Temporal Belonging

A temporal alignment of the individual with the functioning of markets, two centuries in developing, has made irrelevant distinctions between work and non-work time, between public and private, between everyday life and organized institutional milieus.

If you had hormonal constancy, as men did, you might not be taking your cues from your body about when to rest. You would have to build that in: Sunday is the day we don’t work, God’s day. But if what defined the days was you, your biological clock and calendar, then every day might as well be Tuesday. Perhaps you wanted to work for two weeks solid

One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaste

In spite of the omnipresent proclamations of the compatibility, even harmonization, between human time and the temporalities of networked systems, the lived realities of this relationship are disjunctions, fractures, and continual disequilibrium.