Time, for Business
Jonathan Cook:
Welcome to This Human Business, a podcast giving voice to the movement to reform business, to balance technology with humanity. My name is Jonathan Cook, and I’ve been on this mission for 25 years now… but what is time, anyway?
Time is money, they say, but they also say that time heals all wounds, and we know that money doesn’t heal all wounds.
One of the great and terrible things about doing a podcast about time is that there are a huge number of opportunities to insert cliches on the subject. I could introduce this episode by saying that it’s about time that business starts thinking about time. I could say that it’s just a matter of time before business has to confront its relationship with time, or make some awful statement about how time flies, and any business that wants to soar… I can’t bear to finish such a dreadful statement.
On the other hand, there’s a reason for these familiar figures of speech. Cliches are annoying, but one of the most true cliches about cliches is that cliches are cliches because they’re true. What I mean to say is that there are such a large number of cliches about time because time is as vital subject, one that we wrestle with every day, usually coming away feeling as if we have lost the contest.
Time is at the heart of the struggle over the culture of business, and has been for generations. In physics, power is defined as work over time, and business uses similar formulations to calculate value. Workers are paid according to their sacrifice of time, and investors evaluate business according to their ability to generate money over time. Everybody has deadlines, and must face the consequences when they are not met. Business runs on time, or fails in no time.
The vocabulary of business shows its obsession with time. Take the word “innovation”. Innovation is all about time, the creation of things that are untethered to the past, belonging only to the present moment, and perhaps to the future.
The cruel joke time plays with innovation is that once something innovative has been created, it remains an innovation for only a short length of time, beginning the process of decay into obsolescence almost at the very moment of its creation. What was once a future goal moves through the present moment, and soon becomes just another relic of the past.
Francine Stevens, who specializes in the management of business innovation, explains the consequences for the people working in business. Innovation isn’t a quest with a beginning, a middle, and an end, she says. It’s relentless.
Francine Stevens:
I guess I’ve got some different views, and I don’t think I necessarily have all the answers. While we want to move forward and the pace of change is constant and relentless, we obviously have levers that we can use to drive it a little quicker, but we can’t drive it at breakneck speed and break people, but also I think what’s happening in business as well is around efficiency. So, there’s a lot of focus on efficiency, and that comes in with time as well, that whether it be meeting time needs to be precise and concise, and we keep it to 30 minutes, and we talk about the statuses of these projects, and thank you very much.
But for innovation to flourish, sometimes you need to introduce boredom. Sometimes you need to introduce time for taking space. It seems that more and more as there is the need to drive change and the need to find new ways of growth or new ways of doing things or solving big world problems, that there’s this pace that just relentless. However, for us to go faster, I think that sometimes we have to go a little bit slower. We have to allow people to think things through, to come up with new ideas and approaches, and if we don’t give people that space, or even just to connect from a relationship perspective, so many meetings now are very much about the task at hand, and how well do you know some of your colleagues? How well do we take the time to get to know them, versus the time to be efficient, because when you have really good, solid relationships, things really do work quicker in the long run.
Jonathan Cook:
Francine identifies one of the harsh conflicts at the core of the relationship of business to time. Businesses themselves move through time like machines, measuring it objectively and responding to demands for speed and efficiency. Human beings, however, are not machines, and experience time subjectively, as an aspect of their consciousness.
The effectiveness of machines over time can be sustained through effective engineering and occasional physical repairs. The effectiveness of humans over time, however, requires irregularity and unpredictability. People move in obliquitous paths. We think best when we don’t try to think all the time. We are most awake only when we spend significant amounts of time unconscious in sleep. In order to get work done quickly, we need to slow down.
Francine asks how, when we’re faced with imperatives of efficiency, anyone in business can take the time to get to know their colleagues, or take the time to know their own craft. Under digital management systems, we’re so busy sprinting toward the destination that we never can take the time to take note of the landscape along the way.
The digital orthodoxy overturns traditional views of the relationship of work to time. The artisanal approach of taking time to do a good job has been replaced with a celebration of fast and sloppy work that aims only for a minimally viable outcome, with products that aren’t expected to last far into the future.
It is in the moments of pause, in which we appear to be doing nothing, that our minds are at their most productive. Ideas ferment when we dawdle. Insights develop while we daydream. There is a fertility in moments of boredom, an intellectual thickening that enables us to follow connections between superficially unrelated ideas. This kind metaphorical thinking is impoverished when the metric of speed is given precedence over more subtle qualities.
When people are treated like objects in the machinery of business, we break down. That’s what happens to people at infamous corporations like Amazon and Tesla, where workers are disposable, tossed aside when they’re wrecked by a predictable process of churn.
These days, Roberta Treno devotes her efforts to The Joy Academy. Before that, she was working in the corporate world, forced to labor at the pace of the machine.
Roberta Treno:
The focus is not the human being. So maybe if the focus went back to the individual parts of, I don’t know, because what I felt during the period that I was working there, speaking with some other friends living still in this situation, they are still working with big companies, they feel like they’re not just numbers, but that their life is accelerating in a certain way. So you always have a mobile from the company. You’ll always have, you can work from home. That means you can work whenever you want and whatever is needed. So it’s kind of you’re not dividing your time according to your needs to what it’s worth for you, but what is needed.
Two days before I left the company, for example, I’ve been working until two o’clock in the morning on a project, and it was OK, nobody says thank you to me because it was part of the job. Like, okay, you like to do that? Whatever it takes, it takes you. I think it’s that you’re not a human being. You’re part of a big machine and whoever you are whatever happens to you, it’s not really worth it.
Jonathan Cook:
Listening to Roberta and Francine, we hear several issues of time emerge. First, there’s the issue of speed. Second, there’s the issue of control over time through scheduling. Then, there’s the fracturing of the experience of time into several different versions, each suited to the different needs and capabilities of different stakeholders. When the mechanical aspect of business dominates control over time, the other aspects of our lives suffer.
Roberta identifies a common problem in corporate life in the digital age, which is that the ability to work from any place has created the expectation that we will be at work at any time that the company demands it. Our schedules, which once protected private time from corporate control, have been taken over, invaded to the point where the only schedule that matters is the business schedule, while everything else in life has to be crammed into the slim margins that remain.
In contrast to this inhumane corporate takeover of time, a human business will allow work to proceed at a pace that’s right for the people who are doing it, for the people who are receiving the work, and right for the quality of work itself. A human business must also establish firm boundaries in the schedules of the people it employs and serves, replacing the culture of business that’s always on with a culture that respects the need to spend time off the clock. Such an approach ensures that the timelines of everyone involved are in sync, rather than fractured apart by the insensitive speed of automated labor.
Chuck Welch of Rupture Studio has another suggestion for the relationship with time a human business should pursue. He seeks a culture of business that counterbalances its lust for innovation with a respect for the wisdom accumulated through human experience in the past.
Chuck Welch:
I know it’s kind of trendy to discount experience today, in an age where anybody can have an idea and actualize it to some extent, and you know, we live in a world that’s this conversation that’s about kind of digital extraction. It’s about you know the here and now. It’s about ephemeral. So, experience is kind of being discounted. I’ve seen in the marketing organizations everybody wants the new, right? We’re a culture of new.
You know, the future is in the past oftentimes, and we have a wealth of experience helping guide the best brands in the world forward through the lens of culture.
Jonathan Cook:
Chuck advises his clients to broaden the scope of their perception of time, not just to encompass a recognition of cultural wisdom gathered through awareness of the past, but also to include a deeper strategic gaze into the future. Chuck helps his clients to build cultural strategies that deliver value over the long term, rather than simply pursuing tactics that play into the dynamics of the immediate future.
Chuck Welch:
We tend to work with larger clients and you know they’re part of public companies so they have to drive value for Wall Street or quarterly returns so there’s always a tension between you know kind of a long term more human led approach and a short term extractive approach right. There’s a tension in that. We always say, how do we reconcile the tension between human need and brand need or corporate need? That’s kind of our job as a strategist, is to reconcile those two tensions. What’s the win-win? That’s why we always look to culture as a driver of potential, and that driver potential is of human potential but it’s also of business potential and that’s where we go out and find answers.
Jonathan Cook:
Considering Chuck’s work, a question comes to mind: What kind of business wouldn’t choose the long game? The answer is that too many businesses have adopted practices in which products, people, and even companies themselves are treated like disposable tools of the moment, things that can be used up quickly, and then thrown away without a moment’s hesitation.
For those few at the top of such businesses, the ones who have enough power to extract value and then move on, there’s an appeal to the concept of disposability. They enjoy the flexibility of a lack of attachment, skipping between hot opportunities and making a killing. The consequences for everyone else, however, are similar to the consequences of a material culture that relies on disposable packaging. Society is getting buried under a litter of the remains of disrupted industries and displaced people.
Chuck has in mind a different vision of time, one that doesn’t just move fast, break things, and leave behind a landscape strewn with the wreckage of the past. He helps his clients to engage in a kind of cultural recycling, in which businesses don’t just surge forward into the future in the simplistic, linear view of Silicon Valley, but are able to move in a more fluid way, curving from the present back into the past in order to create a culturally enriched future.
Chuck Welch:
Time has changed. We used to be on a timeline that was always linear and moving forward for the most part. Yeah, people went back in the past and got inspiration, mostly creatives, got inspiration or blatantly knocked things off, where bands like Led Zeppelin would go literally steal from black bluesmen from the past.
So, there’s always been people who’ve gone backwards but I think the notion of time is an interesting one when you think about the notion of clients and their constituents which are the customers right. So now people time shift back and forth. Now, the 90s is current, or the 80s, or what have you. That’s in everything from clothing to TV shows and movies, to whatever ephemera of pop culture.
So, when you’re thinking about the past and going forward. We always think about going forward right? Clients think about the next thing, but oftentimes your audience is thinking about the past thing. So, there’s an inherent tension.
A few years ago we worked with a broadcast client. They’re in the TV and movie business and they’re going after young people. And those young people weren’t consuming their product like they thought it was, which is TV and movies, they were going back and watching the old stuff, because the old stuff to a 16 year-old, if I’m a 16 year-old, the 80s is new stuff, right? Movies that we grew up on, that’s new for them.
The notion of time is an interesting one when you think about kind of a modern marketer. How do we play with that? How do we toggle backwards and forwards as we’re in the moment?
Jonathan Cook:
Chuck Welch advocates a culturally-informed practice of business that acknowledges the intricate, cyclical connections between the past, present and future. With its relentless push forward through time, digital-driven acceleration is crippling our ability to understand the meaning of what’s happening in our own society.
Artist Mio Loclair discusses the way that the opaque character of digital innovation creates this feeling of disorientation in time.
Mio Loclair:
All those processes feel actually quite passive. It’s very passive and I can’t tell. The systems are too big, too fast. I can’t tell where the error is. I can’t tell what happens after I press enter. Why I do believe that acceleration beyond the speed of mental light is difficult, is because if I can’t tell, I want to know how politicians do this. I want to know how politicians are able to tell the future, if I write the code and I don’t know what happens in three seconds.
Jonathan Cook:
Mio suggests that the black box of artificial intelligence is increasing, rather than decreasing, the unpredictability of the future. Humanity loses the competition with digital technology, he warns, the instant we try to emulate the ferocious pace with which it masters time. When we move fast in business, we become blind to time.
Mio Loclair:
You remember when I showed this video of Modern Times and it is one thing that Charlie Chaplin was at this assembly line trying to accelerate himself, and it was a comedian’s idea to get swallowed into the machine? Why? Because he tried to keep up with that speed, and then he was swallowed by the machine.
If he would have stood there, just hanging out, there would be no reason for him to fall into the assembly line. But it was him trying to be human.
Now, if you think of the assembly line in general it is one machine with replaceable modules that then at the end could construct on that line anything. So it’s a universal machine. The assembly line with interchangeable models we would call this in computer science the Turing enabled machine, the machine that could calculate potentially everything. You just change the models.
So it was first us that behave like robots and then organically we were inspired by this and thought we could turn this into a real machine. We first looked in the mirror trying to be a robot and then came very organically to the sensation, well we could create a robot that looks in the mirror, because it comes from us to become. It came always from within.
That is a truly interesting sensation, but just because, here’s the trick, that energy comes from us. We want to be fast, and we want to be faster. We have so much energy that the cups of tea and those dead stones beside us start to pop up and speak too. It is as if we weaved our energy into them, and all of a sudden now everything blinks. We made this came from us, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good for us.
Jonathan Cook:
Mio’s description of inanimate objects emerging into life through the disorientation produced by processes accelerated in time beyond our understanding brings to mind the old legends of djinnis coming forth from ordinary objects such as rings and lamps. Like the adventurers of legend, we cannot be sure whether these new voices have emerged to serve us or to control us. We put ourselves under their enchantment, Mio says, when we seek to imitate their superhuman speed in time, even though we remain within our slow flesh and bone.
Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we seek to imitate the unreal time of our own digital creations? Part of the answer is that we’re pursuing competitive advantage in business. We figure that if we use digital technology to become faster than our competitors, we’ll win the day.
The trick in all this is that one day is followed by another, and another, and another. The digital race isn’t limited in time. It never ends, and as the race progresses, we’re compelled to accelerate ever faster and faster, until we’re moving at a pace beyond our own ability to understand what’s going on around us, desperate to catch up to a victory that will always remain beyond our reach.
We’ve become addicted to the false promise of speed. Many people in business have gone so far into this addiction to digital time that they’ve come to believe that there’s no possible escape, no alternative.
That’s just the kind of stiff, limited thinking that spells doom in business. Johann from Social Media Breakup tells us that there is a different way.
Johann:
We help people with increasing their self-worth, because people feel depressed. They have a sense of emptiness inside and they try to fill it up with social media, with interaction online. So, at the end of the day, an addiction begins and ends with pain. So what we do with Break Up is that we tell them, “Look you’ve got to be very mindful and conscious about how you spend your time.”
So we focus on people’s strengths. We focus on what people want, and then we help them, for example to journal about their phone usage, mindfulness exercises, as well as how to, for example, to pause when you feel the trigger of reaching for your phone or going to social media. For example, we have them implement some breathing exercises or some grounding exercises and then to become more mindful, to become more still.
You see the people are taking ownership of their lives. They understand they need time and investment to truly improve their relationships with their loved ones with their children, that they stop living like an accident.
Jonathan Cook:
Johann reminds us that time isn’t something that happens to us, not when we have ownership of it. It’s a resource we can choose to invest as we see fit. Attention to the way we invest the time available to us is as important as attention to the investment of money.
Johann identifies awareness of time as an essential step in the escape from addiction to digital technology. This awareness is cultivated through purposeful rebellion against the orthodox business belief that it’s impossible to step away from the race. His prescription is for people to pause, in order to break the cycle of self-delusion that enables the addiction to accelerated time to thrive. Getting lost in time is part of the addiction to digital technology that business suffers from.
Digital technology puts us into an alternative kind of time, a time frame with its own rules. At first, these rules are appealing because they offer immediate, short term gains, much as cocaine or amphetamines offer a quick boost for a short amount of time. The trouble with digital addiction in business is the same as with chemical stimulants: The accelerated experience of time offered by digital technology provides a stimulus that cannot be sustained. The headlong rush into an ever-quickening cycle of deadlines depletes businesses of the resources they need to be healthy as, just with a drug addict, everything of value outside the addiction is sacrificed, sold off to pay the increasing price of speed. The terrible truth is that, after a short while, the original benefits of the digital boost wear off, and the emaciated business comes to depend on its daily fix of digital acceleration just to feel normal.
Vasco Gaspar, an expert in human flourishing in business, urges his clients to look critically at the assertion, taken for granted in conventional business culture, that an increase in speed is essential for survival. He observes that the promised time savings from digital tools have proved to be illusory.
Vasco Gaspar:
So my name is Vasco, and I live in Portugal close to Lisbon, and about that awareness of time, I think one day, I don’t know when I read it, but it was about the idea that our brain measures time, we have a sense of time according to the amount of stimulus that we receive, and nowadays with the technology all the time, we are always on, we are seeing emails, WhatsApp and so on, Facebook. The sense is that we don’t have time, and everyone is rushing, and everyone, I still remember, I think it was in the 90s where the mobile phones started to appear and the Internet and so on and emails, and people said, “Oh, now we are going to have a lot of time, we have a lot of time because the computers have weight the things for us and this communication and so on, but actually it was the opposite.
The sense is that now they are having the same conversation about artificial intelligence. They are saying, “Oh, now with artificial intelligence, we will have a lot of time. We will have time to paint and to read poetry and so on. So, I wonder if things are not going to be even faster, or actually the perception of things. I can buy whatever I want in the world, but I cannot buy time. So I’m very cautious about the way I spend my time.
Jonathan Cook:
Here’s the simple trick that’s being used to hook business into the digital addiction: The peddlers of digital acceleration ask us to take it for granted that time is a commodity, a resource that can be measured out as easily as a pound of soybeans. Once they convince businesses that time is a simple, quantifiably manageable substance, the businesses are hooked.
It’s an illusion. The subtle truth that the hucksters of digital acceleration want us to overlook is that time is not a concrete substance that has an independent, objective existence out there in the physical world. Time as we know it is an experience within the human mind. Time is as much a qualitative experience as it is a quantitative dimension.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli writes in his book The Order Of Time that, “In order to understand time, it is not enough to think of it from outside: it is necessary to understand that we, in every moment of our experience, are situated within time.” An objective, scientific, mathematical model of time fails to adequately describe the thing that we experience as time.
Time is much more than just a straight dimension stretching between the past and the future, measured by clocks. Time is a mental construction that takes on different qualities far beyond what can be quantitatively measured. The different qualitative kinds of time have a strong impact on our conscious experience, and therefore support different kinds of professional capabilities.
We don’t just perform more or less in fast paced work environments or slow paced environments. We perform differently as our relationship to time changes. We think differently. We perceive differently. We feel differently. We create differently when we enter into different kinds of time.
Most people are aware to some extent of the 20th century discovery that time, as a physical concept, is relative. Albert Einstein’s sharp reasoning led him to the realization that physical time changes with speed, so that the passage of time is different on a speeding airplane than it is for someone standing still on the ground. Of course, no one is really standing still anywhere in the universe. It gets weird, so that in physically extreme places, such as around the event horizons of black holes, time can slow down or even stop.
Cultural time is even less tethered to objective reality. What time is it right now in the Eastern Standard time zone in the United States? It’s 8:00 PM, but that means different things in different parts of the zone. In Boston, Massachusetts, at this time of year, it means that it’s nighttime, and the sun went down long ago. Around the summer solstice, however, 8:00 PM in Boston means that there is still plenty of time before dark. However, over on the other side of the Eastern time zone, in western Michigan, even at this date in the middle of September, the sun is still up. The time of the sun and the time of the clock are out of sync, telling us different things.
We can easily say that it’s 8:00 PM Eastern Time, because that time is set by a clock, an arbitrary cultural designation, but one we all accept. What time is it, though, on the Moon, or on Mars? What time is it in the middle of the sun, or in a faraway galaxy? We have no concept for these things, no way to measure them, because we don’t have a cultural reference point for reality in these places. Time of the clock is a cultural construct, not a quality inherent in the universe itself.
The subjectivity of time is something that people were aware of well before clocks became a widespread tool for enforcing cultural uniformity of time. The idea behind the aphorism, “Time flies when you’re having fun,” has ancient roots, with Geoffrey Chaucer having written in 1386, “While we dawdle, our lives pass swiftly.”
Celtic culture talked about Awen, a kind of space outside of space and time outside of time, both a magical realm and the the force of magic itself. This translated into the idea of faery time, which a person might enter if they chanced upon a faery realm, as did Rip Van Winkle, falling into faery in the Catskill Mountains of British colonial America only to wake up in the United States of America.
Colonial powers on the other side of the globe constructed the idea of Dreamtime from an amalgamation of misunderstandings of indigenous Australian beliefs, a belief in an eternal frame of time that exists always right next to our own, now adhered to by New Age practitioners around the world.
Cultural anthropologists have identified something of this same experience of an alternative flow of time in what they refer to as liminality, the creation of a ritual arena of experience that exists outside of the standard cultural constructs of space and time. Such ritual thresholds outside of standard time aren’t just a part of tribal practices, but are embedded in commercial culture as well, in places like casinos that purposefully forbid the display of clocks and obstruct the intrusion of daylight so as to enable gamblers to lose track of time and become lost in the timelessness of the game.
In entertainment rituals such as movies and live theater, audiences can be transported across years of storyline within just an hour or two. Sports is rife with alternative times as well, as anyone who has spent 30 minutes watching the last two minutes of an American football game wind down can attest.
Purposefully slow times have been practiced in mindfulness meditation, among the flaneurs of the Romantic movement, and by advocates of the Slow Movement such as Carl Honoré. Popular media is full of the mythology of time travel, gardeners grow flower clocks that tell the time botanically, and as Douglas Adams wrote, “Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.”
The point is this: Real human time isn’t a matter of simple mathematical measurement. Time is a human construction, and that means time is weird. If your mind isn’t blown, is your wig isn’t flipped by time, you’re not really paying attention to what time means to people.
In contrast to the cultural and psychological complexity of time, business tends to deal with time in only its most shallow manifestations. Digital corporations are selling mostly one kind of tool for the management of time, pursuing the task of efficiency, getting as much done in as little time as possible. There’s much more to time than mere speed, however.
Instead of just relying on the single strategy of time efficiency to deal with every challenge, business needs different kinds of strategies to manipulate time in different ways. Business needs a more complete toolkit for working with time, not just the one hammer of acceleration to bludgeon every problem it comes across.
For one thing, as Francine advised us at the beginning of this episode, people trying to do creative work in business need tools that accomplish the opposite of acceleration. They need tools to slow time down. Given the scarcity of such tools in business, and the animosity to slow work that dominates most corporate cultures, creatives in business improvise their own methods.
Matthew Burgess is one such professional, a television producer who has been assigned the task of fostering the circumstances in which people can achieve their creative potential. He’s an advocate of purposefully wasting time, of deliberately meandering.
Matthew Burgess:
It is almost like just holding down time and rather than trying to run away from this feeling, to just slow it down and to think OK I feel this in the pit of my stomach. And I can trace the thoughts going in that says the worries that come from the future and of the inner critic that comes from the past. And I could see the thoughts swirling around and sometimes you just almost stop inside them, and just let them be there.
I would agitate for a tiny amount of the program develop a budget to be spent on the opposite of what is popular because if everything is going in one way, it’s really good to explore the other ways. And so, I think because of the drive for efficiency and speed and finding the best possible way of doing things, every bit of your time is allocated for that you the more your environment demands that the more you need to spend have a happy time where you go entirely against that, and you deliberately meander. You take yourself out of contact.
Sometimes during the hectic times I just go and stare at the waterfall for half an hour. Or I would deliberately get off the train a stop early on my way into work and I would cycle down the river bank really slowly, and I’d get in late, and I’d make up some excuse about having been late. But you need that reset and that reset for me involved going against the grain a little bit. Not massively. I’m not standing up and rebelling or causing a big ripple. And obviously if I’ve got a deadline I’m going to hit it.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s yet another reminder of the way that time is culturally constructed to hear the timing of Matthew’s arrival accepted when he claims to have been accidentally late, when the very same time of arrival would be rejected if he admitted to having a few minutes of slow time to himself. He would have got the same amount of work done that day, either way. The thing that was important was that he made a show of deference to clock time, which in turn represents the power of the corporation to structure the time of its employees.
There are some places in the world where the cultural conventions of clock time are particularly out of sync with other cultural traditions. When I spoke with Jessa Gamble earlier this year, she told me about her time living in such a place.
Jessa Gamble:
My name is Jessa Gamble and I’m a science writer primarily but I’ve been exploring the topic of awe, and before that circadian rhythms and sleep and how it intersects with culture.
We all have this basically universal circadian system. There’s not all that much variation globally. It’s in our species. So, we overlay our daily schedules, which are a cultural phenomenon, on this universal biological underpinning and it’s sort of, circadian rhythms as the more that I looked into it, the more it felt like this sort of hidden force in our lives that we don’t have really conscious access to, but that affects our behavior nonetheless and has really big implications for our performance in various areas and for the state of mind that we’re in at various times of day.
I sort of lived in the subarctic for about a decade. So I am, culturally up there, there’s a living memory includes the sort of traditional society, the traditional ways, and those tend to be very seasonal in the Arctic. You would spend your winter sort of enjoying your family and be having a lot of quiet time and then summer when the midnight sun is out, you would be almost manically sort of working and hunting and active. But, as Western sort of cultural imperialism took hold, we exported our nine-to-five year long schedules onto all sorts of places where it makes no sense, and the Arctic is one of them. So, if you go into the band office up there or some government store, you would recognize the schedule from the temperate zones, but it makes no sense and so you’re dragging yourself to work every morning in the winter time when it doesn’t feel like you should be moving. And then, in the summer, it never really feels like time to go to bed and so all the kids are booting around on their bikes at two o’clock in the morning together and it’s this odd juxtaposition of natural schedules and a foreign imposed schedule.
Jonathan Cook:
Jessa’s experience brings to mind the odd story of the cultural construction of time in another cold place. Earlier this year, well established news organizations such as the BBC told the story of a village in Norway that was planning to abolish time. The island community, with just 300 residents, it was said, had concluded that clocks were fairly useless for much of the year, because the village was so far to the north that around the summer solstice there was no night, and around the winter solstice there was no daylight. What relevance could clocks have, residents were quoted saying, when the physical signs of day and night fluctuated so wildly? The villagers all knew each other anyway, and would work things out just fine without any need of naming the hour.
After a couple weeks of international excitement about the idea of living without the artificial structure of clock time, it was revealed that the whole story was a hoax. There was no Norwegian village planning to abolish clocks.
We could simply take this story as an example of unethical public relations. A more interesting angle, however, is the enthusiasm that grew for the story around the world, in places far removed from the arctic. There was a strange false truth to the tale, as many people decided that the idea of living without clocks could be a refreshing change for a while.
The story ended up saying more about the shortcomings of clock culture in our digital culture than it told us about Norway in particular. We’re living in a time when time itself is more precisely calculated and managed than ever before. Most people now carry smartphones, mobile chronological devices, with them wherever they go, to help them structure their lives. Yet, the idea that we might do without any timepieces at all was unexpectedly thrilling for many people.
Filip Vostal considers issues like these for a living. He’s on the editorial board of the journal Time and Society, and had quite a bit to say about the way we work with time when I spoke with him earlier this year. Time, he told me, is a tool for the performance of power.
Filip Vostal:
High position people within corporate hierarchy or even university, how they demonstrate their importance by constantly claiming that they are busy and you know from my research given that I’m doing kind of anthropology of science, if you wish, working with physicists of all sorts, I have encountered this quite a few times, I’d say.
How come that you have time at your hands that you have free time? You know, nobody should have free time. We are all supposed to be busy. So that’s like a very old, well not very old, but in 1956 Erving Goffman published a brilliant book that you probably know, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, and I think that’s a part of it that we often appear, we have to appear due to cultural conventions to be perceived as busy rather than being actually busy. There’s sort of the division between being actually busy and sort of pretending that that one is busy is quite an interesting theme in its own right.
Jonathan Cook:
“Look busy, the boss is coming,” was a theme that was common to the 20th century workplace, but what does it mean now, when for huge numbers of people, the workplace isn’t even a place and the boss never physically arrives? The clock itself has become the boss, enforcing a vision of time in business that has become so abstracted from the rhythms of human life that basic biological health is dependent on.
In a digital world where business leaders openly dream of a post-human future, Vostal asserts that we’re moving into a post-clock hegemony, in which the limitations of the clock have been transcended, and we’re never truly allowed to punch out of work, no matter what time of day it is.
Filip Vostal:
It might be interesting to investigate the clashes between the kind of globalizing force of the clock time, but I would even say post-clock time hegemony when clock time is still in universal kind of means of coordination and standardization and all the rest of it, but I think that we also have moved them we are moving to clock matters but in a way I am registering something even different that I’m still not able to capture, you know conceptually but something like post clock regimes.
You might have read the book, it’s called 24/7 Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep by a guy called Jonathan Crary. He starts the book with an example of research conducted in you know by Pentagon and University of Wisconsin Madison, and it’s a kind of army funded or military funded research conducted and the researchers are actually ornithologists, you know, people examining birds, and what they want to do is that there is a particular kind of bird that flies from Canada to Mexico seven days without sleeping.
What the aim of this research is to develop a similar kind of biotechnological intervention into human beings so that there could be a soldier without the need for sleep for seven days. So this is what I kind of called post-clock time kind of mentality or intentions or something of that kind.
The biological time, the social time, clock time is to a large extent not only, but to a large extent, is a social kind of invention and conventional wisdom, obviously. But yeah, well there are now many ways, or attempts not ways, attempts and intentions to bypass that you know. Elon Musk and Silicon Valley, the whole Silicon Valley culture I think is a very good example of that.
Jonathan Cook:
Vostal links the digital economy’s disconnection of work demands from biological limitations to the amount of time a human being can coherently contribute at work to something he calls the speed imperative. As business demands more work in less time, it’s increasingly forgoing its links to humanity.
Filip Vostal:
I think for me, you know, these are kind of indicators although they would probably not materialize, but the intentions are interesting because it’s another sign of what I’m interested in and that is the speed imperative. The modern era is characterized by speed imperative, and it’s related to the way how capitalism works, that’s quite a complex, there has been numerous studies on the relationship between time and accumulation of wealth, of capital.
You mentioned time is money which comes from Benjamin Franklin, but it was nicely sort of operationalized if you like by Max Weber in his study of Protestant ethics and a waste of time is the cardinal sin.
I think that you need to use the time productively that you have at your disposal. I think that it has deep origins, this kind of, I call it will to speed, that there is a kind of a will to speed that defines modern society, and capitalism is a perfect embodiment of that.
Have you heard the high frequency trading? That’s one interesting example of speed that cognitively we can’t perceive in any way.
We can see an interesting kind of commitment to will to speed even there, you know, that the optical fibers on the ground up too slow so, for what, too slow? Having a zero point, and then you have several zeros, one millisecond advantage is a competitive advantage which means assets, profits, money making, all the rest of it.
I work with laser physicists and biologists. It’s a diverse group of people it’s a very much project based and they are actually working with lasers that operate at the rate of phantoseconds which is one quadrillionth of a second. It’s impossible to imagine that.
But what this can deliver might be you know it could be a paradigmatic shift.
So there is a huge potential in this kind of speed because it’s incredibly fast. I’m going there actually next week, you know there as a kind of anthropologist, and they are the tribe you know and I’m just observing and trying to understand why it’s difficult because I don’t have the jargon or terminology so that’s a kind of interesting speed that is also kind of associated with that. speed is not only a threat or a kind of capitalist instrument. It could be a promise as well.
Jonathan Cook:
It’s not just that, in the pursuit of ever-smaller margins in time, digital corporations are unemploying people and replacing them with bots. It’s that business is now working with units of efficiency that are so tight that they have no more connection to human experience. A human being can’t even imagine what a phantosecond would feel like, much less produce anything of value in that time. As businesses obsess about competitive advantages in speed, however, the way that humans experience the world is becoming irrelevant to them.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that Filip Vostal is advocating simply for a purposeful slowing of business in reaction to the speed imperative.
Filip Vostal:
We like speed. We don’t like waiting. We don’t like queues. We don’t like delays. You know, if I break my leg you know, I want the ambulance to be here immediately, as soon as possible. Speed is exciting in a kind of visceral sense on a roller coaster or motorbike. I think Aldous Huxley, the famous writer said that the experience of speed is the only new invention of modernity, which I think it was kind of related to the early modernity when automobiles were suddenly a part of traffic in big cities, not any of them but some. So the kind of duality you know the ambivalence of speed, and you know, it’s usually portrayed and perceived via the grid or via this kind of matrix of you know, not having time and rush and all that which is legitimate, but it’s just one part of the story.
I was not a big fan of this whole notion of speed as some kind of a megaforce of modernity that glutenizes and colonizes everything in the tyranny of speed and all that, although I do see a point in it, but at the same time I was not a big fan of slowness either in exactly the same way that you know, okay, it’s all speeding up. It needs to all slow down. That’s why I’m not a big fan of this Carl Honore thing, and slow movement and slow food. First thing, it’s very, how shall I say it? You need to have material and temporal resources in order to enjoy slow cooking for seven hours. Well, I don’t have that time. I need to go to work to feed my family. It’s a very, it’s a status thing. It’s a kind of sign of affluence in a way that you know I’m well I’m rich. I can do that slowly. I’m fine.
Jonathan Cook:
Slowness for the sake of slowness is a luxury that’s available only to the top tier of economic elites. Human slowness in business processes is important, to the quality of our work as well as to our ability to retain some sense of agency. Still, for Vostal, the key is that humans retain the choice over their approach to time. It’s what he calls temporal autonomy.
Filip Vostal:
I’m afraid that there needs to be some kind of collective temporal autonomy, and that the way I meant it was individual temporal autonomy, and that wouldn’t work precisely for the same reasons as the slow watches wouldn’t work because you know, I would have my own temporal demands and that might differ even with my wife’s temporal demands, not to mention with my employer’s or employee’s temporal sort of requirements. So, this kind of autonomy, I don’t know whether this would be compatible with one of the principles of modern society, and that is synchronization. Synchronization of various activities, some people need to get together. It’s not only people but technology some people and technologies need to get together in order to pursue some task to accomplish something.
Jonathan Cook:
When Vostal looks at the management of time, he confronts the fundamental difficulty of decreasing individual power in an age when digital technology is using the clock time to concentrate wealth and organizational power to an extent that we have never seen before. Most of us might theoretically have more temporal autonomy than we had before, but that autonomy becomes something that we need to put aside, to sell desperately to any business that will be willing to pay a pittance for a temporary gig. Business is leaving more and more people lost in time.
So, what can we do? Perhaps one of the only refuges left against the onslaught of the speed imperative is the subjective experience of time in the human mind. Vostal reminds us that time is a human construction, being constantly reinvented.
Filip Vostal:
You know time, one second, no matter how objective we think it is, is actually very artificial, the way how the atomic clocks around the world are the fundamental source of how one second is actually counted or determined, and it changes every day, actually, the measure of one second. So, it’s nothing stable. Well, it is stable in a way how we use it, you know, in our daily lives, but it’s not stable on a sort of microscopic forensic level. It’s something that is being continuously reinvented.
Jonathan Cook:
To regain control over time, we need more than just a choice between working fast and working slow. Time, after all, is a mental construction that becomes fluid according to the kind of attention we bring to it. Vasco Gaspar explains that digital media constricts our sense of the passage of time by increasing the rate of stimulus we receive.
Vasco Gaspar:
One of the things I am most curious about, and I will ask you after the race, is the relationship with time. How did that change? If you sense that you have much more time now than before, because normally, our brains, we measure time about, there is a relationship between the amount of stimulus we receive and the perception of time. So, the theory is that if you don’t have so much stimulus you seem to have more time. So, it’s kind of your thing of the Kairos dimension more than the Chronos.
Jonathan Cook:
What is this distinction between Kairos and Chronos that Vasco is talking about? It’s not a new concept, but rather, a distinction that’s almost as ancient as the measurement of time itself.
Everyone knows about Chronos, Father Time, the titan of Greek mythology who relentlessly orders the cosmos with his unwavering progression of second to second, minute to minute. Kairos, however, was another Greek divinity of time, one more subtle and fluid. Filip Vostal explores this concept of Kairos, though to most, its significance is forgotten.
Filip Vostal:
You know there’s a difference between Chronos and Kairos. The Kairos thing that actually completely got lost from many of them, many other languages Kronos remained. We have chronology and chronoscopy and whatever, but Kairos hasn’t sort of leaked into Latin languages and that’s also kind of interesting aspect of it. So we can’t, we don’t even know how to imagine a different kind of time temporal unit not to mention how to kind of come up with the practical or specific you know shape of it. So, it starts all with kind of the imagination you know, like how can we imagine the post-clock hegemony.
Speed as we are talking about it is definitely grounded in clock time. You know it’s a clock time measurable sort of entity, even in physics. It’s a combination of slow and fast. Know it very much depends on the situation, and it’s slow and fast, always relational. The Chronos and Kairos thing often are you know a sort of an opening you know quotes from x y z, Saint Augustine often, when you know, yeah well, there was there used to be this time. This is gone, but now we only have the other one.
Jonathan Cook:
Is Kairos gone? Of course not. That may have been a theologically convenient claim for Saint Augustine to make, but it doesn’t match with human experience.
Over the last couple of years Kairos has been gaining attention as an alternative sense of time, an evasion of the tyrannical clock time of Chronos. While Chronos is forceful and unyielding, Kairos is inquisitive and exploratory.
Chronos represents a sacrifice in every moment, carrying a sharp scythe with which he cuts down the past so that the future may emerge, to be killed in its own time. Kairos, however, doesn’t kill, but makes space for growth to occur.
Kairos is pictured, metaphorically, as a lithe runner with a head devoid of all hair, except for a patch of long hair growing from atop his forehead. He is referred to as the opportune moment, the experience in time when possibilities are open, but for a limited time. One must grab on to that odd lock of hair at the very moment that Kairos comes running by, for he is not likely to pass the same way more than once.
Kairos isn’t slow time, exactly, but a offers a different quality of speed. Kairos offers a moment apart, a time outside of time, akin to the experience of the threshold in ritual space. That time can both feel eternal and pass in a flash. Tune in to last year’s episode of this podcast about the rituals of business to hear more about that.
The appeal of Kairos as an alternative to Chronos is that his strength isn’t domineering. As the spirit of the opportune moment, Kairos is a door opener. That’s what opportunity means, after all: Ob portunis. Isn’t that what we’re all looking for in business – an open door to unrealized possibilities?
Kairos isn’t just a mythological figure. Kairos isn’t merely some sort of sacred moment that is transcendent, but completely useless and detached from the practical world. Kairos is the concept of opportunity itself. Kairos is both transcendent and useful, presenting us with labor if we should choose to accept it, but never with repetitive work. When Kairos arrives, it is with the possibility for genuine transformation.
And now, Kairos opens a doorway to next week’s episode, which is also on the topic of transformation in a time set apart from the ordinary progression of time. Next week, This Human Business will walk for a while on the path of the pilgrim, considering how commerce might be different if it was regarded as a pilgrimage of meaning, rather than a job to be done.
Thank you for taking these moments out of your day to listen to this podcast. Thanks as well must go out to Meydan, who produced the music that opens and closes each episode. The song is from the album For Creators. It’s called Underwater.