Exo-Darwinism and the Compression of Time in Michel Serres’ The Incandescent
Summary: This essay explores a paradox at the heart of our computational world: as technology accelerates our control over the future, our relationship to the past grows increasingly compressed and narrow. Drawing on Michel Serres’ reflections in The Incandescent, I argue that technological power does not merely speed up human life but alters our orientation to time itself. When evolution becomes externalized through tools and engineering—what Serres calls exo-Darwinism—time acquires intention and direction.
The consequence is not only faster change, but a distinctive form of forgetting, in which the past is acknowledged only insofar as it serves the present. Time compression names this shift: a historical sensibility in which vast durations are summarized, neutralized, and rendered unessential to how we understand where we are and where we are going.
Time’s Somersault—Backward elongation becomes forward progress
Looking back from a great temporal distance from now, will historians (if there are still such figures) see our moment as a passage into or out of something as temporally vast as the Neolithic Age?
To imagine such a judgment requires imagining humans retaining an experience of time as physically large and elongated. The question is not only whether our era marks a historical threshold, but whether it signals a transformation in how time itself is experienced and understood.
This essay explores a paradox at the heart of our modern experience of time: as technology accelerates our control over the future, our relationship to the past grows increasingly compressed. Unpacking several dense paragraphs from Michel Serres’ The Incandescent, I argue that technological power does not merely speed up nature’s processes but remakes our orientation to time. When evolution becomes externalized through tools and engineering—what Serres calls exo-Darwinism—time acquires intention and direction that is did not previously have. The consequence is not only acceleration, but a distinctive mode of forgetting in which the past matters only insofar as it has filtered out the waste and given us a clean present.
I have written elsewhere about the Enlightenment’s elongation of time—an expansion that largely looked backward. Biblical chronologies that once dated the events of Genesis to roughly 4000 BCE gave way to geological and historical durations that stretched human origins far beyond any inherited scriptural frame. This elongation did not grant mastery over time. On the contrary, it made human existence appear belated, small, and contingent within vast natural processes.
As the eighteenth century became the nineteenth, however, time underwent a decisive somersault. Backward elongation was increasingly accepted—especially as Darwin’s evolutionary vision, drawn from geology, took scientific hold. With that acceptance came a reorientation toward the future, driven by the growing marriage of scientific knowledge and technological engineering. Together, these forces began to define what we call Modernity.
This somersault subtly altered the status of the past. Once backward elongation no longer posed a threat to Biblical reckonings, it ceased to demand sustained attention. The deep past became ancient history—background rather than a mythical source of divine meaning. Time increasingly oriented forward under the sign of progress, innovation, and technical capability.
The past compressed again. What mattered now was not duration as such, but direction. History became relevant only insofar as it could be summarized, inherited, or operationalized by the present.
Serres attempts to name this experience of compression. In The Incandescent, he traces an intuition rather than a system: as technological power accelerates, time itself seems to shrink around the present moment. The past is neither denied nor erased, but relegated—validated in principle, rendered unessential in practice.
I believe we live within this sensibility today. We might call it an End of History not because events have ceased, but because prior history is increasingly treated as complete, settled, and already absorbed into the present. What remains is a forward-leaning temporality oriented toward intention, outcome, and speed.
Technology and Exo-Darwinism
To understand this compressed experience of time, we need to dwell on the transformation Darwin introduced in the mid-nineteenth century. Evolutionary time is slow, tentative, and experimental. It unfolds through variation, error, and contingency. Crucially, it is not driven by a final state toward which it aims.
Darwin’s evolution has no destination in view.
This point is often misunderstood. Evolutionary time is sometimes compared to grand historical narratives such as Marxism, or even to the teleological fantasies that animated National Socialism. But these comparisons fail at the most basic level. Darwinian evolution does not move toward an end of history. It is not guided by purpose, design, or foresight. It proceeds without intention. As Serres puts it, evolution is “intentionless” (45).
There is, of course, a sense in which evolutionary change accumulates. Traits persist when they happen to work within a given environment. But this accumulation does not amount to a plan. Mutations are not selected because they are better in any absolute sense, only because they survive. Evolution adds up mistakes that endure. Its time is progressive only retrospectively as any given mutation in the present has no sense of purpose.
Technology introduces something radically different into this temporal field: intention and purpose.
With technology, human consciousness acquires the power to shape processes toward the ends we choose. Time is no longer passively moving forward as the intentionless play of mutations that happen to work; it is stretched between the present and an envisioned future. Evolution is externalized into design, experimentation, and engineering that seeks to orchestrate the coming into being of that future.
Serres names this shift exo-Darwinism. ‘What is technology?’ he asks. ‘The advent of finality in an evolution that knew nothing of it’ (45).
This is a decisive rupture. Technology frees humanity from waiting on the slow and uncertain rhythms of genetic adaptation. ‘No more waiting for a long and problematic adaptation from the genetic bank,’ Serres writes (46). What evolution accomplishes through blind variation over immense spans of time, technology achieves through deliberate intervention.
Human tools thus function as a short circuit in evolutionary history. They compress durations that once stretched across millions of years into moments of invention, fabrication, and use. The future is no longer something that happens to us. It becomes something we attempt to make.
This is not merely a technical change. It marks a transformation in how time itself is experienced. When intention enters evolution, time acquires not just a direction but a director. Time begins to feel available, actionable, and responsive to human purposes. The slow, meandering temporality of natural history gives way to a faster, more assertive rhythm shaped by design and foresight.
Here, the compression of time begins in earnest.
Technology and Speed
In this sense, technology is not merely an extension of evolutionary processes. It is a speed upgrade applied to evolution’s slow experimentation.
Natural selection does not invent mutations with a vision of the future. It has no intent and no purpose. It simply chooses from what nature has offered it with the only criteria being 1) a relatively better than other options and 2) the possibility of being passed on to offspring.
Through technology, humans begin to experience time as something they can shape. Duration becomes responsive to aims. What once unfolded according to indifferent natural rhythms now bends, however imperfectly, toward desired ends.
Serres captures this shift in a striking image. If not the first stone—whose origins disappear into deep prehistory—then at least the second was deliberately shaped:
If not the first stone, which came about God knows how, then at least the second one was carved by someone or other in order to hunt or fish, to harpoon some prey, to jab, to cut up, seeking, for an aim, new means, a newness that, for an intentionless evolution, would have taken millions of years. . . (45)
In the carved tool, intention crystallizes. A future outcome—a successful hunt, a cut made easier, a task accomplished faster—guides present action. Time contracts around purpose. What evolution might achieve slowly through chance, humans attempt directly through design.
They understanding of purpose and technology makes a long arc visible. Serres traces a meandering but unmistakable line ‘from tools to the entropic scale, from the hammer to the thermonuclear bomb, in order to renew the face of the earth and change human destiny’ (134). The tool is not simply an object; it is a wager on time. It assumes that the future can be reached more quickly, more reliably, and more decisively through human intervention.
Technology, in this sense, is humanity’s way of taking control of fate. It does not abolish contingency, but it reorganizes it. Risk is no longer merely endured; it is calculated. Possibility is no longer awaited; it is engineered. The future becomes a field of action rather than a horizon of uncertainty.
Speed follows naturally from this shift. Once intention governs time, delay becomes a problem to solve. Acceleration becomes a value. The faster an outcome can be achieved, the more fully time appears to answer to human purpose.
Here, speed is not simply a quantitative increase. It is a qualitative transformation in how humans relate to time itself. Time becomes compressed not because it contains less, but because more is demanded of it. Each moment is tasked with producing outcomes, justifying itself through results, and clearing the way for what comes next.
This accelerating orientation toward the future prepares the ground for a final consequence: the gradual relegation of the past.
The Re-Compression of Time as Forgetting the Past
With this background in place, we can now understand the re-compression of time that accompanies humanity’s emergence from the Neolithic condition. Technology does not merely accelerate natural processes; it accelerates life itself. ‘What is technology?’ Serres asks again. His answer is blunt: ‘A tremendous acceleration of the time of living things’ (46).
This acceleration does not consist simply in running natural laws faster. It produces a fundamental shift in temporal orientation. When intention governs time, attention tilts toward the future—toward goals, outcomes, and projected states of affairs. Time is increasingly experienced as something to be aimed rather than inhabited.
This has an unexpected consequence. As the future becomes the primary horizon of meaning, the past begins to recede. It is not denied or erased, but quietly sidelined. The past remains present only insofar as it explains how we arrived here or supplies resources for what comes next.
The past starts to appear merely as the surviving capabilities that allow us to shape the future. Technology becomes the driver of history ins0far as our history is the summation of our progress toward controlling fate:
Technology sculpted the human, which sculpted it, its time, its habitat, its customs, its morality. Technology carried history with it. (47)
Serres does not fully theorize this process. Instead, he traces an intuition, one that turns on a striking paradox. Darwin forced human thought to confront durations so vast they strain imagination. ‘Opposition to Darwin,’ Serres notes, ‘came above all, I think, from the incapacity to conceive such colossal durations, and I still wonder today whether we conceive of them easily’ (46). Evolution stretched time to a scale nearly incompatible with human experience.
Yet at precisely the moment when time expands to these unimaginable lengths, technology enables humans to overcome nature’s pace. We no longer wait on evolutionary drift or geological patience. We intervene. We design. We accelerate.
The result is not a renewed engagement with duration, but its neutralization. Modernity’s belief in progress—a linear temporality oriented toward continual improvement—quietly invalidates the past by declaring it obsolete. What came before is framed as less informed, less capable, less advanced.
Time moves forward by leaving things behind.
In this framework, every present moment functions as a summary of all that preceded it. History matters only insofar as it has bequeathed something useful to the now and filtered out the waste. Anything that cannot be absorbed into the present’s projects is discarded as residue. The past becomes background noise, an archive consulted selectively and instrumentally.
This is what time compression finally names. The past is acknowledged, even respected, but no longer dwelt within. It is rendered complete, settled, filtered and finished. What remains is a present perpetually oriented toward its own futures, moving too quickly to linger with what no longer appears to matter.
In such a temporal regime, forgetting is not a failure of memory. It is a structural feature of progress.
Coda: After Compression
Seen from a sufficient distance, the question that opened this essay returns with greater force. If future historians look back on our moment, they may not describe it primarily in terms of machines, algorithms, or artificial intelligence. They may describe it as a transformation in how humans learned—or failed—to remain present to time once they acquired the power to direct it.
The Neolithic marked a long accommodation to rhythms humans did not control: seasons, growth, decay, inheritance. Modernity, by contrast, is defined by the steady expansion of agency over those rhythms. Exo-Darwinism names the culmination of this expansion, the moment when evolution itself becomes something we attempt to steer. The cost of this power, Serres suggests, is not simply risk or error, but a narrowing of temporal attention.
When time is experienced primarily as something to be accelerated, the past becomes heavy. It slows things down. It resists optimization. Compression becomes not only convenient but necessary. Vast durations are summarized so that action can proceed unencumbered.
Yet something is lost in this exchange. The past is more than a sequence of causes leading to the present. It is a reservoir of alternative tempos, abandoned possibilities, and unrealized paths. To relegate it entirely to background is to impoverish our experience of time itself.
The danger Serres points toward is not nostalgia, nor a desire to reverse technological acceleration. It is the risk of becoming temporally shallow—capable of immense power over the future while increasingly unable to dwell within duration. When time is reduced to a vector of outcomes, history collapses into utility, and forgetting becomes indistinguishable from progress.
Whether this moment marks an exit from the Neolithic or the beginning of something else remains an open question. What is clear is that the compression of time is not an external force acting upon us. It is a posture we inhabit. And postures, unlike destinies, can still be adjusted.