On observing time /╲/╲/╲

One of the primary anxieties of the digital age is that an online life is a kind of half-life; that time spent on the internet is wasted time rather than lived time. Temporality and rhythmicity is the most popular way to differentiate between the live and the inanimate, the natural and the artificial, even if it is not the most accurate

As Kei Kreutler points out, conventional calendars and time lines seem awfully out of date now that we are lost in a multi-temporal garden of forking memes. This dissonance between felt time and measured time gets more confusing by the day, and it’s beginning to feel unsustainable. Amidst the unsettling chaos, it’s tempting to crawl back to the tim... See more

When it comes to the internet and our media ecosystems, it is easy to hurl vague, blanket critiques like Social media is making everything feel worse. That is mostly true, by the way—but it’s obvious. Which is why I was drawn to a recent idea from writer and technology theorist L.M. Sacasas: The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not... See more

As I used to observe with some frequency, the arc of digital culture bends toward exhaustion.

What I mean by this is simple: when we think of the way our days are structured, the kinds of activities most readily on offer, the mode of relating to the world we are encouraged to adopt, etc.—in each case we are more likely to find ourselves spent rathe... See more

This idea of relativity is what is often left out of the narrative that the internet has broken our relationship to “natural time.” It is presumed that if we could synchronize a perfect harmony between inner and outer time, we would rediscover a sense of belonging to the planet and to each other. We are haunted by the specter of an innate, perfect ... See more

This depressing observation struck me as one outcome of living on an internet that is stuck in the past. It might seem the other way around: that our fleeting attention is the result of an internet that’s unrelentingly feeding us the now. But my hunch is that people feel stuck or move on because online, these events feel like things that have happe... See more