An accelerated state

Writing about the digitalisation of subnational administrations in Kenya, Datta and Hoefsloot make the case for engaging the temporality of the state as a locus of power and its expression. As a cinematic auteur, they argue, the state times and sequences the asynchronous moments of its action. Building on this insight, the following commentary adds a vectoral dimension to the relationship between time and statecraft: acceleration, or, as physicists would define it, a directional rate of change in speed. Yet acceleration is more than an analytical metaphor: as we argue, it has been a collective grammar through which the Kenyan state itself has been given effect and sense through hastened infrastructural projects in the transition from autocracy and immobility to democracy and (digital) development.