The process of habituation to the new technologies is still in full swing. It is always also a learning and mastering process. What the machinery has to offer - global simultaneity and the social representation and integration into it of countless, local proper times – is being rehearsed at the moment, and turned into social habituation. Through technology, people's relations with one another change, but a new relationship between proper time and the social time which unites people can also be established through it. There is a long way to ${ \bf g o } ,$ however. At the moment, the juxtaposition of times outweighs a new togetherness. The struggle for the social recognition of proper time and its representation in the global, standardized system of world time as a political fact, too, began with the spread of the technological infrastructure and the obligations to join in produced by it. It is being continued by the struggle for a political structuring of the structuring spaces and times thus opened up. This makes it clear why the aspect of conflict in habituation is so strongly to the fore at present. Proper time, viewed as self-time from the perspective of the individual, has to come to fresh terms with the time of others, with outside time, above all in the institutionalized complex of working hours and its changed relations to time free of work. It also becomes clear why it is not so much psychology or physics which lie at the heart of the challenge, in the scientific observation and in the first phase of the subjective grounding of proper time, but rather biology and sociology, and certainly also political science. For in order to find a fairly acceptable social ‘solution'to the need for coordination of proper times, the proper time which people bear within them as biological beings in their common features, but also in their individual variations, must be considered in the rules of social existence and of technological mediation. The solution presupposes that the specious present' is not just interpreted as a phenomenon of individual psychology, but becomes socially and politically interpretable.
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The Illusion of Simultaneity