The Turtle aims at creating a space of thought and praxis, without, however, staying behind on the news. After all, as in Aesop’s fable, “The Hare & the Tortoise”, the creature with the checkered shell gets to the finish line first, even though it is competing with the faster hare.
The Turtle (with the accompanying motto ‘More Haste Less Speed’) is based upon the concepts of acceleration and deceleration. Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) and Paul Virilio (1932–2018) were among the few philosophers who analysed in depth the relationship between speed and media, outlining its implications in the fields of politics, aesthetics, ethics and life in general.
The Canadian theorist was the first to speak about the “visual stress” caused by the media (since the invention of printing), while the important French thinker Virilio pointed out that in the accelerating society in which we live, time is flattened and man’s ability to think is reduced: “In today’s world,” to borrow a phrase from his book “Pure War,” “real time has no thought.” In other words, there is a violence in the rapid dissemination of information that has not yet been understood, especially in our era when speed is now measured in nanoseconds and communication never stops.
