Saving Time

A book by Jenny Odell exploring the social and material roots of the idea that time is money.

“This book is not a practical means for making more time in the immediate sense… What you will find here are conceptual tools for thinking about what ‘your time’ has to do with the time you live in.”

• Who buys whose time?
• Whose time is worth how much?
• Whose schedule is expected to conform to whose, and whose time is considered disposable?

See also: time, Buddhist Economics

Book Talk

Concepts of time

• In Ancient Greek, there are two different words for time:
  • Chronos: quantitative, calendar time
    • See also: entrainment
  • Kairos: qualitative time, “all moments are different, the right thing happens at the right point”
    • In a world that is “marching in deterministic lockstep towards the abyss” kairos is a life line, a sliver of the audacity to imagine something different.
    • “A forgone conclusion is self-fulfilling: in any situation, if we believe the battle is over, then it is.”
    • “The difference between perceiving chronos and perceiving kairos may begin in the conceptual realm, but it doesn’t end there: it directly affects what seems possible in every moment of your life”
• Horizontal vs Vertical time (Josef Pieper): the point of leisure should not be to work better
  • Horizontal time: work and refreshment/recovery for work
  • Vertical time: things that remind you of your mortality and the sort of fragility of your life, but also this deep sort of awe and gratitude about the fact that you exist at all. He describes it as sort of cutting through that horizontal plane; it feels in that moment almost like it invalidates the horizontal time
• Industrial Time
  • Time as money (equal interchangeable hours)
    • Emerged from the need to measure others’ labour.
    • In its most dehumanizing form, this view sees individual people as interchangeable, separate repositories of this usable ‘time’
    • Marx called it “personified labour-time”
  • “In July 1998, the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) decided to make its researchers start clocking in and out of the lab. They could not have known the backlash this would inspire, not only at the institute but across the world. Hundreds of scientists wrote in support of the INFN physicists’ complaints, saing that the move was needlessly bureaucratic, insulting, and out of step with how the researchers actually worked.”
    • “Good science can’t be measured by the clock”
  • The colonisation of time (Giordano Nanni)
  • Conflict between British colonial sense of time and the existing understanding of time of people living in colonized places
    • Taylorism and factory labour (measuring and systematizing work to make it go faster)
    • This is not much different than the working class today (e.g. Amazon warehouse workers scanner gun, UPS truck with GPS sensors, etc.)
• Unfungible time: pick a point in space and time and just keep watch. A branch, a yard, a webcam. A story is being written there
  • To consider something as inhabiting time with you is to consider that it has experience
  • “Who is in time”
    • Euro-western division of the world into a clear hierarchy of the divine, the human, and nature — from greatest to least in that order
    • Existence of the lesser time problem, similar to the Lesser Minds Problem
• “Clock time is not the only form of time reckoning we experience, but it is certainly primary in how many of us think about the ‘stuff’ of time”
  • explaining aboriginal notions of time is an exercise in futility as you can only describe it as “non-linear” in english, which immediately slams a big line across your synapses. you don’t register the ‘non’ only the “linear”: that is the way you process that word, the shape it takes in your mind. worst of all, it’s only describing the concept by saying what it is not, rather than what it is. we don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. the winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name

Time and Agency

• Conceptions of time are deeply related to how and where we see agency, including within our selves
  • Time and space are quite inseparable, the geologist Marcia Bjornerud calls this “timefulness”
  • “Wherever anything lives, there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed”
  • The abstraction and separation of time and space is a culturally specific and fairly recent event in human history
    • The idea was given its fullest expression in Isaac Newton’s “clockwork universe” in which events and interactions between discrete and bounded entities played out
    • This was mostly dissolved in the realm of physics after Einstein’s articulation of space-time
    • The newtonian ideal proved to be sticky though. Despite developments in quantum physics and philosophy, “most of western society remained newtonian in outlook while thinkers and philosophers abandoned the belief that nature existed ‘out there’”
      • Abstract newtonian time is the kind of time that can be measured, bought, and sold. wage work requires us to see time as “stuff” divorced from bodies and environmental context
• Selma James: “We want to have the freedom to live the lives as we like them, and we are together for that”
• “Unfreezing something in time”: to release something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable, individual identity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time, but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself.
• Politics of subjectivity
  • Amelioration was technical, a question of how to use objects better
  • Abolition was moral, a question of who was a subject
  • “Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object”
  • “Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects”
  • Helene Cixous: “we need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is”

Time and Labour

• “I think the reason most people see time as money is not that they want to, but that they have to. This modern view of time can’t be extricated from the wage relationship, the necessity of selling your time, which, as common and unquestionable as it seems now, is as historically specific as any other method of valuing work and existence.”
• “The wage relationship, in turn, reflects those same patterns of empowerment and disempowerment that touch everything else in our lives:”
• One kenyan worker with gigonline, when asked about the possibility of unionization, is clear-eyed on the matter: “they’ll just take the job somewhere else if the unionised labour of freelancers in Nairobi don’t want to do the work at a certain dollar amount… they’ll take it to nigeria, they’ll take it to gabon, they’ll take it to the philippines, they’l take it to all kinds of countries.. the unions will not have enough power, because I’ve seen what globalization can do”
• Leisure
  • Aristotle: Leisure is only can be philosophy — contemplating, deliberating, and inquiring into the nature of things— which he saw as man’s highest calling
  • If a polis were to have autonomous labouring machines, it would not need slaves, but in the meantime, it was a ‘good thing that natural slaves existed’
  • It was good because the ideal polis would have leisure and for some men to have leisure, someone else would need to do the work

Fitting to the dominant narrative

• “It’s almost like the car seat, but as a metaphor. It’s like you’re trying to make yourself more man-shaped in order to not die in the car.”
• “Becoming more man-shaped in order not to die in the car was my unwitting description of a Lean In type of feminism ”
• Or giving up? Re: the youth
  • High-level of anxiety about the future, “because of that, there is a feeling that they want to collect experiences of value now while they can”
  • Lie-flat movement
  • “Why work hard? I don’t own my work”

Systemic vs Personal Time Pressure

• Self-help broadly: given the system, how can we personally play our cards better?
  • Generally promised to revolutionize your life, not the social or economic hierarchy
  • It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “who will do the low-wage work” is that it doesn’t matter as long as it’s not you.
• “In work, underprivileged employees have very little time-sovereignty, pressure is put on them by the boss or by external authorities who regulate their time-budget”
  • For others, the source of pressure is outside the job situation, it is themselves they needs to blame
• Discretionary time: time you don’t have to use for something, you just choose to do so, for whatever reason
  • “Not all tasks are essential to survival, Burkeman writes, and it isn’t universally ‘compulsory to earn more money, achieve more goals, realize our potential on every dimension, or fit more in’”
  • This allows us to distinguish between someone who truly has no free time and an ambitious person who voluntarily works long hours according to personal notions of necessity
  • “Time pressure illusion”: these are people who, strictly speaking, have lots of free time — it’s just that, according to their discretion, they don’t see it as free
• Byung-chul Han in The Burnout Society: “the drive to maximize production inhabits the social unconscious” producing what he calls “the achievement subject”
  • Rather than be disciplined by something or someone external to them. Achievement-subjects are “entrepreneurs of themselves”
    • Han coined the term “achievement-subject” (Leistungssubjekt) to describe the modern individual who is driven not by external pressure but by the internalized imperative to achieve and optimize.
  • Although it answers to no one (else), an achievement-subject nonetheless “wears down in a rat race it runs against itself”
  • “The disappearance of domination does not entail freedom. Instead, it makes freedom and constraint coincide. Thus, the achievement-subject gives itself over to compulsive freedom — that is, to the free constraint of maximizing achievement. excess work and performance escalate into auto-exploitation”
  • “This same limitlessness is what leads the achievement-subject toward burnout. Trained to set their sights on infinity, they never experience the feeling of having actually reached a goal, frustrated at the impossible gap between what is and what could be”
  • The capitalist “logic of increase” infiltrates cultural notions of the good life — you have 24h a day and must spend them in a better — and better, and better, and better — way!
  • Moral equation of busy = good
  • In a study of “conspicuous busyness”, the sociologist Michelle Shir-Wise finds that irrespective of work-life balance, busyness can become a lifelong performance of productivity, where “not presenting oneself as [busy] may be construed as evidence of an inadequate and unworthy self”
• Experiment with what looks like mediocrity in some parts of your life. Then you might have a moment to wonder why and to whom it seems mediocre
  • Less ambition != less meaning!

Time is not a commodity

• I had a friend who always was giving away bags of cabbage to people. Apparently you are supposed to get rid of the outside leaves of the cabbage so the inside leaves of the cabbage can grow to maturity. Not everything is transactional. “I’ve sort of forgotten that a lettuce keeps growing, assuming that more lettuce leaves for me mean less lettuce leaves for her”
• Chronodiversity: a garden invites the human subject into conversations with different modes and speeds of life
• “Time is not money, time is beans”
  • Beans are not just commodities. Sure, you could eat them, but they weren’t end points and they weren’t dead. At least some of them contained something: the possibility of future beans.
  • Reminded of Donald Trump’s logic for not exercising. Seeing the human body as a being like a battery with only so much energy, Trump could imagine exercise only as a permanent subtraction from his energy bank.
  • Sometimes the best way for me to get time is to give it to you
• Desmond Tutu’s description of the South African idea of Ubuntu: “We say a person is a person through other persons. It is not I think therefore I am. It [is] rather: I am human because I belong, I participant, and I share.”

Misc

• Essay on walking by Rebecca Solnit:
  • Walking is made of steps, but a step is not a walk; a walk is made of perserverance, of continuing to step, and this process of repetition is not redundant but a form of inquiry. “Where are we going?” is the universal question, but the answer is just to go, to walk until your shoes wear out, and then to resole and keep walking… To keep walking is to keep living, to keep inquiring, and to keep hoping. Hoping and walking have preoccupied me the past dozen years, but I had to travel a long way down those two paths to realize that they were the same path whose rule is motion, whose reward is arrival in the unanticipated, and whose very nature is in contrast with the tenor of our time, a time preoccupied with the arrival and the quantifiable. Many lose certainty so much more than possibility that they choose despair, itself a form of certainty that the future is notable and know. It is neither. To despair is to stop walking, and to stop walking is to fall into despair or those depressions that are both features of the landscape and states of mind — the hope deeper than a rut.
• Richard Sennett: “routine can demean, but it can also protect; routine can decompose labour; but it can also compose a life”
  • It can be the construction of ritual, the way that the rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called the Sabbath “a palace that we build in time”
• Against longetivity
  • Numerical longevity and wellness become the final metrics, avoiding the question of what it is that we want to be well and live for, not to mention the irony of a life consumed by the effort to make more of itself.

The sun is eventually going to set behind the skyline. But, in the meantime, if you cast your eyes upward, there’s a different view I wanted to show you. In high school, my art teacher gave me another piece of advice: To get an accurate California blue sky, the trick is to add a near-imperceptible bit of alizarin crimson. There, between us and outer space, is a blue full of crimson and everything else — the circling hawk, the turkey vulture now headed west, the restless flock of tiny swallows zipping around unpredictably over our heads, like air molecules. Though we can’t see it yet, the earth is ever so slowly rotating our view, altering the blue, lengthening our shadows. It is holding us fast, turning us toward tomorrow.