Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture

by Jenny Odell

The tragedy of fungible labor time lies first in its historical association with coercion, exploitation, and the imagining of people as machines. Time is the punitive dimension in which the wage worker is both measured and squeezed. But beyond that, an overemphasis on fungible time upholds an impoverished view of what time and labor are in the first place. The industrial view of time as money can see time only as work, the masculinized work of a machine with an On/Off button. Like a grid spreading outward from the Taylorized workplace, whether on the warehouse floor or on a gig platform’s mobile interface, this framework contributes to a view of individuals who hold time like private property—I have my time, and you have yours, and we sell it on the marketplace. Now it’s not just the employer who sees you as twenty-four hours of personified labor time; it’s you, too, when you look in the mirror.