For Sharma, the discourse of speed that accompanies characterizations of contemporary non-stop 24-hour life only masks the ways that achieving “the perfect calibration” to an ideal temporality is an unattainable goal; and how “slowness” is a luxury that can necessarily only be enjoyed by some under capitalism.

Instead, that sense of alienation is a product of the fact that the internet as it is serves what Sharma has identified as a dominant temporal order: one that locks each person into their own individualized time-scale, making them feel fully responsible for their success or failure to adhere to the particular temporality that is assigned to them.

The pacemaker-style app attempts to bring an experience of communality back to the highly individuated temporal flow of the online experience, playing on nostalgia for an age when media had a more predictable temporal structure.

Sharma argues that the contemporary relationship to time is characterized by “the looming expectation that everyone must become an entrepreneur of time control.” Each of us must “recalibrate” to temporal expectations that vary widely along lines of power and privilege.

The idea that we are living in a “dangerously sped-up culture” only fuels the desire to outsource undesirable tasks (perceived as “non-time”) to others.

“If standardized time was a fiction more or less driven by capitalism,” writes D’Erasmo, “it might be possible that [internet] atemporality is a fiction more or less driven by capitalism as well.”

Sharma writes: “Capital invests in certain temporalities — that is, capital caters to the clock that meters the life and lifestyle of some of its workers and consumers. The others are left to recalibrate themselves to serve a dominant temporality.” Some float in the lazy river, and others clean it.

But clock time was not always viewed as being this organic. The accusation that is today leveled against the internet — that it distorts natural rhythmicity and turns the human body into a machine — was once leveled against clock time itself.

With time, as with space, the locus of the “natural” is constantly shifting. Caught between two fictions — the rigidity of clock time, and the undifferentiated soup of internet time — people hoping to rediscover a “healthy” or rewarding relationship to time increasingly turn to the purest, most natural, and most objective timepiece of all: the body... See more