Time Has Been Codified and Commodified. Jenny Odell Wants to Set It Free

If we have only so much attention to give, and only so much time on this earth, we might want to think about reinfusing our attention and our communication with the intention that both deserve.

the clock is just one tool among many for reckoning time, and its full meaning emerges only when it’s joined with a particular goal or cosmology.

In its most dehumanizing form, this view sees individual people as interchangeable, separate repositories of this usable time stuff: as Marx put it, “nothing more than personified labour-time.”

I was seeing that the means by which we give over our hours and days are the same with which we assault ourselves with information and misinformation, at a frankly inhumane rate.

IT’S WORTH NOTING here that a scrupulous accounting of time is not in itself unique to capitalism.

Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth