But presence also means permanent availability without any promise of compensation. It is related to the function of zero hour contracts in other sectors, even though motivations for availability are not the same. In the age of the reproducibility of almost everything physical, human presence is one of the few things that cannot be multiplied indefinitely, an asset with inbuilt scarcity. Presence means to be engaged or occupied with an activity without being hired or employed. It means more often than not to be locked down in standby mode, as a reserved element for potential engagement, a crowd of extras to provide stochastic weight.

Interestingly enough, the demand for total presence and immediacy arises from mediation; or more precisely the growing range of tools of communication including the internet. It is not the opposite of, but rather the consequence of technology.

According to William T. Mitchell, the economy of presence3 is characterised by a technologically enhanced market for attention, time, movement – a process of investment that requires careful choices. The point is that technology gives you tools that allow for remote and delayed presence, so that physical presence becomes the scarcest option among a range of alternatives..

According to Mitchell: “Presence choice occurs when an individual decides whether face-to-face presence is worth the time and money”. Presence in fact becomes a mode of investment. It is not opposed to technology but it ́s consequence.

The economy of presence is not only relevant for people whose time is in demand and who could basically sell (or barter) more time than they have, but even more so to those that must work multiple jobs in order to make a living or even not make a living. It is equally relevant to those who coordinate a jumble of micro jobs, complete with the logistical nightmare of harmonising competing schedules and negotiating priorities, or that are on permanent standby in the hope that their time and presence will become exchangeable for something else eventually. The aura of unalienated, unmediated and precious presence depends on a temporal infrastructure that consists of fractured schedules and dysfunctional and collapsing just-in-time economies in which people frantically try to figure out reverberating asychronicities and the continuous breakdown of riff raff timetables. It ́s junktime, broken down, kaputt on any level. Junktime is wrecked, discontinuous, distracted and runs on several parallel tracks. If you tend to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and if you even manage to be in two wrong places at the same wrong time it means you live within junktime. With junktime, any causal link is scattered. The end is before the beginning and the beginning was taken down for copyright violations. Anything in-between has been slashed because of budget cuts. Junktime is the material base of the idea of pure unmediated endless presence.

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