“Get realtime” was the theme of our conference back in 2008. At the time, it marked the transition of the web towards real-time interaction through the then-nascent social media and mobile smartphones. These were the early days of Facebook and Twitter, and they greatly influenced modern time regimes. Apple had launched the iPhone just the year before, and Android would be released later that same year.

But the term realtime also signalled a significant shift in our shared understanding of time – the time regime – away from the previously dominant model of clock-time. The Industrial Revolution installed the clock, its manifestations in time zones, and standard time to structure our work and collective lives. Trains needed standard time to establish timetables and run on time:

The railways required time to be synchronised over distance to avoid crashes and secure operations according to a timetable. Synchronisation of time over distances was only made possible through the invention of the telegraph. Time zones followed even later and were fully adopted only as late as 1956, when Nepal switched to a standard UTC offset (UTC+5:45, still a bit odd). Before the arrival of railways and the telegraph, or modern transport and communications technology, nobody really cared if two events at different places would happen simultaneously or not. The answer wouldn’t have any practical relevance whatsoever. Also, there was no way to find it out.

The factory also required time management. Even agencies and service providers established business models that charged for their services by the hour. Time was linear, could be measured objectively, and shared across distances. Over the course of two centuries, clock-time became the dominant mode of time. Consequently, the cyclical, rhythmic time of the past lost its dominance.

Today, we live in a regime that the media scholar Robert Hassan calls ‘network time’, and sociologist Manuel Castells even dubs ‘timeless time’. Global communication networks have compressed time to the point where it almost disappears. Everything seems to happen all at once. We don’t have time for anything. Everything has to be done asap – as soon as possible, and that often means in real-time. If everything has top priority, nothing has. We live in a constant maelstrom of the here and now:

With the acceleration and proliferation of modern transport and communications technology, we have basically accelerated time up to a point where it almost collapses into a single simultaneity.

We barely understand what’s happening

It’s more than just a form of bad management. The linearity of time – a key feature of the industrial time regime – is lost when we live and act in a constant present, disregarding both the past and the future. The network’s modus operandi is always-on, instantaneous, asynchronous, and virtual. When we compress time to the limit, Castells argues, the sequence of time, and therefore time itself, disappears. Time collapses into simultaneousness:

In today’s world, things are happening all at the same time. Interruptions are frequent. You carry a device that can interrupt you all the time, and it does if you let it do so. The office world has changed dramatically, and not only mail arrives every second, but also other messages on myriads of different platforms. News, both real and fake, is everywhere and always available, spreading like wildfire. The whole communications process has sped up to a point where everything happens at once, simultaneously.

Indeed, clock-time still prevails in our daily lives, as does the cyclical rhythm of natural time. But the time regimes of the past have lost their dominance. It’s not a matter of individual choice – networked communication is deeply ingrained in the way we work and live, and we have gained a lot from it. At the same time, we barely understand what’s happening. Time itself is notoriously difficult to understand. In the European tradition, there was an early understanding of time as linear and sequential.

But in daily life, the cycles of nature, the seasons of the year, the rhythms of day and night, of life and death, have been dominant for millennia. We still measure time by the rotation of the Earth on its axis (days) and around the Sun (years), although this isn’t precise enough and has to be corrected by leap years and leap seconds. Since Einstein, and possibly before, it has been clear that neither space nor time are absolute phenomena, but relative to the observer. Or, as Rob Kitchin has put it, time is “produced, articulated, and experienced in multiple ways”.

The time regime favours populism

It was not until the Industrial Revolution and the modern notion of progress that the linearity and sequentiality of time became dominant. Since then, communication technology has compressed time, and the same has happened to space, leading to time-space compression.

This, in turn, has led to a significant acceleration of the pace of life and the economy. Ideologically, this is exaggerated as accelerationism or, in its latest form, effective accelerationism. The latter can be seen as the domestic ideology of the Big Tech oligarchy that has taken power.

It’s about time to think through and debate the implications of these changes.

Network time, or timeless time, favours populism. Promising simple, instant solutions to complex, wicked problems works well when everything is reduced to sound bites and TikTok videos. If there is virtually no tomorrow, only a constant here and now, no one will hold you to account. When Trump promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, this is the essence of populist chronopolitics. When these instant promises fail, the populist will always blame others and never take responsibility.

The populist mode has now penetrated deep into the party landscape. Democracy continues to work with legislative periods, session weeks, and weekly cabinet meetings. Forming opinions and finding a majority takes time. If the time pressure becomes too great, the balance shifts from the parliament towards the government. For the modern state, time is a governmental technology.

The tyranny of the moment

Meanwhile, there is a growing sense of urgency in our times of polycrisis and permacrisis. Since 9/11 in 2001, we’ve witnessed a chain of increasingly interconnected crises. Everything seems to have to be solved all at once. Hence, politics suffers from the same problem as bad management: when everything is a priority, nothing is. Most, if not all, political issues require time to resolve, but there is no time. The complexity of the problems and solutions also slows down the process.

Three decades after Francis Fukuyama postulated the end of history and the triumph of Western liberal democracy, optimism has given way to pessimism. However, the time regime is still that of a presentism characterised “by the tyranny of the moment and the treadmill of an infinite now” (François Hartog), which exists at the expense of both the future and the past.

AI is the latest incursion into a time regime that prefers the immediate, albeit approximate, semi-solution. If we can choose between spending days or weeks, i.e. investing time, for a good, if not perfect, solution or getting an instant fix, why not choose the latter? As we keep telling ourselves, it will get better over time. And AI is useful if we know what we do.

Even agencies are feeling the pressure of the timeless time regime, as their clients move away from paying them for time and effort and instead spend money only on deliverables and results. Combined with AI, vast chunks of agency work will be automated and delivered instantly, compressing time to the max. Being faster than their clients is a key reason why agencies exist. Does that still hold true in the age of timeless time?

A turning point in time

Time, as we once knew it, is dissolving. The dominance of structured, linear time has given way to an era of simultaneity – where everything happens at once, and the future struggles to emerge from the ever-present now. As we stand at this crossroads, we must ask ourselves: What comes next?

Throughout history, every shift in our understanding of time has marked a deeper transformation. When one way of measuring, perceiving, and experiencing time reaches its limits, a new perspective inevitably takes shape. Are we witnessing the end of one era – or the beginning of another?

Some ends are not as final as they seem. Sometimes, they are just the start of something else.

Photo by Gerd Altmann / Pixabay