Saving Time

This worker needs no feeding machine; instead, she takes a Soylent-like beverage and a set of pills, adding, “The aim is to achieve a laser focus and find ways to work around the limitations of the human body. There isn’t always time to eat, but there are so many innovative ways to fuel your body and mind.”

In comparison to those other forms of “screwing the nine to five”—worker organizing, legislation, and mutual aid—the allure of the productivity gospel is supposed to be that you don’t need anyone but yourself to achieve freedom.

But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profit

Ta-Nehisi Coates: “The defining feature of being drafted into the Black race [is] the inescapable robbery of time.”

what I find in kairos is a lifeline, a sliver of the audacity to imagine something different.

Like an emissary from somewhere outside clock time, it has populated my mind with questions of porousness and response, of inside and outside, of potentiality and imminence.

In contrast, for those timed by the time-study man, work becomes more like the Tramp’s work on the assembly line in Modern Times: consistent and eminently timeable, with less and less left to the discretion of the worker, who in turn becomes more easily replaceable.

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

In this way, Taylorism rendered labor more abstract and fungible, hastening a process that has often been referred to as “de-skilling.”