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“Leisure does not exist for the sake of work,” Pieper wrote, “however much strength it may give a man to work; the point of leisure is not to be a restorative, a pick-me-up, whether mental or physical; and though it give new strength, mentally and physically, and spiritually too, that is not the point.”
it remains possible to harbor desire for the vertical realm, that place for the parts of our selves and our lives that are not for sale.
There is a lonely absurdity in the idea of racing against the clock at the end of time,
the origins of the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet are inseparable from the history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people.
to see time not as happening to objects in the world, but as being co-created with the actors of the world.
How much someone’s time is valued is not measured simply by a wage, but by who does what kind of work and whose temporality has to line up with whose, whether that means rushing or waiting or both. Keeping this field in sight is all the more important amid exhortations to “slow down” for which one person’s slowing down requires someone else to speed up.
Instagram has turned every corner of the world into a menu of backdrops and experiences. Now you can shop for life itself in a virtual mall where posts about self-care and retreat come across as ads for self-care and retreat. Tap to add this to your life.
In the experience economy, nature (and everything else) appears devoid of agency, a backdrop to be consumed.
“Creating wasn’t fulfilling me the way it used to…prob because I was running around stressing over getting the perfect shot without ever actually experiencing the beauty right in front of me.”
I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could “save” time—by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us.
It’s also about what an employer buys when they pay you money. For Anderberg, it’s a package deal including not only work but also life minutes, bodily presence, and humiliation.
productivity and policing are two sides of the same coin.
“The Shitty Tech Adoption Curve,” in which oppressive technology makes its way up the “privilege gradient”: “Asylum seekers, prisoners and overseas sweatshop workers get the first version. Its roughest edges are sanded off against their tenderest places, and once it’s been normalized a little, we inflict it on students, mental patients, and blue collar workers.” Doctorow writes that remote work surveillance had already been used on at-home call center employees, who tended to be poor Black women. During the pandemic, this type of surveillance spread more widely to university students
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Historian Giordano Nanni writes that “the project to incorporate the globe within a matrix of hours, minutes, and seconds demands recognition as one of the most significant manifestations of Europe’s universalizing will.” Clocks arrived as tools of domination.
On a larger scale, they graded native populations as being more or less “progressed” into modernity based on how removed their systems of time seemed from nature—a
it's interesting that to be considered civilized is to be removed from nature.
This view of abstract labor hours could not have been more alien to task-oriented communities who organized their activities based on different ecological and cultural cues—such as the flowering or fruiting of a certain plant—and where things took however much time they took.
strategies: “Though modern practices are rarely compared to slaveholders’ calculations, many planters in the American South and the West Indies shared our obsession with data. They sought to determine how much labor their slaves could perform in a given amount of time, and they pushed them to achieve that maximum.” Plantation owners were some of the earliest users of what we would now call spreadsheets, producing preprinted work logs and conducting labor-timing experiments similar to the ones Taylor would become famous for many decades later.
Planters did not see them as people but as labor embodied, and that labor could be optimized. Rosenthal writes that, unlike wage workers, “[enslaved people] could not quit, and planters blended information systems with violence—and threat of sale—to refine labor processes, building machines made out of men, women, and children.” Readable between the ledger lines of the plantation book is the violence underlying the system’s “standards.”
At one time…we were chattel slaves; today we are, one and all, white and black, wage slaves.”
Time discipline was and is a tool used both inside and outside the factory to render a more docile and productive workforce,
For the worker, time is a certain amount of money—the wage. But the buyer, or employer, hires a worker to create surplus value; this excess is what defines productivity under capitalism. From an employer’s point of view, purchased time could always yield more money.
the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits.
“The only reward for working faster is more work.”
At FANUC (Fuji Automatic Numerical Control), a complex of twenty-two factories in Japan, robots replicate themselves twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The robots are great workers who don’t even need heat or air conditioning. An article from the software design firm Autodesk, citing clients like Tesla and Apple, wrote that “job stability for FANUC’s self-replicating robots is at an all-time high.”
humans “increasingly have to compete with computers, algorithms, and robots that never get tired, or sick, or depressed, or need a day off.”
But then she points to the graph of growth versus wages in the United States, where the line for wages drops off precipitously from the line of productivity after the 1970s. Now, not only does increased productivity not lead to free time, but it doesn’t lead to money for American workers. Their time is more money, but for someone else.
“Potemkin AI,” Jathan Sadowski’s term for what he calls “services that purport to be powered by sophisticated software, but actually rely on humans somewhere else acting like robots.” Making up the “human cloud,” those humans can be recruited from anywhere and paid very little for their time. Mueller mentions the case of Sama (formerly Samasource), which recruits low-wage workers from Kibera, Kenya (believed to be Africa’s largest informal settlement), to do the dull and endless work of entering data into a machine-learning system.
