media: notes on the real-time stream.

[12] Hassan, “A Temporalized Internet”.

[13] Weltevrede, Helmond and Gerlitz. “The Politics of Real-Time: A Device Perspective on Social Media Platforms and Search Engines”.

[14] Lundström, “Synchronization of the Corona Crisis”.

[15] Vally and Bennett, “COVID in Victoria: 262 Days in Lockdown, 3 Stunning Successes and 4 Avoidable Failures”.

[16] Gillezeau, “Australia is Living Through a ‘Time Between Times’”.

[17] Loose, Wittmann and Alejandro Vásquez-Echeverría, “Disrupting Times in the Wake of the Pandemic: Dispositional Time Attitudes, Time Perception and Temporal Focus”.

[18] See, for example, Hsu, “As COVID-19 Continues to Spread, So Does Misinformation About It”.

[19] Aliapoulios et al., “The Gospel According to Q: Understanding the QAnon Conspiracy from the Perspective of Canonical Information”.

[20] Pond, Complexity, Digital Media and Post Truth Politics: A Theory of Interactive Systems.

[21] Bergmann, Conspiracy & Populism: The Politics of Misinformation; Byington, “Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories and Violent Extremism on the Far Right: a Public Health Approach to Counter-Radicalization”.

[22] Webster and Abramowitz, “The Ideological Foundations of Affective Polarization in the US Electorate”.

[23] Davey and Ebner, “The Great Replacement”: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism.

[24] “The report highlights the findings from our annual Global Risks Perception Survey, which brings together the collective intelligence of nearly 1,500 global leaders across academia, business, government, the international community and civil society.”

[25] Cavaciuti-Wishart et al., Global Risks Report 2024, 4.

[26] It is notable that the report is rarely explicit about what or who is threatened by the risks it identifies, though the threat of an emergent multipolar order suggests that it might be a Western institutional hegemony, of which the World Economic Forum is very obviously a part. If one is a farmer on the edge of the Sahel, a refugee or an economic migrant – that is, not a global leader – then I think risks are clearly weighted differently.

[27] van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity; Berinsky, Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It; Thagard, Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It.

[28] Wintour, “US Leading Global Alliance to Counter Foreign Government Disinformation”.

[29] Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation.