## Metadata - Author: [[Jenny Odell]] - Full Title: Saving Time - Category: #books ## Highlights - Even for a very privileged person who is isolated from the effects of climate change, toggling between a Slack window and headlines about a soon-to-be-uninhabitable earth produces, at the very least, a sense of dissonance and, at the very worst, a kind of spiritual nausea and nihilism. ([Location 139](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=139)) - the origins of the clock, calendar, and spreadsheet are inseparable from the history of extraction, whether of resources from the earth or of labor time from people. ([Location 150](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=150)) - It is kairos more than chronos that can admit the unpredictability of action, in the sense that Hannah Arendt describes it: “The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.” ([Location 181](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=181)) - As the economic historian Caitlin Rosenthal has noted, the tools that we would now call spreadsheets were used on colonial plantations in America and the West Indies to measure and optimize productivity, and they concerned work like sulfur mining—mindless, backbreaking, repetitive. ([Location 240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=240)) - was learning that whether you see an inert world or an agential one—whether something like Ijen is a pile of stuff or a subject deserving of regard—is an outgrowth of an age-old distinction about who gets to occupy time and who (and what) does not. ([Location 279](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=279)) - Of all the senses of time I will describe in this book, this is the one I most want to “save”: that restlessness and change that runs through all things, making them anew, rending the crust of the present like the molten edges of a lava flow. ([Location 329](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=329)) - Simply as a gap in the known, doubt can be the emergency exit that leads somewhere else. ([Location 338](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=338)) - We also dwell in practical reality, and one of the challenges in thinking about any valuation of time as something other than money is that this thinking has to happen in the world as it currently appears. ([Location 339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=339)) - the personal and collective project of thinking about time differently has to go hand in hand with structural changes that would help to pry open space and time where now there are only cracks. That is why I consider this book only one portion of a conversation. My deepest hope is that it can combine with the work of activists and those who do write expressly about policy—like ([Location 348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=348)) - To speak another language about time, to eke out a space different from the dominant one, you need at least one other person. That speaking can invoke a world, perhaps one less characterized by a cruel, zero-sum game. Writers like Mia Birdsong have taught me the role of culture shift, something that exists on the everyday level of personal interactions and politics with a lowercase p. In How We Show Up, Birdsong writes that the American Dream exploits our fears, creating real and imagined scarcity, and she calls for “accessible, celebrated models of what happiness, purpose, connection and love look like” that are different from what we are ordinarily taught. ([Location 358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=358)) - You can see this work as emancipatory and utopian, or you can see it as simply filling in the gaps left by the erosion of services under neoliberalism. In fact, both can be true. The rise of mutual aid at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 gives one example. All those Google Docs and spreadsheets were, on the one hand, a response to horrific gaps in the social safety net and, on the other, a concrete, living experiment in nondominant ideas of value, responsibility, kinship, and deservedness. ([Location 364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=364)) - Sometimes the best muse is the thing you’re so afraid of you almost cannot speak it. For me, that is nihilism. In How to Do Nothing, I quote the painter David Hockney on what he wanted to achieve in one of his many nonorthogonal, cubist-inspired collages: He called them “a panoramic assault on Renaissance one-point perspective.” If I could borrow that phrase, this book is my panoramic assault on nihilism. I wrote it in an effort to be helpful, but toward the end, I felt I was writing it to save my life. As the largest gesture of hope I could muster, the following is intended as a future shelter for any reader who feels the same heartbreak as I. ([Location 371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=371)) - In the midst of calls to “get back to normal,” this book was written in kairos for kairos—for a vanishing window in which the time is ripe. In any moment, we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness. ([Location 389](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=389)) - Any system of time reckoning and any measurement of value reflects the needs of its society. In our system of standard time units, grids, and zones, for instance, one can still read the marks of the Christian, capitalist, and imperialist crucibles in which it was formed. Understanding the invention of modern mechanical clocks, the historian David Landes writes, means first asking who needed them. ([Location 547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=547)) - The separation of time from its physical context is preserved in our everyday speech. As John Durham Peters points out in The Marvelous Clouds, “o’clock” means “of the clock,” as opposed to less artificial standards (e.g., the light at one’s particular location). Observing clock time signaled a supposed domination over the natural world that was similar to other rationalist ideals, like the imposition of an abstract grid onto a decidedly diverse landscape. A clock hour was meant to be an hour, no matter where or what the season, just as a man-hour would be expected to be an hour, no matter who the man. This was as useful for regulating labor as it was for conquering land. ([Location 573](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=573)) - In the drive to make time equal more money, the employer has two strategies to pursue: extension (increasing the amount of time that money buys) or intensification (demanding more work in the same amount of time). ([Location 776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=776)) - But unlike the Ancient Greeks, who imagined that, someday, machines might replace slave labor so that everyone might enjoy some free time, capital only “frees time in order to appropriate it for itself.” In other words, the goal of capitalism is not free time but economic growth; any time freed up goes right back into the machine to increase profits. ([Location 789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=789)) - Peter Reinhardt, CEO of a carbon capture company, may have coined the expression “above the API” in a 2015 blog post called “Replacing Middle Management with APIs.” Describing automated processes at Uber (freelance drivers) and 99designs (freelance designers), he gives examples where a line of code is executed by humans: “The Uber API dispatches a human to drive from point A to point B. And the 99designs Tasks API dispatches a human to convert an image into a vector logo (black, white and color). Humans are on the verge of becoming literal cogs in a machine, completely anonymized behind an API.” Reinhardt worries that “as the software layer gets thicker, the gap between Below the API jobs and Above the API jobs widens.” ([Location 1048](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1048)) - One of the things I talked about with May, the administrator of the working moms Facebook Group, was how everything from offices to cars was designed for men. (Car crash dummies are based on so-called average men.) She then told me about how, in a group for women engineers, someone had called out the women who were getting promoted for acting like men. “So now these women who have had to do this in order to get ahead are being criticized,” she said. “And I’m like, I get it? I don’t know. I’ve been on both sides.” I nodded, realizing something out loud. “It’s almost like the car seat, but as a metaphor. It’s like you’re trying to make yourself more man-shaped in order to not die in the car.” ([Location 1324](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1324)) - Just as a gridded schedule reproduces the idea of time as fungible units, advice for “becoming more man-shaped to not die in the car” reproduces the life of the wrong-shaped car. It is great advice to seek your dream job, but in many of these books, the implied answer to the question “Who will do the low-wage work?” is that it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s not you. That answer doesn’t feel so good. ([Location 1348](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1348)) - Time management illuminates the assumptions of the will-versus-circumstance debate because it takes the individual as the absolute unit and the near future as the time frame, at the expense of the collective good. Even Sharma understands time management’s appeal, which also happens to be its danger. “It is an intoxicating concern: how to have a better relationship to time control and technology,” she writes. “But this cultural fixation on time control and one’s ability to modulate time, to manage it better, slow it down and speed it up, is antithetical to the collective sense of time necessary for a political understanding of time.” ([Location 1351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1351)) - “Slow living is now ‘for sale’ and approaches a consumerist lifestyle mostly for middle-class metropolitan dwellers—the majority of whom are probably far from holding transformative, progressivist or even socialist agendas. Arguably, many would admit that ‘it all needs to slow down,’ but such slowness would then be, more often than not, consumed, and consumed privately.” ([Location 1746](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1746)) - In 2017, the term Insta-bae—a word that combines “Instagram” and “haeru,” which means to shine—originated in Japan as an adjective to describe something that would perform well on Instagram. A study that same year showed that two-fifths of American Millennials chose their travel spots based on their Instagrammability. ([Location 1773](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1773)) - I was skeptical, to a fault, of paid surprise, paid conviviality, and paid transcendence—the classic teenager’s complaint that “the world is so fake.” ([Location 1823](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1823)) - I don’t mean to suggest that there isn’t an art to designing and acting in experiences, nor that there is some uncomplicatedly “authentic” experience hiding behind the screen of its commercial counterpart—if only I could grab it—nor that people can’t have a genuinely good time at a place like a theme park. It’s just that, as the experience economy expands to include commodified notions of things like slowness, community, authenticity, and “nature”—all while income inequality yawns wider and the signs of climate change intensify—I feel the panic of watching possible exits blocked. I keep wanting to do something instead of consume the experience of it. But seeking new ways of being, I find only new ways of spending. ([Location 1831](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1831)) - Images and experiences are the leisure time counterpart of time management self-help. The same individual who is encouraged to buy time from others instead of having a mutual support network is also encouraged to consume periodic experiences of slowness instead of acting in ways that might reclaim her time—or help others reclaim theirs. In some senses, this could be considered not just conspicuous consumption, but compensatory consumption, where you buy something as a way of coping with a psychological deficit or threat. ([Location 1847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1847)) - Because the Protestant work ethic is mostly about work, getting stuff was fine as long as you kept needing to work for it. In fact, leisure could even begin to stand in for work. Sociologists have observed that once assembly-line jobs made it difficult to see how well or hard someone had worked, what became visible instead was how much someone was able to consume. This consumption, in turn, became the new way to signal how hard one had worked. ([Location 1858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1858)) - In interviews about my first book, How to Do Nothing, I was sometimes asked about the kinds of activities I would choose in order to “do nothing.” That Pieper’s leisure was a state of mind and not a place, product, or service helped me understand the real reason it was hard to answer that question. I have experienced “leisure” while cooking, sorting socks, getting the mail, waiting for the bus, and especially riding the bus. If you have ever had a good trip on psychedelics, you know how something normally tedious and everyday, part of the horizontal realm of time, can switch into the vertical realm and become dizzying, fascinatingly alien. ([Location 1919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1919)) - You may not need a park to experience Pieper’s leisure, but it sure is nice to live near a park and not to be harassed when you visit. You may find it outside vacation, but it does help if your entire life isn’t subsumed by insecurity, anxiety, or trauma. If I exhibited the leisure mindset while in line for groceries, it was at least in part because I wasn’t worried about paying for them. ([Location 1930](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=1930)) - In leisure, there is more to be free from than just the clock. Any consideration of leisure as a mindset—its definition, conditions, and purpose—is complicated by the history in the United States of the active destruction of anything and everything that many people have needed for wholeness, a sense of agency, and peace of mind. There are many people who, simply by walking down a street, whether public or private, are seen as “a threat to the design of the place” and for whom simply appearing in public at all is interpreted in some places as an invitation to violence. ([Location 2021](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2021)) - The 1930s concept of leisure didn’t just exist within a field of social hierarchy; it also actively reproduced and entrenched that hierarchy. It had to, when the offer of safety and “freedom from care” to one group was composed of the tacit and violent exclusion of other groups. Safety and purity meant white and abled; improvement meant more white and more abled. ([Location 2034](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2034)) - For Bergson, time was duration—something creating, developing, and somewhat mysterious, as opposed to abstract and measurable. According to him, all our problems conceiving of the true nature of time stemmed from wanting to imagine discrete moments sitting side by side in space. He further noted that this “space” was not concrete environmental space, but something purely conceptual: Think of that green-on-black grid that sometimes shows up in the virtual nonspace of sci-fi movies, and think of moments in this kind of time as cubes existing in that space. (This conception also provided the grounds for the concept of fungible time I mention in chapters 1 and 2.) Bergson thought that our predisposition toward thinking of time in these kinds of spatial terms came from our experience manipulating inert matter; we wanted to see time in the same way, as something we could cut up, stack, and move around. ([Location 2399](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2399)) - The best description I have seen of this problem comes from a book by Tyson Yunkaporta, who straddles both worlds as an academic, arts critic, and member of the Apalech Clan in Queensland, Australia. In Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, he puts it this way: Explaining Aboriginal notions of time is an exercise in futility as you can only describe it as “nonlinear” in English, which immediately slams a big line right across your synapses. You don’t register the “non”—only the “linear”: that is the way you process that word, the shape it takes in your mind. Worst of all, it’s only describing the concept by saying what it is not, rather than what it is. We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name. ([Location 2450](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2450)) - Whereas, as Giordano Nanni notes, the abstracting of time made it possible for Europeans to “carry the four seasons with them, superimposing them on local seasons wherever they went around the globe,” most places did not (and do not) have four seasons. Instead, each has a series of stages corresponding to the ecological character of that specific place. For example, in what is now called Melbourne, the Kulin “recognized seven seasons, each of a different length, according to the appearance of specific flora and fauna”: “Kangaroo-apple Season, corresponding roughly to the month of December, Dry Season (around January–February), Eel Season (around March), Wombat Season (approximately April–August), Orchid Season (September), Tadpole Season (October), and Grass-flowering Season (around November). Two longer, overlapping seasons were also recognized: fire (approximately every seven years) and flooding (approximately every 28 years).” ([Location 2520](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2520)) - The corollary to fungible time is fungible space: the square footage of real estate or a nuisance to be crossed on the way to some destination. Whether due to lack of interest, lack of time, lack of access to safe outdoor spaces, or some combination of the three, many urban and suburban dwellers today might be hard-pressed to identify the living profile—what Deloria calls the “personality”—of the space they inhabit on a daily basis, or the ground below the shopping center. In “Indigenizing the Future: Why We Must Think Spatially in the Twenty-first Century,” Daniel R. Wildcat, a Yuchi member of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, wonders “what would happen if human beings once again took the places—the spatial dimension—where we lived as being constitutive of our histories as time or the temporal dimension.” It’s a vital question that pushes up against the grid of fungible time like tree roots under a sidewalk, especially as living in one place for a long time becomes difficult for more and more people. What would happen to our view of time if we could better see our wheres? ([Location 2547](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2547)) - What is a clock? If it’s something that “tells the time,” then my branch was a clock—but unlike the clock at home, it would never return to its original position. Instead, it was a physical witness and record of overlapping events, some of which happened long ago and some of which are still occurring as I write this. This exercise in observation is an example of what I have come to think of as “unfreezing something in time.” To do this means releasing something or someone from their bounds as a supposed stable, individual entity existing in abstract time, seeing them not only as existing within time, but also as the ongoing materialization of time itself. ([Location 2686](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2686)) - WHAT HAPPENS IN a world where Bergson’s duration and Bjornerud’s timefulness are palpable and where time is back in its place? Instead of things that the empty “stuff” of time simply washes over, you may begin to see “things” more often as patterns in time. The world, just like the architecture of a city, becomes a patchwork of outcomes from different weeks, decades, and centuries, all of it being built upon and eroded—pushing, trickling, and winging forward into the unknown. ([Location 2706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2706)) - Kimmerer considers the cliff explosions a kind of crime, even if the owner legally “owns” the rocks. “Owning diminishes the innate sovereignty of the thing,” she writes. If the owner had really loved the mosses, “he would have left them alone and walked each day to see them.” To see something in time is to allow that it has a life and to allow that this life entails more than the mechanistic cause-and-effect of a Newtonian world. In this way of thinking, mosses “decide” which rocks to live on, and even rocks have lives.[*7] ([Location 2740](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2740)) - In “The Stones Shall Cry Out: Consciousness, Rocks, and Indians,” the Osage scholar George “Tink” Tinker makes the case that rocks can talk. Pointing out that there is currently no agreement as to what consciousness is, Tinker finds it both paradoxical and arrogant that “the emergent world culture…of globalized capital and Western science is equally sure that rocks certainly do not have consciousness.” Learning how to hear rocks talk requires a Copernican shift away from anthropocentrism. Tinker describes attending a conference where a Kānaka Maoli artist was answering a question about how he found the boulders he sculpted. “I don’t find them; they find me!” the artist had said. “I might be walking along the beach, and one would reach out and bite the heel of my foot.” ([Location 2776](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2776)) - The difference between respecting something and not respecting it is the acknowledgment that that something is not an automaton, that it is registering time by acting and not just existing in ([Location 2804](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2804)) - Like rocks pushing up out of the depths and the water that wears them down; like browned and ripened buckeye fruits falling off the tree and rolling down the hill; like poetry, which strains the boundaries of an ossified language; or like Bergson’s cascading rocket that can never be arrested—the co-creation events of our lives do not play out in an external, homogenous time. They are the stuff of time itself. Grasping this fully can be like the moment when you actually have a conversation you’ve rehearsed in your head. Your rehearsal can never be complete because your imagination was missing not only the person you’re talking with, but yourself in each moment—the person changing and responding as the conversation proceeds. ([Location 2909](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=2909)) - The story of Enlightenment Man teaches me an all-too-common truth: that the people who stand to gain the most from determinism (in others) are typically the people doing the determining. ([Location 3285](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3285)) - If you don’t want to kick the can down the road, look to those who never recognized the road in the first place. ([Location 3404](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3404)) - Māori writer Nadine Anne Hura (Ngāti Hine, Ngāpuhi) gives this diagnosis: “We are unwell because Papatūānuku is unwell. What’s coming is worse. How can we talk about solving this sickness if we don’t acknowledge its fundamental causes? Greed, waste, the accumulation of individual wealth, an arrogant belief in the superiority of ‘man’ over every other living organism, and the perception of land as a resource to be wrung out like a dirty cloth and then discarded.” ([Location 3464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3464)) - the seemingly utilitarian reasoning of energy companies and investors can be compared to that of the apologists for slavery in nineteenth-century America, who also saw it as an apolitical, economic issue with technocratic solutions. ([Location 3492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3492)) - Energy companies cannot imagine a future without the objects of extraction and, therefore, must promote and fund a worldview in which earth remains an object. Plantation owners could not imagine futures without the objects of slavery and, therefore, promoted and funded a worldview in which enslaved people remained objects. ([Location 3496](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3496)) - To look into the future is to look around; to look around is to look into history—at not the apocalypse coming but the apocalypse past, the apocalypse still unfolding. Observing that the Greek word apokalypsis meant “through the concealed,” Washuta writes that “apocalypse has very little to do with the end of the world and everything to do with vision that sees the hidden, that dismantles the screen.” Likewise, French feminist poet and philosopher Hélène Cixous wrote that “we need to lose the world, to lose a world, and to discover that there is more than one world and that the world isn’t what we think it is.” The current meaning of apocalypse is modern; in Middle English it simply meant “vision,” “insight,” or even “hallucination.” The world is ending—but which world? Consider that many worlds have ended, just as many worlds have been born and are about to be born. Consider that there is nothing a priori about any of them. Just as a thought experiment, imagine that you were not born at the end of time, but actually at the exact right time, that you might grow up to be, as the poet Chen Chen writes, “a season from the planet / of planet-sized storms.” Hallucinate a scenario, hallucinate yourself in it. ([Location 3509](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3509)) - Instead of “marching in lockstep toward the abyss,” where the admonition to be realistic refers to an increasingly untenable reality, we at least have the right to imagine, and to imagine in common, whose time should be worth what, whose time is worth anything, and what our time is for. ([Location 3624](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3624)) - In trying to imagine other temporal landscapes, we might take some lessons from what Allen C. Bluedorn refers to as the “temporal commons,” the social agreements that construct and define participants’ experiences of time. Bluedorn is especially concerned for endangered temporal phenomena, such as the Spanish siesta, which is declining. If laws fail to protect the siesta, or if people stop observing it for other reasons, it will perish as a temporal form. Like all other commons, then, a temporal one requires stewards. “The idea is not to save time in the time management sense; rather, it is to save times,” he writes. “Or at least to preserve some of them.” ([Location 3626](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3626)) - Centuries after Sandford Fleming dreamed of a Cosmic Day utterly divorced from an earthly context, the zeitgeber that dominates our lives seems to be not the Doomsday Clock but the quarterly earnings report. ([Location 3653](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3653)) - The example of DST and time zones might at first seem trivial, a simple question of hours and daylight rather than what time itself means and is for. But the very idea of time zones and standardization implies dominance—the subsumption of one zeitgeber (e.g., local solar time or locally embedded agricultural cues) into another (international time and standardized commercial agriculture). The question of official versus unofficial time becomes a variation on the question I ask in chapter 1: Who is timing whom? ([Location 3748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3748)) - At the beginning of his book on Daylight Saving Time, Downing jokes about the time he adjusted his clock well before the official two a.m. start time of Daylight Saving because he was tired and wanted to go to bed. “You were breaking the law,” a neighbor tells him the next morning, offering to “lie for [him] if the Feds came around asking questions.” But in Xinjiang, temporal noncompliance is no joke. A former Uyghur political prisoner told Human Rights Watch about a man who had been detained for setting his wristwatch two hours back to Xinjiang Time. It was evidence, Chinese authorities said, that he was a terrorist. ([Location 3763](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3763)) - An inside joke makes a new inside, a new center. If the state relies on intelligibility, the inside joke is a way of becoming simultaneously unintelligible to the overseer and mutually intelligible within a group. ([Location 3803](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3803)) - Zerubavel wrote that observance of time systems, like any language, is what allows us to participate in an “intersubjective world,” and the broadest intersubjective world right now is a global, capitalist one. But if, just for a moment, we leave behind historically and culturally specific notions of clock-based punctuality and time as money, then Filipino time actually doesn’t appear to be a problem at all. If you and everyone you know are on it, then it’s just time.[*5] ([Location 3840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3840)) - it’s too easy to read history as a linear story of the encroachment of capitalist time into all locales and areas of life. While that story is true from a certain remove, it carries the same risks as those I describe with the Anthropocene, where history appears as a smooth, deterministic, devastating onslaught where anything else (“resistance”) looks like a postponement of the inevitable rather than an opening onto another trajectory. ([Location 3856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3856)) - Speaking a language is a way of participating in the making, preservation, and evolving of worlds. ([Location 3859](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=3859)) - Hoping and walking have preoccupied me the past dozen years, but I had to travel a long way down those two paths to realize that they were the same path whose rule is motion, whose reward is arrival in the unanticipated, and whose very nature is in contrast with the tenor of our time, a time preoccupied with the arrival and the quantifiable. ([Location 4132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=4132)) - Philosopher Ivan Illich worried in 1978 that “innumerable sets of infrastructures in which people coped, played, ate, made friends, and loved have been destroyed,” leaving a barren social landscape of “huge zero-sum games, monolithic delivery systems in which every gain for one turns into a loss or burden for another, while true satisfaction is denied to both.” ([Location 4149](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=4149)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Would it be possible not to save and spend time, but to garden it—by saving, inventing, and stewarding different rhythms of life? And wouldn’t this simply be an acknowledgment and use of the chronodiversity that already exists for all of us on some level, individually or communally? ([Location 4170](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0B3HY8HGW&location=4170)) - Tags: [[blue]]