Among the many names that have been used to describe the society in which we live, a matter that also involves issues within the realms of theory (the society of the spectacle, society of simulacra, risk society, etc.), there might be yet another very important name: the society of speed and acceleration. The technical acceleration of modernity, which in recent times has reached a state of paroxysm at the limit of the speed of light thanks to information and digital technologies, has become the most decisive phenomenon not only in social and cultural change but also in the way we live our lives. The experience of time, as marked by acceleration, has become a vertiginous spiral. Everything, from the circulation of money to information, from work rules to leisure activities, takes place at a speed that is increasing relentlessly. This has led to two emblematic diseases of our time. One, burnout, is physical and psychological and the other is socio-political in nature and bears an old name in new clothes, alienation. Appeals have been made to slow down, for the sake of our health and that of our planet. But it was not these appeals that caused a spectacular break in this movement that everyone believed to be irreversible unless there were some kind of natural catastrophe. The slowdown has come in the guise of a virus that has spread all over the world. It was enough for us to experience in practice what we already knew in theory: in the world that we live in, reducing speed brings everything falling down round our ears. Because speed is a total social phenomenon, we have chosen it as the ‘Subject’ for this edition of Electra.