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An odd thing about this digital modernity is that the relativity of time is receding in the practicalities of our lives and our conscious self-understanding. Once we would periodically set our clocks and watches, knowing they were fallible machines. Now that our computers, phones, and digital watches are synced, time is definitive and leap-second adjustments are added without our noticing. The “correct” time is no longer even a question; the smart phone, the computer screen or the web-connected timepiece speaks to us today in universal, univocal, unequivocal time. Numbered and calculated time is for practical purposes infallible.

The numbers, of course, are all relative to a ramshackle array of natural phenomena, religious leaders, colonial pasts, and in the case of weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds, little more than human precociousness. We have nevertheless done everything to stabilize and universalize time that our human wits and modern counting technologies will allow.

In defiance of Einstein, in an ordinary experiential sense, this numbered, computer-generated, global time is less illusory than ever. Because this time is now nearly everybody’s, non-negotiable time, any underlying relativity has slipped from our field of vision. Contrary to Kant, time is experienced less and less as a figment of our a priori intuitions.

So, when we feel pressed for time in our modernity,¹⁴⁸ the feeling is real.¹⁴⁹ However, in a longer frame, the experience is historical and peculiar to modernity. When we are racing to catch a train, we can track this back to the railway timetable,^§AS1.4.6a a foundational modern textual artifact governing space-time relations.¹⁵⁰ When our work productivity is measured as output over time, we can track this back to the origins of industrial capitalism,¹⁵¹ and the mechanics of its calculation to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s^§AS1.4.3e time and motion studies.¹⁵²

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¹⁴⁶ www.ntp.org; Barbara Liskov, 1993, “Practical Uses of Synchronized Clocks in Distributed Systems,” Distributed Computing 6(4):211–19.

¹⁴⁷ https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545

¹⁴⁸ Judy Wajcman, 2015, Pressed for Time: The Acceleration of Life in Digital Capitalism, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

¹⁴⁹ Norbert Elias, 1987 [1992], Time: An Essay, translated by E. Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 21–23.

¹⁵⁰ Wolfgang Schivelbusch, 1977 [2014], The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 33–34.

¹⁵¹ E.P. Thompson, 1976, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38:56–97.

¹⁵² Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management, New York: Harper & Brothers.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 72–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Network Time Protocol and iCalendar §AS1.3.1b