The gods confound the man who first found
out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him too
Who in this place set up a sundial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial: one more sure,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when it was time
To go to dinner, when I had anything to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.
The town’s so full of these confounded dials,
The greatest part of its inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, creep along the
streets.[i]
Though the notion of cursing sundials seems quaint today, these lamentations, attributed to the Roman playwright Plautus, speak to an anxiety about the draining nature of time measurement that still seems prescient. In 1967, over two centuries after Plautus died, the Marxist historian E.P. Thompson would take time out of the hands of poets and put it into the hands of historians and anthropologists with his essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” where he traced the relation of “clock-time” through the emergence of waged labour in the industrial revolution:
As soon as actual hands are employed the shift from task-orientation to timed labour is marked. It is true that the timing of work can be done independently of any time-piece - and indeed precedes the diffusion of the clock. Still, in the mid-seventeenth century substantial farmers calculated their expectations of employed labour … in ‘dayworkers’… The computation is difficult, and dependent upon many variables. Clearly, a straightforward time-measurement was more convenient. This measurement embodies a simple relationship. Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time. And the employer must use the time of his labour, and see it is not wasted: not the task but the value of time when reduced to money is dominant. Time is now currency: it is not passed but spent.[ii]
Thompson wasn’t the first to take a sociological interest in time, but his contribution to the field of anthropological horology cemented time-discipline as a dominant category that remains a topic of study today. For Thompson, the capitalist method of exploitation through the wage necessitated domination through the clock. The life that was lived between the hours marked by sundials became colonized with minutes and seconds. The growth of merchant-capital and global trade would lead to greater demand for personal clocks and portable watches, with fine-watches becoming a status symbol among industrialists and train conductors.[iii] Taylorism was defined by the measurement of the stopwatch. The mass-coordination of industrial warfare in the First World War lead to mass production of wristwatches; what had previously been seen as a kind of jewelry primarily worn by wealthy women became a necessary tool in the orchestration of unprecedented destruction.[iv] But if it was clock-time that came to regiment the pulse of the Industrial age, today it is screen-time that measures the operation and contradictions of labour in post-Fordist core nations.
When examining time-discipline we must remember that “what characterizes capitalism is not the exchange of products, but the purchase and sale of the worker’s capacity to labour and its use in commodity production for profit.”[v] Workers do not sell labour, but labour power, and the sale of labour power takes the form of a sale of time. In the contemporary service industry, it does not actually matter if one actually has any task to do or any customer to serve, one must always be ready to serve because they have contracted their time to be dedicated to that work. Post-Fordist time becomes ever more intense in its suddenness and intrusiveness. A fast-food worker may be called at any time and be asked if they can fill a shift (for extra pay they might desperately need). After attaining my Undergraduate degree, I spent about a year working as a night-shift custodian at a university. My coworkers and I would be called in for new training, HR meetings, and trade show demonstrations regularly - rarely was it useful. These attendance-mandatory meetings often seemed to ensure that we were just doing something mandated by the employer rather than learn anything that could be useful or make our work more engaging.
Many of the fears about screen time, or phone-time more specifically, are about how much of it we seem to participate in. Phones now come with a tracker that lets you check how much time in your day or week is spent on your phone. Applications like Offtime can block off social media access for programmed lengths of time to help limit distractions while attending to periods of the day like “work”, “family”, or “me-time.”[vi] There has yet to be definitive empirical evidence that screen-time itself is likely to produce mental health problems on its own; however, the content of what is seen on a screen can be deleterious to one’s mental wellbeing.[vii]
It is not enough, though, to think that the issues of “problematic” content on a screen is simply an issue of greed, poor community guidelines, consumerism, or other behavioral characteristics. As Nick Srnicek points out in Platform Capitalism, the digital realm is not driven so much by an “attention economy” that produces value out of users who spend their time online, but a “platform” economy that seeks to acquire and sell data which entails “recording, and therefore a material medium of some kind”[viii] We can see how screen-time is related to the production of Data through incrementally minute measurement of time; but, as Thompson did for clock-time, we should also look at how screen-time relates to the daily lives of individuals and particularly what it says about how we work. In 1979 a 49-year-old Italian factory worker might boast: “I do my seven hours’ work in three and a half or four hours. I’m responsible for 78 pieces every day. I work the way I want and decide how to do it. When I finish, I talk or do crossword puzzles, even though we’re not supposed to. I walk around. There’s also a room for relaxing where we play cards…”[ix] In the United States in 2019 when I or my coworkers working the custodial nightshift finished early (a particularly common occurrence in the summertime) we would often each seclude ourselves away in some corner alone to look at our phones. Unprotected by any union or organized movement it was risky to try and pass the time talking, playing cards, or even reading a book. To be alone with one’s phone was safer: one only had to pocket it and pick up a spraybottle to look busy, and if caught you could say you were simply checking the time or changing some music you were listening to. One couldn’t claim to be just checking a book or playing cards for just a few seconds.
Screen-time might make up a significant portion of one’s day, but the appeal and power of it is in its minute divisions of activity, its periodic accessibility. If I’m looking at my phone at work or playing videogames at home on the weekend, screen-time is almost always interruptible. Whether one is supposed to or not, it is easy to interrupt a lull in a service-industry job like custodian or barista by looking at one’s phone. Likewise, the activities on one’s phone can be put aside moment-to-moment to return to work when interrupted in turn by a new customer or a radio call about a spill somewhere. Phones can be checked on a bathroom break to send messages, check if there are new videos on my favorite YouTube channel, read headlines, or spend a few actions in a “coffee-break game” like Fallen London. Like sand in an hourglass, the more screen-time we have the more it seems to slip through our fingers. Screen-time is mythic time moving at the speed of light: a hundred cyclical stories playing repeatedly throughout the day. Where it once took Sisyphus a day to roll his boulder up a hill, now it takes a smartphone user a few moments, and they might get some in-app currency for doing so. But the fact remains that the boulder must be rolled, and any time that’s saved must likewise be invested in repetition.
This domination extends well beyond the realm of the minimum-wage service industry, up into the world of digital industry itself. With work producing or maintaining software, games, apps, and websites it is not uncommon for employees to be contractually expected to work well beyond standard 8-hour days. In 2004 the originally anonymous “letter from an EA spouse” revealed brutal time crunch under Electronic Arts:
When asked for specifics about what ‘working long hours’ meant, the interviewers coughed and glossed on to the next question… within weeks production had accelerated into a ‘mild’ crunch: eight hours six days a week… They gave a specific date for the end of the crunch, which was still months away from the title’s shipping date, so it seemed safe. That date came and went. And went, and went. When the next news cam it was not about a reprieve; it was another acceleration: twelve hours six days a week, 9am to 10pm… the current mandatory hours are 9am to 10pm - seven days a week - with the occasional Saturday evening off for good behavior (at 6:30pm).[x]
In October of 2018, fourteen years after the “EA Spouse” article, Rockstar Games received a media backlash after Dan Houser bragged that Rockstar employees has been working 100-hour workweeks. Though Houser said that it was only the writing team and the crunch only lasted for three weeks, a subsequent removal of NDAs allowing employees to discuss work culture had reports of 55- or 60-hour workweeks and crunch that effected personal relationships and health.[xi]
Working from home or freelancing offers little consolation either. As Mark Fisher, who knew well the personal exhaustion of precarious freelance work, wrote: “intellectual work can only be undertaken on a short-term basis. Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”[xii] Gig economies and freelance work has brought about a new normalized form of piecework disguised as freedom, where abstract blocks of one’s personal life are always on the verge of being transformed into the sale of labour power:
If the hour’s wage is fixed in such a way that the capitalist does not bind himself to pay a day’s or a week’s wage, but only to pay wages for the hours during which he chooses to employ the worker, he can employ him for a shorter time than that which is originally the basis of the calculation of the wages for the hour, or the unit of measurement of the price of labour. Since this unit is determined by the ratio of the daily value of labour-power to the working day of s given number of hours, it naturally loses all meaning as soon as the working day ceases to contain a definite number of hours. The connection between the paid and the unpaid labour is destroyed. The capitalist can now wring from the worker a certain quantity of surplus labour without allowing him the labour-time necessary for his own subsistence. He can annihilate all regularity of employment, and according to his own convenience, caprice, and the interest of the moment, make the most frightful over-work alternate with relative or absolute cessation of work. He can abnormally lengthen the working day without giving the worker and corresponding compensation, under the pretense of paying ‘the normal price of labour.’[xiii]
The intensification of intrusive labour and the ubiquity of incremental screen-time exist in relation to one another. Where organized opposition and protection does not exist then resistance to work on the job is not collective, it is the individual search for little moments to look away. Likewise, industries seek to produce work that can interrupt the time of the individual through apps that let you work as a taxi or food delivery service or websites where you can do research or online tasks on demand. Time spent on screens may not cause mental stress, but the social relationships of screen-time produced by intrusive work and algorithmic platform capital is another story. It is not that screens make us anxious; it is that the requirements of living a life which may constantly be intruded upon demands activity that can be interrupted - screen activity. Conversation becomes piecemeal, it can be stopped and picked back up as it proceeds sentence-by-sentence on the screen over hour-long periods. Even someone who wants sex but feels too exhausted, isolated, or busy can try and sext where titillation becomes a back-and-forth of images and sentences that can occur as sudden exchanges over a long time. One can begin to see a future where the social life of the individual becomes further and further broken into intensive, exhausting pieces. Like a parody of Marx’s early vision of a communist society where it would be “possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic”[xiv] we are confronted with a future where I would drive others, do data entry, deliver food, write for journals, and browse Facebook or twitter all throughout my day while still selling my time for wages. At the same time, waged and salaried work in factories or offices can continue their search for ideal gamification where it will be ensured workers will spend all their time at work participating only in activities demanded by the employer. Little fragments of distributed screen-time will be homogenized into glacial masses of repetitive Skinner-Boxes of augmented labour. Already Amazon Warehouses are utilizing games to “make work less tedious, but also encourage higher productivity by pitting workers against one another in the virtual game world.”[xv]
To confront this future, we must ask both what could change about the relationship of time in a future socialist mode of production and what the current capitalist form of screen-time does to condition methods of struggle today. The dismal conditions of intensified and piecemeal time described above should not be mistaken as evidence of a Baudrillardian world-as-simulation where nothing is real, everything is a projection upon a screen, and individuals operate like automatons. Nor is it simply an issue of too much technology and too many gadgets, too many bad hobbies for young people today. All of this is necessarily social, and our activity grows from the societal base that surrounds us. It is the product of the way our social organization must reproduce itself. Today, the Left in the productive core has begun to make promising inroads into digital culture. Left-wing online journals, magazines, YouTube channels (”breadtube” even being its own loose association of socialist channels), Facebook pages, and podcasts have allowed revolutionary opinions to seep into the cracks in people’s everyday, disjointed lives. In what has often been deemed “anti-social” screen activity rests a possibility for a new kind of anti-capitalist “distraction.” Something akin to what Walter Benjamin saw in the potential of film and the surrealists updated for the digital age:
Contemplative immersion - which, as the bourgeoisie degenerated, became a breeding ground for asocial behavior - is here opposed by distraction [Ablenkung] as a variant of social behavior… The tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means - that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually - taking their cue from tactile reception - through habit. Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert measure of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception.[xvi]
When I was working the night shift, it was extremely beneficial to have access to podcasts and news about theory and current struggles while I was in my workplace and exhausted at home. At the same time, we need to find ways to move beyond media and news to better engage in workplace struggles. Teachers strikes and union organizing in the tech industry and among game developers is promising: it is good that many individuals in conflicting class positions (I.e. the “middle class”) are starting to see themselves aligned with proletarian interests. Nonetheless, to produce revolutionary “habits” among the working class we must not be content with producing material that exists only as an interruption in their daily lives, we need habits that push beyond distraction even if they begin with our state of subdivided time. Strategies of sudden moments of resistance, or the multitude, have proved themselves insufficient. We on the left must start by asking how we can make ourselves accessible to people who are dominated by the sudden demands of capital-driven screen-time, but we must then look to find ways to help workers find a way to engage in continuous activity. Like screen-time, we should allow the accessible and repeatable and engaging actions which can accumulate into real organizing. Unlike social activities in screen-time, a social revolutionary-time cannot be pocketed and put aside at any moment to be picked up later. We need to begin to create images, songs, videos, writing, that can be engaged with and held onto. We need art and activity that seeks to stick around for the long haul. We need art that has spent its time doing its research to show that it has dedicated itself to something beyond a moment.
2018 West Virginia teachers strike
We also should not make the mistake of imagining some idealized society in the past where people simply did not engage in labour to make their society. Even the notion of the “idle masses” in ancient Athens that became popularized through the 1800s was largely a myth promoted by reactionaries who wanted to discredit new republican revolutions.[xvii] It is idealistic to think we may somehow “abolish time” to institute a fantasy of pure luxury. Tribal societies which have almost entirely activity-oriented time relationships often still have to engage in unpleasant labour and endure hardships. This would likely be the case for a future socialist, or even communist, society. We should not be deluded about the fact that human individuals will have to do things. The question is how things are done and who benefits from them being done. Just as the Athenian invention of citizenship and democratic participation in the Polis (limited as this democracy was) incited workmanship and pride in one’s daily activities, so too should we begin to conceive of creative activity, digital or otherwise, that is intended to coincide with regular participation and contribution, rather than quantified viewership.
As labour becomes part of social and communal engagement, and as individual desires become addressed as social needs, we will find new ways of measuring and perceiving time. New ways of existing with each other and engaging with the world. The Boggs and the Paines wrote in Conversations in Maine: “A revolution in the U.S. is only going to be led and made by people with some sense of the thickness of time, of time as duration, of time as heterogenous, of development through contradiction.”[xviii] Screen-time appears heterogenous in its fragmentation, but it lacks thickness and duration. Thinking and living in this kind of time is not an exploration of contradiction because all moments are isolated into their own singular substance, torn from their social relationships. The disciplining of screen-time homogenizes work precisely by making us feel undisciplined in our own activity.
The creation of long-form content does not mean making content inaccessible. The popularity of Twitch streaming and hours-long podcasts, which have become a platform for public debates, show that long content can be appealing and engaging. Online writers and youtubers who may not be able to produce extensively lengthy pieces should strive to think ahead in their content and produce complementary materials in multiple parts or in series. The materials for building revolutionary-time must at once enable individuals to move quickly between many activities without the anxieties of interruption, while simultaneously producing more long-term engagement with singular activities with fewer distractions. True changes in time will require changes in the way society produces itself, which will necessitate more than piecemeal activism. We should begin to move beyond imagining societies with different time by pursuing creations that can allow individuals to act and plan beyond the hectic partitions of the workday. Only by struggling against the current of contemporary time will we be able to move into a new flow of time altogether.
Endnotes
[i] Attributed to Titus Macchius Plautus, “Hacked-Up Days,” Lapham’s Quarterly
[ii] Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” in Past and Present no. 38 (December 1987): 61. www.jstor.org/stable/649749
[iii] Ibid, 69-70; Clive Thompson, “The Pocket Watch was the World’s First Wearable Tech Game Changer,” Smithsonian, updated June 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/early-tech-adopters-ancient-rome-had-portable-sundials-180962225/
[iv] Thompson, “The Pocket Watch.”
[v] Ben Fine, Marx’s ‘Capital’ (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 21.
[vi] Courtney Cambpell, “10 Apps that Block Social Media,” Reviewed, updated August 28, 2019, Https://www.reviewed.com/smartphones/features/10-apps-that-block-social-media-so-you-can-stay-focused-and-be-more-productive
[vii] https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/kids-are-not-hurt-by-screen-time/
[viii] Srnicek, Platform Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017), Kindle, Chapter 2.
[ix] Barkan, Visions of Emancipation (New York: Praeger, 1984), quoted in Wright, Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 204.
[x] Erin Hoffman, “Letter from an EA Spouse,” Livejournal (November 10, 2004). https://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html
[xi] Jason Schreier, “Red Dead Redemption 2 Developers Speak Out After Rockstar Lifts Social Media Ban,” Kotaku, updated October 18, 2018. https://kotaku.com/red-dead-redemption-2-developers-speak-out-after-rockst-1829835034#_ga=2.144282870.211397697.1540160558-956264.1532293700; Jason Schreier, “Inside Rockstar Games’ Culture of Crunch,” Kotaku, updated October 23, 2018, https://kotaku.com/inside-rockstar-games-culture-of-crunch-1829936466
[xii] Mark Fisher, “Time-Wars” in K-Punk (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 518.
[xiii] Karl Marx, Capital (London: Penguin 1990), 686.
[xiv] Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845), on Marxists.org, accessed September 21, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
[xv] James Vincent, “Amazon turns warehouse tasks into video games to make work ‘fun,’” The Verge, updated May 22, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/22/18635272/amazon-warehouse-working-conditions-gamification-video-games.
[xvi] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Reproduceability (Third Version)” in Selected Writings: vol. 4, 1938-1940 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 267-8.
[xvii] Ellen M. Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave (London: Verso, 2015), Chapter 1, Kindle.
[xviii] Grace Lee Boggs, James Boggs, Freddy Paine, Lyman Paine, Conversations in Maine (1972), http://www.boggscenter.org/c_maine/html/1972_c_m.html
Patrick Higgins is a writer based in Boise, Idaho. Social media splash image by Adam Ray Adkins.