Temporal Capture: The Arbitrage of Human Duration
For more than a century, critiques of capitalism have been anchored in the factory, where value comes from labor: the worker sells hours, the company buys them, and profit is squeezed out of whatever those hours can produce.
That framework still explains the warehouse and the assembly line. It does not explain the feed.
It cannot account for a business model where a handful of employees oversee billions in revenue, where “users” generate value without a wage, and where markets move on the difference between one millisecond and the next.
The problem is not that the old theories were wrong; it’s that tying value strictly to labor-time misses where extraction happens now. Contemporary capitalism has stepped outside the factory walls. It no longer just organizes the workday; it reorganizes the day, full stop.
To understand that shift, we need more than a theory of labor exploitation. We need a theory of temporal capture.
The Arbitrage of Duration
We usually treat time as the neutral backdrop of economic life. Wake up, commute, work, rest: the clock is just there, ticking in the background. But in the platform economy, time is no longer background. It is raw material.
You are likely familiar with Shoshana Zuboff’s concept of “surveillance capitalism”—the extraction of our data. But the target here is deeper: it is the extraction of our duration. Tech giants function less like manufacturers and more like refineries. They take unstructured human time and turn it into something that can be priced, predicted, and sold.
When you scroll a feed, you’re not “working,” but your duration is being converted into behavioral forecasts. This follows the logic of high-frequency finance, where, as sociologist Donald MacKenzie details, the game is latency arbitrage—profiting from the tiny gaps in timing between when an order is placed and when it executes.
Streaming services don’t just sell shows; they risk-manage attention. They model exactly how long you’ll stay and the precise “churn rate” of your boredom. Mobile games inject wait loops and countdown timers, then sell you the chance to skip the wait. In each case, the commodity is not just content. It is the control of when things happen—the ability to shave uncertainty off the future and package it as a product.
From Commons to Lease: Temporal Enclosure
Where industrial capitalism fenced off land, 24/7 capitalism seeks to colonize what art historian Jonathan Crary calls the “pores” of life—the intervals of rest, waiting, and sleep that once lay outside the market. These are the little gaps that used to belong to no one.
Today, if you want to move through the world, you pass through privately owned temporal infrastructure: your navigation app, your messaging platform, your social feeds, your work tools. They set:
The Sequence: When you see information (algorithmic sorting).
The Friction: How long basic tasks take.
The Tempo: At which you are pinged for attention.
We are not just “users.” We are tenants in someone else’s timeline. As economist Nick Srnicek argues regarding platform capitalism, these companies operate as rentiers. We pay rent in data, in exposure to influence, in the steady drip of our minutes. The platform owns not just a product, but a slice of the present.
Just-in-Time Humanity
“Just-in-time” manufacturing was invented to cut down on idle inventory. Goods would arrive only when needed; warehouses would be as empty as possible. That idea has been extended from pallets to people.
Today, drivers, couriers, and taskers are kept hovering on the edge of use: unpaid while waiting, instantly mobilized when demand surges. The app promises customers speed and convenience, but as sociologist Sarah Sharma argues in In the Meantime, the speed of the privileged is made possible only by the waiting of the poor.
Human beings have become the buffer. The risk of slow days and dead hours is pushed entirely onto the worker.
A new chronopolitical divide appears:
Those who can buy temporal insulation (priority lanes, faster shipping, concierge services).
Those who must sell temporal availability (on-call shifts, flexible hours that are flexible only for the employer).
Time becomes a class marker: not just how much of it you have, but who controls its flow.
Burnout is a Property of Systems
Seen through this lens, the current wave of burnout stops looking like a personal failure to “manage time” and starts looking like the predictable outcome of an economy that refuses to leave any time unclaimed.
We feel this as what sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls social acceleration—the sensation that despite all our time-saving technology, we have less time than ever because the volume of tasks grows faster than our ability to complete them.
But the shift is also psychological. The boundaries between market time and human time have thinned to the point of transparency. The inbox follows you home; the chat ping follows you into bed.1
In the factory, the enemy was the foreman. In the timeline, the enemy is the internalized pressure to be optimized, leading to a burnout that is structural, not accidental.
The Timeline is the New Terrain of Struggle
Historically, as historian E.P. Thompson famously chronicled, the transition to capitalism was defined by the imposition of “time-discipline”—the replacement of natural rhythms with the clock. Today, we face a second imposition: the replacement of the clock with the feed.
The central questions are no longer only: How much are you paid?
They are also:
Who decides the pace of your day?
Who benefits from your waiting?
Who gets to ignore their phone without penalty?
A theory of temporal capture asks us to widen the frame. Raising wages matters. But so does reclaiming what sociologist Judy Wajcman calls temporal sovereignty—the ability to decide when to speed up, when to slow down, and when to be unreachable.
That means fighting for limits on 24/7 availability, protections against algorithmic scheduling, and institutions that defend the right to be offline without economic collapse.
Capitalism once extracted value primarily by buying and underpaying our work hours. Now, it builds empires by quietly reorganizing the minutes around them. If we want a livable future, we cannot only fight over what happens at work.
We also have to fight over what happens with our time.
This leads to what Byung-Chul Han describes as the shift from disciplinary power (the boss telling you what to do) to auto-exploitation (you voluntarily checking your email at 10 PM to “stay on top of things”).