Normal Operating Conditions
"Hi L, it's cycle day 19."
At this moment, there is a clock being built deep in a mountain in western Texas, on land owned by Jeff Bezos. As designed, it will tick once a year, and feature a “century hand” together with a cuckoo that shall “come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years.”1
It is perhaps quite telling that the architect of our planet’s largest commercial logistics system felt compelled to fund such a project. After all, what is The Clock of the Long Now if not a stunning visual metaphor for the “always-on” techno-consumer perpetuity that has come to define our contemporary experiences with time?
This is uptime. The nonstop background operation of our apps, the endless scroll of our social feeds, the sleepless synchronization of our data (so much data) across a dozen platforms. Then, the unremitting, inhuman pace of warehouse labor, the socially engineered consumer appetite that repackages fugue-state consumption into viral social media trends. It is the hum beneath everything, the sense that nothing—least of all ourselves—can be safely powered off.
It is not a stretch to say that the same logic of 24/7 operation that runs global logistics and tech systems has found home in the micro-rituals of the self.
I am frustratingly compelled to open a social app every time I lay down with my son for his nap. I could open a book with the same degree of effort (I want to) but the anxious audit against missing what others are capturing, which reframes my presence (right here, in this moment) as an effort to keep pace with a perpetually updating elsewhere, takes precedence.
Yet I’m not the only one watching. While I monitor the ever-brighter, bigger, more beautiful elsewhere, I am monitored in return by the very same tools.
Two period apps, one diet and wellness, and the default Health app work without pause in perfect technocratic sync to flatten my body’s biological rhythms into an array of efficiency and marketability metrics—fed back to me in color-coded, aesthetically pleasing abstractions, and fed to shadowy (shady) others in nonchalant packages of the most intimate personal information. Step count is the number of steps you take throughout the day […] and even movement as you go about your daily chores. My pacing as I rock my son to sleep is a fixed, accounted, priced quantity. My own body is a frontier for relentless 24/7 optimization, rivaling the landscape of the most micromanaged shipping and processing center.
While these tools suggest they’re delivering liberation, empowerment, or some permutation of such, they also demand reciprocal custodianship. Ostensibly designed for convenience, they rather conscript us into their own cycles of operation. A perfect closed loop: we are not merely the subjects of continuous tech operation, but also its agents. We charge, update, accept the terms and conditions; we allow the rhythms of our living to become raw material on the market, and our active attention and emotion the labor that maintains it.
It is in the dizzying eruption of new domestic protocols that surfaced without warning in the early months after I had my baby. As if my daily sundown dread were not acute enough on its own prospect of a sleepless night ahead (each rising to feed the baby punctuated by painful reminders of what my body had just endured), it was compounded by a non-negotiable evening systems check:
Baby monitor on? The blue status light angled away from my son’s face?
Lullaby track queued? The right lullaby?
Dirty diapers logged in our baby app? Feedings? Per breast?
It is in the location sharing my husband and I enabled after getting married, under the tacit agreement that we (or our icons) shall henceforth always be in each other’s view. I am where I’m supposed to be. Viewed by you.
Sometimes, it is also the annoyance at finding that my steps have failed to sync (or worse, that I hadn’t brought my phone for a walk). When my steps don’t sync, my diet app can’t give me the precise caloric requirements for my upcoming dinner. The physical activity of my body is left in a liminal gap, un-synced into the digital data of my living this day. I am left unoptimized.
I am a wife, a new mom, a woman. I am a custodian of apps and devices. I service and maintain their monitoring. But we internalize the demand for our own permanent uptime until it feels less like a pressure and more like a preference.
This is a confession.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve really shut anything down.
My husband uses my phone and closes out of Google Maps. He swipes up the carousel of open apps and gives a sigh as he closes each one. The calculator? I don’t remember when I last opened that. He lectures me about battery life as I watch him casually erase the digital sediment of my attention. Each disappearing screen imposes a closure on thoughts that I had merely paused. He sees a machine used inefficiently, lazily, while I see the fragmentation of my own mental presence.
My laptop does not power off—it just closes, its light consumed by the unceremoniously (sometimes angrily) closing space between screen and keyboard. The auto-save function of my document drafts and my browser’s promise to “restore previous session” may serve as metaphors for a self not permitted to lose, forget, or begin anew.
These tools—our tools, extensions of our function—operate on a logic of unremitting memory that is an extension of unremitting uptime, in which true power-down is resisted just as fiercely as true erasure. What might seem like recuperation is actually a kind of conscription. The possibility of an ending, of interruption, of loss, even, is a freedom we are continuously ceding. We are choosing to believe that interruption is an annoying malfunction rather than a prerequisite for true reflection.
In fact, it is in this “gap” state—an intentional removal, cessation, stillness—as Hannah Arendt would have it, that we find the space and time to make sense of our experiences.2 In practice, uptime sells us a perverse parody of Arendt’s gap—an eternal, constantly updating, contextually flickering “now” that replaces intentional breakthrough into stillness with ceaseless algorithmic churn. The embedded, constitutive uptime of the network becomes naturally, silently, our own; crafting and enforcing—with each notification, system update, data analysis tool—an existence that must also be relentlessly at work.
If the modern(ist) psyche of the twentieth century was forged in the shock of fundamental crisis, our own is being flattened (silently, beautifully, with all the right marketing slogans) by the enervating hum of uptime.
Danny Hillis, “The Millennium Clock”, Wired Scenarios, 1995.
Hannah Arendt, “Preface: The Gap Between Past and Future,” in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (New York: The Viking Press, 1961).