Saving Time

For colonizing countries, this was true both at home and abroad.

There was something difficult and self-defying about these processes of shedding, I thought. And this quality was also mine to claim, given that I, too, had desires to follow, a will to express, and a container to supersede. Tomorrow was growing raw out of the husk of today, and in it, I’d be different. All of us would.

Trained to set her sights on infinity, she never experiences the feeling of having actually reached a goal and, instead, exhibits the “auto-aggression” of the master and mastered rolled into one. She is forever “jumping over [her] own shadow,” frustrated at the impossible gap between what is and what could be.

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.

navigating their own temporal topographies, rushing to meet some unseen demand.

But the buyer, or employer, hires a worker to create surplus value; this excess is what defines productivity under capitalism.

dour, substantial buildings as historic rallying places for troops in the case of foreign threats to U.S. soil…their original purpose was to allow the rapid deployment of the militia to keep workingmen in check.”

the colonists were not able to perceive it at all, because the native sense of time and space did not exhibit the same abstraction and independence from natural cues as their own. On

The lived experience of a person working with an anonymous, algorithmic, and inscrutable interface is one demonstration of the way automation doesn’t so much replace work as reconfigure its content, conditions, and geography.