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

“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.”

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.

often the experience of using traditional social media — which involves “navigating aimlessly and pointlessly through an apparent unceasing waterfall of content” — is associated with impressions of deadness or lifelessness. We can step into the content waterfall at any point in the day, and it will still be there: endlessly, lifelessly flowing.

“Cyberspace has no seasons. The virtual world is absent of night and day. Internet Time is not driven by the sun’s position, it is driven by yours — your location in space and time.”

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.

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.

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.

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.