Some preliminary notes I’d like to flesh out in a longer essay.
We are all now living in the Unix epoch. That is: the amount of milliseconds that have elapsed since the beginning of the year 1970, which is how our myriads of digital devices and their software keep time, in order to avoid the comparatively messy clock time legible to the human eye and rendered in 12 or 24 hour increments and adjusted to different time zones. Unix time is absolutely synchronic: it is irrespective of one’s position on the planet. It’s also hermetic, unreadable to the human eye. It can be considered the mechanical-mathematical core of digital temporality.
It seems necessary to explore the resonances, ambiguities and affordances of digital time to better understand and inform cultural theory and specifically, critiques of capitalism. To what extent is digital time determined by capital, or is it best considered as interdependent with capital but as its own distinct modality? In a sense, digital time is clearly an extension or apotheosis of the forces instantiated by what some have called the Capitalocene (Jason Moore’s suggested alternative for the Anthropocene): the unleashing of compressed material energies that industrial, fossil-fueled capitalism has exploded.
Certainly, without digital time calculated down to the millisecond many features of 21st century capitalism are unthinkable: most immediately and specifically, high-frequency trading and in fact all electronic finance. But equally as well, the micro-surveillance practiced by companies like Amazon who pursue new frontiers of time discipline for the worker at a scale of acceleration and optimization previously unimaginable, taking Marx’s theory of capital’s extraction of value from labor time to new extremes of granularity using digital technologies of temporal measurement.
The digital is full of multiplicity and ambiguity; it is both bound up with the economic and also, a field of contention and competing uses. Digital time involves the mundane and omnipresent digital transactions and communications tools that make everything from international money transfers to the instant messages of activists possible. The rapid pace of online crowd formation and discourse; the disjointed nature of asynchronous conversations done over text and social media; the restless urgency of the 24-hour news cycle in the internet age; these and much more are expressions of digital time.
Contemporary cultural studies in the humanities with respect to temporalities has often emphasized culture. Such studies ask what different dispositions towards temporality are associated, rightly or wrongly, with cultural formations or ideologies — Blackness or the Indigenous, whiteness or the West, or Christian eschatology and teleology all are said to come with conceptions of time, the past and the future. Without dismissing those questions, but seeking to complement or complicate them, a materialist and critical analysis of digital time could question what affordances digital temporality enables and what constraints digital temporality imposes on society, individuals and cultural practice.
The nature of those impacts of the digital’s structuring of time — a microcosm of broad paradoxes of digital technologies’ new geographies of power that work both horizontally and vertically — have import for cultural studies of temporality because the digital is increasingly imposed on every cultural group and every population as a precondition of modern work, study and intimate communication. It has to be considered because we are all saturated in it and mediated by it.