Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

In Ancient Greek, there are two different words for time, chronos and kairos. Chronos, which appears as part of words like chronology, is the realm of linear time, a steady, plodding march of events into the future. Kairos means something more like “crisis,” but it is also related to what many of us might think of as opportune timing or “seizing the time.”

This phenomenon, in which one adapts her temporal rhythms to those of something or someone else, is called entrainment, and it often plays out on an uneven field of relationships that reflects hierarchies of gender, race, class, and ability.

As Braverman puts it, “Every step in the labor process is divorced, so far as possible, from special knowledge of training and reduced to simple labor. Meanwhile, the relatively few persons for whom special knowledge and training are reserved are freed so far as possible from the obligations of simple labor. In this way a structure is given to all labor processes that at its extremes polarizes those whose time is infinitely valuable and those whose time is worth almost nothing.”

experience is algorithmically incompressible.