{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","id":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","uuid":"0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title":"Pressed for Time The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism","normalized_title":"pressedfortimetheaccelerationoflifeindigitalcapitalism","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780226196473","isbns":["9780226196473","9780226196503"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":228,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Pressed%20for%20Time%20The%20Acceleration%20of%20Life%20in%20Digital%20Capitalism","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/0cf5c9df-7116-426e-ae21-ce72b2ccbe50/search"},"page":{"printed_page":40,"pdf_page":52,"physical_index":52,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"ff16830e4db3fc490cec89202a3a078ada269b469d78cf9650a5d93f0ade551b"},"chapter":"Pressed for Time","content":"Time had become money. And, as Dickens foresaw in his novel Hard Times, while clock time standardizes time, not everyone’s time is of equal worth. As Mr. Bounderby, the businessman, put it to the freedom-loving circus people, “We are the kind of people who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t know the value of time.” To which the circus performer, Mr. Childers, retorted, “If you mean that you can make more money of your time than I can of mine, I should judge by your appearance, that you are about right.”3\n\nThroughout their extensive publications, both Barbara Adam and Helga Nowotny trace the historical shift in the way people understand time to the clock culture that developed in modernity. They stress that industrial time engendered the pursuit of a disciplined and frugal use of time in the quest for eficiency. Time became commodified, compressed, colonized, and controlled.4 And once the linear system of time was set:\n\nAcceleration could start in the form of motion making everything dynamic, which seemed to stop at nothing. In the tourbillon social which broke out with the industrial revolution and wrenched people out of their countless “small worlds”  .  .  . acceleration became the experience of modernisation overshadowing and shaping everything else. The pace became more important than the destination: anyone who stands firm stands still; everything, above all time, becomes frantic motion: the new myth was speed.5\n\nMarx’s analysis of the commodification of time remains the touchstone for such writing.6 Marx’s central argument was that an empty, abstract, quantifiable time, applicable anywhere, anytime, was a precondition for its use as an abstract exchange value on the one hand and for the commodification of labor and nature on the other. Only on the basis of this neutral measure could time assume such a pivotal position in all economic exchange. Since “moments” are “the elements of profit,” it is command over the labor time of others that gives capitalists the initial power to appropriate profit as their own.7\n\nStruggles between owners of labor and capital over the use of time and the intensity of labor have been endemic. What Thompson’s account highlights is that it took several generations for the new labor habits and the new time discipline, “the familiar landscape of disciplined industrial capitalism, with the time-sheet, the time-keeper, the informers and the fines,” to be instilled. The time discipline was based on obedience to the clock and to the appointments specified on it, such as the time to begin work. In a much quoted passage, Thompson records how two nineteenthcentury factory workers testified that they were not allowed to have their own clocks or watches on company grounds:\n\nChapter two\n\n40","previous_page":39,"next_page":41}