Everything is old now: A-temporal experiences of the digital in a rural farming co-operative

Abstract

This article, drawn from an ethnography of a rural farming co-operative in the East of England, argues that the temporal experience of the digital is one of a-temporality rather than acceleration. In using the term a-temporality, the article is elaborating on a concept briefly discussed by Mark Fisher to denote an alienation from time, combining it with Natasha Dow Schull’s writings on casino capitalism. Schull suggests that Las Vegas capitalism has moved from streamlining time to deforming it, rendering it tensile and pliant. A similar temporal distortion is apparent in the community’s experience with digital devices. The article explores the relationships of coping the community members form with their devices, arguing that they utilize them to self-medicate emotional distress and in doing so open new ways of existing in time. In this way, the article makes sense of the fact that the group – environmentalists largely sceptical of other forms of technology – has adopted the digital so readily.

Studies of the temporal effects of digital technology concern themselves with one dimension of time: speed (Rosa, 2013: 43). As we will argue in this article, this discourse argues that acceleration of the speed of technological development, and the fast-moving life it has enabled, makes time pass by in a heady, disorienting rush – faster than it ever has. It is a discourse which is ideologically linked to the ideas of development and progress, and often therefore takes on an excited and optimistic tone, even in its critiques.

But in their concern with this attribute, many scholars neglect to explore the almost endless forms that the experience of time can take, the diverse qualities it can possess and the manifold temporalities that co-exist. We will look to help move discourse beyond this simple view of time, arguing that for our interlocutors – the inhabitants of a farming co-operative in the East of England – digital modernity is not characterized by acceleration but by a-temporality. That is, rather than simply causing them to hurtle through time at ever greater speeds, digital technology is inducing a dissociation and distancing from it.

In using the term a-temporality, we are developing a term briefly discussed by Mark Fisher, to denote a sense of alienation from time. We combine it with Natasha Schull’s writing on machine gambling, which suggests that Las Vegas capitalism has moved from streamlining time to distorting it, rendering it tensile and pliant. Following from Fisher and Schull, this article will attempt to demonstrate that the broader texture of our interlocutor’s experience of time is being amended, not just its speed. We will do this in an ethnographic fashion, drawing on experiences conducting research on Gray’s Inn Farm – a rural farming co-operative getting to grips with digital technology.

Our interlocutors’ relationship with the digital – specifically, with social networks and video streaming platforms – is negotiated against a background of emotional vulnerability. We will argue that their heavy use of digital devices is premised on the experience of grief, melancholy, stress and loneliness. Out of the encounter between these commonplace mental states, and the capacities of ubiquitous digital technologies, comes a new way of existing as a temporal being. The experiences we discuss are common ones that many of us will experience in our lives. It is our hope that this article will illuminate the relationships of coping that not just they, but anyone who has experienced these phenomena, may develop with digital devices.

As the primary author of this article, Joseph conducted fieldwork and largely writes in the first person. Ellen as, co‐author, participated in developing the overall direction and some of the writing, indicated particularly when we move to the plural first person. All names, including the name of the farm, are pseudonymized. Joseph approached the community via email first, informing them of the nature of the project. His fieldwork was then approved during a meeting of the co-op. When he arrived at the fieldsite, he then obtained informed consent from participants.

Bringing the past into the future

Gray’s Inn Farm, a farming co-operative in the rural East of England, was founded in 2006 by environmental activists and anarchists, with the express purpose of creating a new way of living. Its very existence is a manifesto for how things could be. Most of the people who live there have never owned a television, some are not connected to the electric grid, many have never flown and almost all have lived extensively outside of mainstream English society on protest sites.

But all the members of the Gray’s Inn Farm community have at least laptops or smartphones, and some have tablets. They use a variety of social media platforms and video streaming sites. They communicate with one another using social media messaging services and store their meeting minutes on Dropbox. Most of them have Twitter, Facebook and Google accounts.

The fact that they have adopted these aspects of the digital is testament to the difficulty of constructing a life outside of them. They began using digital technology for pragmatic purposes – because it was necessary to apply for planning permission and grants, recruit volunteer workers and promote their products. But since then, they have come to embrace it – in part because of its various temporal effects, as will be argued.

The genesis of the community was in a housing co-operative in a nearby city composed of lifelong, highly committed environmental activists. To buy the plot of land, the original members of the farm borrowed £190,000 from alternative financial sources like Radical Routes – refusing to be incorporated into the mainstream financial system – and have paid back all but £30,000. Over the course of the 14 years, people have come and gone, but a core membership of between 10 and 15 endures. The residents of the farm are of a range of ages from early teens to mid-50s. They are all white British and come from a diversity of regional and class backgrounds.

The farm grows varied crops, including peaches, potatoes, strawberries, onions, apples and squash, which are sold as part of a veg box – its principal independent income. As well as this they keep two bullocks, a small flock of hens and a herd of sheep. They are doing up a caravan which they plan on renting out to holidaymakers; already they have occasional visitors to their campsite from school trips and retreat schemes. While alternative communities are often seen to be insular, Gray’s Inn Farm is dynamic and ebullient, engaging in friendly commerce with the wider region. They happily participate in society, albeit on the fringes.

Gray’s Inn Farm is not an ordinary farm, but a project of lived utopianism – imagining better ways of relating to people and place. Unlike most modern agriculture, the work here is unmechanized and does not rely on pesticides or insecticides. All work is done by hand, painstakingly, as it might have been hundreds of years ago. Most of its members are vegan and are appalled by the violent treatment of animals. Decision-making is collective and non-heirarchical, and the fruits of labour are shared equally.

But the community is not a nostalgic project; its rejection of other waves of technology comes from a progressive place, a desire to fuse old and new. They do not practice pre-industrial farming out of a reactionary reflex but purport to nourish and protect sustainable agricultural techniques that they might incorporate them into a better future. They aim to work towards a better tomorrow but do not automatically count on technical infrastructures to deliver it.

I chose the farm as a fieldsite in part to ask whether a more synchronous life with digital technology might be developed. What would these people, so avowedly opposed to large commercial systems, do with access to digital devices? But I also wanted to query whether their adoption of digital technology unsettled their hopes for the future, which are so intimately tied up with non-mechanical ways of being.

Ethnographies of technological avoidance are often situated at digital detoxes (Sutton, 2017). Gray’s Inn Farm inverts this setting in almost every respect. Rather than discarding their devices and absconding to the idyllic space of nature, its agrarian inhabitants are embracing the digital world. Unlike digital detoxes, which are often run as for-profit businesses, the ideological core of Gray’s Inn Farm is anti-capitalist. The group are also hard-nosed pragmatists, disdaining what they perceive as the ‘new age’ tendency, which manifests in many digital detox programmes. As a fieldsite, they thus offer great novelty.

I lived for exactly a month in a caravan on the farm in the Spring of 2019, contributing 8 hours of agricultural labour, 5 days a week, in exchange for food and accommodation. I conducted this work in the company of at least two members of the community at any given time. Every day I had dinner in a different home, coming to enjoy a strong degree of intimacy with the group by the end of my stay. Fieldwork was informal and spontaneous, with no staged interviews or pre-planned lines of questioning. Instead, my interlocutors imparted only what they wanted to share.

Due to the lack of electricity in my caravan, I did not use digital devices for the length of my stay, only accessing the internet through the devices of my interlocutors. This did not disturb research as my priority was not to look at what they did while online – rather to see how the presence of digital devices influenced their offline existence. In this respect, my work is aligned with post-digital theorists who analyse the role of technology in shaping everyday, offline realities (Alexenberg, 2011).

Acceleration or a-temporality?

Fieldwork did not begin with the expectation of writing about time, memory and historicity, but the topic proved unavoidable in conversations with community members. In part because living on a farm, they are necessarily aware of birth and growth, of seasonal change and of decay and rot. Every plant, every animal, has its embodied lifespan and rate of change. Also in part because of climate change, which has come to the upset the repetitive rhythm of the seasons with creeping environmental disturbances. But also because of the trauma and hurt that many of them have suffered often burst rudely into the present in involuntary flashes of pain.

In addition to these experiences, the members of the co-operative were experiencing a diversity of temporal effects brought on as a result of their use of digital technologies. Many of these were induced as their need to manage their emotional troubles found relief in the temporal structuring systems of their devices.

Making such an argument requires a foray into the well-populated field that theorizes the experience of time in post-modernity. This field is led by discussions around acceleration and ‘speed up society’, epitomized by Virilio’s, 1995 article ‘Speed and Information’. Virilio made the radical argument that digital technology eliminates the possibility of heterogeneous experiences of time by allowing immediate access to objects and experiences a great distance away – enabling people to reach for and feel them from afar (Virilio, 1995). This experience of ‘absolute speed’, he argues, triggers a collective disorientation, a ‘loss of bearings’ (Virilio, 1995: 1).

Virilio argues that digital technology does not just allow for things to be experienced instantly, but for things to happen in the same instant. He suggests that the digital has created a new temporality, a ‘one-time system’, which he calls ‘real time’ (Virilio, 1995: 1–2). All users of the digital enter this temporality within which the global and local are collapsed. Different places synchronize with one another, absorbed into the same temporality, leading to a standardization of the moment itself.

In the wake of Virilio’s article came, and continue to come, a set of scholars preoccupied with acceleration, presence and high speed. Within these works, experience of digital modernity is depicted as a uniform, all-consuming present – an unrelenting life in the moment. Stephen Bertman, for example, contributed a theory of ‘hyperculture’ – a social state of intense speed induced by technological change (Bertman, 1998). Hyperculture disintegrates pre-existing ways of living and makes presence of mind impossible. Thomas Hylland Eriksen argued that ‘slow time’ – moments of contemplation and pause – are lost in the immediacy of a digitally enabled world within which presence is always required (Hylland Eriksen, 2001). Most recently, Jonathan Crary’s book 24/7 Capitalism argued that digital capitalism has reached such a point of urgency that sleep itself is under assault (Crary, 2014).

The idea of the accelerated world has not been without its critics. Anna Tsing, speaking to Virilio’s idea of the ‘glocal’ persuasively argues that within globalisation’s ‘flows’ exist contemporaneous undertows, eddies, countercurrents and slipstreams (Tsing, 2000). She characterizes the global as being composed of many locals – each with their own temporal logics – which intertwine with and inflect one another. The idea of a total collapse of the two is rejected; they were always constitutive of one another.

Mirroring Tsing, media scholars like Geoff Cox argue that the pace of technological development is itself largely uneven. Cox suggests that we must think of technological change as an inharmonious process that unfolds unpredictably (Cox, 2015). Also within media studies, Florian Sprenger challenges the assumption of technologically enabled immediacy that theoretical accounts of acceleration rely on – which carry with them the tendency to produce globalizing and homogenous theoretical frameworks (Sprenger, 2016, 2018).

But within these critiques, speed is still much of the focus. Moving away from the idea of speed entirely, Mark Fisher discusses the concept of a-temporality in a talk at the University of Warwick entitled ‘No Time’ (Fisher, 2011). Fisher spends the talk teasing apart the multiple meanings of the title. Having no time does not mean simply existing in a frenetic, hectic state, or not having time to do what you want, as the ‘speed up society’ narrative suggests. It means losing a sense of dynamism and progression and a feeling of ownership over lived moments. It is the absence of a clear idea of when you are and where you are going, an alienation from the temporality you inhabit. His account of a-temporal digital modernity is of ‘inertial frenzy’ – the sluggish yet frantic movement of someone deep underwater without a path to the surface (Fisher, 2011).

These statements are best made sense of with reference to Fisher’s wider discussions of time. In ‘Ghosts Of My Life’, Fisher draws on Fredric Jameson’s concept of ‘depthlessness’ (Jameson, 1992), to suggest that, in contemporary Britain, the notion of having a meaningfully different future has evaporated (Fisher, 2014). He writes of a temporally flat London, within which he is surrounded by memories of a past whose hope has been lost and the undelivered promises of a meaningful future. Past, present and future collapse within this ‘hauntological’ landscape, giving time a non-linear quality. Time does not move neatly, and multiple aspects of it are experienced in the same instant. But simultaneously it can rupture, getting stuck in repetitive ruts.

Fisher finds himself thrown out of chronological time, which cannot get itself off the ground, unlike advocates of acceleration who are confronted by a wild tumble forward. He describes a lingering sense that past, present and future do not belong to him any more. The past is endlessly revisited in nostalgia mining exercises, the future fails to arrive and the present lacks depth.

Parallels can here be drawn with Natasha Dow Schull’s ethnographies of machine gambling in Las Vegas, which characterize the casino as the contemporary equivalent to the Modernist factory, and the gambler as successor to the industrial proletarian (Schull, 2012). In the interaction between gambler and machine, ‘the tendency of modern capitalism to bring space, time and money into intensified relation’ (Schull, 2005) is exemplified.

For gamblers who lack control in life, the repetitive mechanism of the machine allows them to enter the ‘zone’, a phenomenological state where awareness of space, time and the body dissipates. The zone is a state of intense connection between human and machine, a space of timelessness within which the self is lost. In the zone, gamblers cease to be, as do their anxieties, their traumas and their stresses.

For machine gamblers, the most efficient way to make time productive is to eliminate a sense of it passing. For casinos, it means facilitating a temporal disorientation, mesmerizing and disorienting visitors before they even enter the building. The city itself even becomes complicit in the addictive experience, cycling gamblers between machine terminals, unlike for substance addicts who are harassed from space to disconnected space under the pretext of public health (Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009).

Again unlike substance addicts, who are continually monitored by police planning to move them on, gambling addicts are surveilled to extend their gambling time and keep them immobile. Casino owners collect detailed data records on each user to refine the addictive potency of games, and provide ever more engrossing experiences, catering to increased demand for self-annihilation. Gambler and casino become allies in an unlikely alliance to commoditize time, an alliance stemming from the gamblers emotional vulnerability. Rendered as ‘time on device’, these moments are no longer experienced by anyone, and ownership of them becomes ambiguous.

Casino capitalism thrives by inducing destabilizing temporal change, allowing a powerful retort to Virilio and the wider ‘speed up society’ narrative. The logics that once called for time to be streamlined and induced a sense of urgency now demand it collapse, buckle and deform. In this state, it becomes more supple and workable that if it were merely sped up. The casino’s environment is designed to captivate and confine its visitors; the city itself is enlisted in inducing a recurring experience of timelessness. By contrast, the farm is the product of a collective wish for independence from global capitalism and offers a space outside of modernity’s strain. But Schull’s gamblers and the farm’s inhabitants are united by a desire to escape the pressures of time. Motivated by this desire, both groups have found similar ways of self-medicating using networked devices. As a result, the space of the farm and the digital space have become entangled.

Schull’s ethnography shows that, in quite unpredictable ways, the relationship with an object can be manipulated to a rough therapeutic effect. Following this analysis, we argue that the experience of a-temporality – conceived of by Fisher as a burden – acts as a makeshift therapy, appealing for people for whom the present is hard to be in, and a relief from time pressure is welcome. Digital devices act as a tool to help numb temporal experience. For better or worse, it stops them from confronting their trauma and anxiety.

The rest of this article will consist of a series of biographical accounts that will explore the changes in time our interlocutors have experienced.

Cracking the Amber of the moment

Harry has a curious hybrid relationship with time. On the one hand, he emphasizes how important the calendar is to him. He remembers everything with a date and is capable of giving me one for every major moment in his life. He can date almost every song we listen to, name dates that Arsenal have played with certain players or won certain cups, and when films have come out. This strict regime of dating is a way of disciplining his life’s experience.

But simultaneously, Harry’s heavy cannabis and alcohol use means that his short-term memory has been dulled, to the point that his forgetfulness has become a running joke on the farm. While his memory of the distant past is immaculate, he struggles to remember details within the past weeks and months. Similarly, his inability to pay attention is the subject of derision. He will often lose the concentration – or the will – to keep working or listening, before wandering off to conduct an unspecified errand.

The calendric thread that Harry has tried to weave through his life is being increasingly unwoven and remade – by the drugs he takes – but also by his use of Facebook and YouTube. They have become part of a suite of tools he uses in which to alter his relationship with his historical trauma, as I will expand on.

During a conversation with one of the farm’s clients, Peter, I have my most revealing discussion of time with Harry. Peter, who is regarded as eccentric by many in the local community, sees himself as adrift in time. While walking with me and Harry, he uses the metaphor of a path that can be traversed in many directions. He discusses the concept of parallel universes with us and of branching temporal possibilities that can be viewed backwards and forwards. He relates himself to stories of biblical characters who shared his name, or transports us to moments of happiness in his childhood, jumping in and out of personal and divine temporalities.

During this discussion, Harry repeatedly interjects, adamantly insisting that we live in the present and can never be elsewhere. Once you have walked one way, there is no return. Some things forever remain in the past and cannot be revisited. But there is a distress in his insistence on time’s linearity. Peter’s theorizing simultaneously provokes anxiety and curiosity in Harry. He later admits there is a part of him that would like to go back, to escape the present.

Harry’s heavy drug and alcohol use comes from a desire to suppress his past: the impossible grief of the death of his young son and the collapse of his marriage. These memories haunt him to the point of physical pain – I saw Harry vomit from grief shortly after what would have been the birthday of his son – and are seared irrevocably into his mind. This trauma is something that Harry both tries to obliterate and links with cherished memories.

Other members of the farm have come to associate Harry’s use of cannabis, alcohol and digital devices. To them, all three are all ways of losing himself – responsible for his difficulties remembering, organizing time, being in the present and paying attention. Harry uses Facebook as a device for almost everything. Whenever he has an idle moment, he will whip out Facebook. In fact, he will often make idle moments, skiving off work to stand discreetly by the tea shed looking at his phone.

After these lengthy sessions of content consumption and production, Harry’s rigorous chronology slips. He begins to make mistakes in the ordering of things, getting hung up on events that have taken place some time ago, but have appeared recently on his News Feed, as if they were recent. And he does not only project himself into the past, but the future, preparing for distant events – mostly festivals and protests shared with him on social media – with more rigour than the tasks of the now. And it is, as I witness others suggest to him, after his sessions of content consumption that his faculty to deal with the details of the immediate present is most impaired.

His friends roll their eyes when they discuss the many ‘nights before’ that Harry cannot remember. In the evenings, Harry smokes cannabis, drinks and watches auto-play Facebook and YouTube videos that help him nostalgically recall his youth. But it is not just the drugs and alcohol that cause him to forget. Facebook and YouTube are part of the potent cocktail which allows him to temporarily lose himself. He lets slip the shackles of his self-imposed chronological distancing and indulges in nostalgic binges, engaging with events and memories of the past. And, in escaping to the past, he pushes the difficulties of his present away. But it is an idealized version of the past, reshaped by the wistful nature of his content consumption.

Digital storage is not neutral – it can remember selectively and manufacture the appearance of urgency or importance. On Facebook and YouTube, time and date are reshuffled. The News Feed and Homepage present content as if it were chronological, but in fact omits huge sections of what has been posted by the people and pages users follow. It prioritizes and deprioritizes what users see; based on what the algorithm determines they will pay the most attention to. An organization can even pay for ‘newness’ on a Facebook feed. In this way, the linear calendar around which Harry has arranged time is confronted with a fundamentally new method of ordering events when he uses Facebook.

This is a theme media theorist Wendy Chun addresses in her article ‘The Enduring Ephemeral, or the Future is a Memory’. Much of Chun’s argument revolves around what she describes as a move towards the ‘nonsimultaneousness of the new’ (Chun, 2008: 148–150). She argues that online new does not mean chronologically closer. It means novel, stimulating, or fresh. Newness is what excites and arouses the viewer most – new could happen today or a year ago (169–170).

In the space of non-simultaneous new, there is an overriding desire for what is not already in front of us. This is encouraged by internet barons who build mechanisms to encourage this behaviour into their software, as well as hardware manufacturers who continuously compete to render one another’s devices obsolete. No sooner has ‘new’ been found than it becomes old; we move onto the next thing, restlessly looking for another stimulant. Because it is updated so frequently, any content, hardware, or software that is not novel and exciting becomes immediately ‘stale’ (169). The new iPhone, for example, is quickly made old by a variety of competitor products and by frequent updates to its own software. And while on the iPhone, she argues that the user pays little attention to what is already in front of them; instead, their minds race ahead. Once seen, ‘a new post is already old’ (169). In the glut of endlessly revisited and repeated information, everything loses its value, and the present is ‘always degenerating’ (171).

Digital content is kept for so long that it becomes ‘undead’ (171). Once digitized, something possesses the capacity to be endlessly stored and recirculated. This leads to an enormous overabundance of things to take an interest in. There is so much to pay attention to that we notice very little of it. Undead information competes for people’s attention; the old becomes new again, displaces what was once new, before being displaced itself, and becoming old again. In this way, it is precisely the endurance of the digital that makes it ephemeral. It is the fact that there is so much information stored that makes the details of each piece of it so inconsequential.

Chun argues that the enduring ephemeral is the ‘ontology’ of the digital (154). I would adjust her argument by characterizing the enduring ephemeral as being a manner of temporally engaging with Facebook and YouTube.

Specifically, based on Harry’s use of the digital, I argue that for him, the linear flow of past–present–future is replaced by the opposition of old/new. Where past means what came before and future means what will come next, old means what does not interest and new means what stimulates and arouses. The ‘newness’ value of something makes it more immediate than the chronological chain in which it is situated. Even Harry, a stronger advocate of linear time than most, finds himself quietly re-arranging his relationship with the present, the past and the future.

In the a-temporal digital experience, the linearity of Western past–present–future is replaced with the flicker of old/new. I argue that Harry is engaging in this form of temporal ordering in order to distance himself from his personal trauma, by projecting himself towards excitements and stimulation from past and future, removing himself from the present. Harry’s grief brings new meaning to Fisher’s idea of hauntological time, an a-temporal space within which future cannot be made to synthesize and past cannot be laid to rest.

His a-temporal experience is implicated in an ongoing traumatic temporality. His trauma has not been dealt with and perhaps can never be. It is something in the past which changes the way he exists in the present, renewing itself endlessly. He is reminded of this past every day, stuck in an unbreakable loop which does not resolve; the only respite he can find is in his digital and substance-based self-medication. The medicine – a cocktail of temporally numbing experiences – thus fits the disease. A-temporality has become the temporal element of a grief that does not age.

Harry’s anchoring in the temporality of past–present–future is beginning to drift as he moves into the temporality of old/new. The temporal amber in which he trapped himself has cracked, giving way to a wild swinging between different time periods. His strict practice of chronological ordering is being challenged. His relationship of distance with the past is relaxing. His insistence on living in the present is undermined. His ability to discipline his memory is fading. So here I will further advance Chun’s argument, to claim that the temporality of old/new is not just localized to the digital. At least in the case of some of my interlocutors, it is bleeding into the broader temporal experience of their offline lives, as I will now expand upon.

Immediately distant

One of the first conversations I have with 11-year-old Danny concerns his desire to become a video game developer and a YouTuber. What makes this remarkable is that Danny does not live in a place connected to the electric grid. The wattage produced by their self-built home’s solar panel is not strong enough for him to properly charge his laptop. His father Brandon tells me that, before he started watching videos with Danny on their tablet, he had not seen an advert in 7 years, such is their degree of distance from mainstream society.

As I will expand, my experience with Danny provides further evidence of the digital influencing my interlocutors’ experience of time as the logics of old/new begin to structure his experience of time and space in the offline world. In Danny’s case, old/new is not just a means of ordering the chronology – the immediacy – of digital objects and experiences but also analogue ones. In this ordering system, the ‘old’ offline world retreats in the face of the ‘new’ online one.

Danny’s mother Jenny worries immensely about his over-usage of the internet, which she equates with addiction. She says that he always seems to find some excuse to be using the internet and that it is interfering with his schoolwork. She also tells me that Danny does not find as much fun in the things he used to. He is at his most excitable when anticipating screen time and struggles to concentrate elsewhere.

Danny tells me that, living on the farm, he has fairly few friends of his own age. He tells me that for a long time, his ambition had been to live in one of the local villages. When I ask him why, he answers with the mundane and ordinary – he would like to have a nearby supermarket, be able to go to cafes or have electricity strong enough to charge a computer properly. This feeling of isolation, and an estrangement from the world that his contemporaries at school live in, is the reason that Danny first began using the internet so much. But his compulsive behaviour has now evolved more complicated roots.

Danny now often declines opportunities to visit the nearby towns when they arise. He admits to me that they simply do not interest him like they used to. I ask him what does and he replies with the details of YouTube streaming channels and gaming-related Facebook pages. When I press him on this, he asks why he would want to go to the small local high street when he can be transported to limitless worlds of entertainment and excitement. The high street is uninteresting and rarely changes – ‘old’.

Danny’s use of the digital dominates his life. In doing so, it removes him from the farm, from his family, from his schoolwork, his contemporaries and other interests. While his compulsive relationship with the digital may have originated in a desire for normality – a way of feeling closer to the outside world – he is now retreating from even the things he once wanted to be part of.

The objects that are most precious to him are related to his digital exploits. This includes his gaming hoodie (‘I Paused my Game to be Here’), a book written by a social media personality, and an electro-swing CD that his favourite YouTuber takes his theme music from and, of course, the tablet and his laptop and the vehicles by which he accesses the entertainment and excitement that he describes. His house is full of recently acquired clothes, toys, books and other objects that he no longer takes an interest in. These ‘old’ things far outnumber the ‘new’, and those that are ‘new’ glean their newness from their association to virtual experiences.

I argue that Danny’s experience of the temporal effects of old/new does not end when he shuts down his devices. They are something that – given enough exposure to – he experiences while in the offline world too. The ordinary things that Danny once wanted and enjoyed have lost their lustre to him. I argue that they have become old; that is, they are subject to a chronological structuring that grades an object or person’s immediacy on their direct ability to stimulate. In this system of structuring, offline objects are often deprioritized, given their relative lack of ability to stimulate. This is a way of making sense of Danny’s allegedly addictive behaviour – he is desensitizing himself to the everyday reality of his isolated life – not simply projecting himself elsewhere.

I later discuss Danny with one of the farm’s seasonal workers, Ben. He says that he notices that his own screen time goes up a lot when he is feeling isolated or lonely and empathizes with Danny. He says that he gives himself various excuses, like wanting to stay informed, pass the time or engage politically. But using Facebook and YouTube really serves as an escape, one that he reaches for reflexively to dull the boredom and frustration that comes with solitude. While indulging for a short amount of time can take the edge off his stress, too much can lead him to take less pleasure in the world around him and into a state of mind where he loses his interest in both good and bad offline experiences, which he foregoes in favour of more time online.

He agrees with the idea that too much time on social media leads to a temporal desensitization to the objects and experiences of the offline world. He comments that the truly beautiful things in the world are often not easily noticed – you have to attune yourself to them. Such attunement is difficult when hunting for ‘new’.

This further implies that, in addition to being ways of ordering digital objects, old and new are also qualities which can be applied to offline objects, routines and practices. Danny struggles to find ‘newness’ in the mundane realities of everyday life. The more he chases after new, the rarer it becomes, shrinking away from him. Objects in his offline world can no longer provide enough of it to warrant much of his attention.

I argue that old and new have become ordering principles in the offline world, allowing different relationships of immediacy with objects and experiences. This entails a relationship of temporal distance with offline objects and actions in favour of a relationship of temporal closeness with their digital counterparts. Danny and Ben are susceptible to applying old/new temporal ordering in the offline world as it helps them deal with their loneliness.

Like Schull’s interlocutors, they have become adept at manipulating devices which allow them to establish distance from their immediate surroundings. Unlike Schull’s interlocutors, they have found ways to preserve this a-temporal state when away from the device. They self-medicate by diminishing interest in things that are not immediately stimulating, desensitizing themselves to the problems in their lives by rendering them old.

Memory that cannot live or die

My interlocutor Amy, a historian, tells me that when she looks at the farm, she sees ‘time in 3-D’. Every year, the farm grows, with new structures added and old ones amended – from flower beds to polytunnels, trees, fences and buildings. In these, she sees the faces of the visiting workers who have built them. Long after she has forgotten their names, or where they are from, she is reminded of them in the landscape of the farm. The land itself is her memory device, a vessel for past relationships and emotions. I become part of this social landscape when I help expand the entrances to the polytunnels.

Amy sees gendered time in the fields. She tells me that the more visible jobs (like bricklaying and carpentry) on the farm tend to be done by men – leaving a more obvious mark – while the women usually conduct the vegetable work, whose traces evaporate at harvest. In looking at a row of potatoes, she feels the muscle fatigue and sore joints that accompany tens of hours of gendered labour. To be remembered by, the landscape workers have to carve themselves into it with muscular effort, inscribing a history of solidarity and friendship.

But the position of the landscape as a memory device is increasingly being rivalled by social media like Facebook and Twitter, which Amy uses to organize the many aspects of her professional and social life. Her deeply embodied relationship with remembering, which emphasizes the physical exertion of the female body, is not present when using social media memory devices.

Amy is aware of the implications of using social media to remember. Facebook and Twitter sever the memory of a person from embodied activity, from the affective memory of physical struggle and elemental exposure. She reluctantly concedes that she is more likely to forget something, or someone, when she has shifted relations onto social media. That is, unless the platform prompts her to remember them – effectively allowing much of the act of remembering to be organized on her behalf. She recognizes that it is problematic to rely on opaque algorithms to choose what gets remembered. But she lives a highly stressful life and finds it practical to offload the need to commit people and events to memory. She balances motherhood, care for her depressed partner Lee, an academic job, book writing and several days’ work on the farm every week and uses her smartphone functions to relieve some of the organizational pressure.

Increasingly, Amy lets social media remember on her behalf. Her view of social media storage space is as an infrastructure that functions like a more efficient version of the human mind, stepping in to relieve the pressure of memory overload. But, as Wendy Chun argues, human memory and computer storage are not the same thing; memory is a metaphor that has been used to conceptualize the computerized process of storage and retrieval, but the analogy is a poor one. While memory looks backwards, storage collects for the future. Storage is not capable of nostalgia or melancholy. Memory is emotional, manipulable and socially influenced. Unlike computer storage, human memory is not a logical, binary-based system and should not be understood as being so. Forgetfulness and error can be joyful, and necessary for our wellbeing (Chun, 2008: 148, 160, 163-4).

Making a similar point, philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that content, unlike memory, is ‘undead’ – using the term in a different sense to Chun (Han, 2017: 67–68). Memory is animate and it breathes. As we go through life, it alters, revealing itself in different ways; it is dynamic and changes with us as we change. It is narrative, the foundation of a constantly shifting biography, which interweaves with and influences different layers of itself. It reflects on a past that is fundamentally personal and emotional. But at the same time, it can be comprehensively lost, a point from which much of its poignancy stems. In this way, memory both lives and dies with us.

A good ethnographic demonstration of this theory of memory can be found in Charles Stewart’s account of dreaming and remembering in Naxos (Stewart, 2017). Here, remembering is a way of historically relating to place and people. The collective memory and cultural identity of the village of Koronos is kept alive through the continual process of dreaming (67–75), digging for religious icons (169–178), treasure hunting (114–123), and building (154–165). The past is literally unearthed through the work and play of the living body. It is through action that the villagers remember, becoming closer to the past and embedding themselves in a series of historical, political narratives in a fashion that is fundamentally embodied.

By contrast, content is simply regurgitated information – it does not change, and it does not live. There is no narrative to content; it is, again, merely a matter of ‘storage and retrieval’. Where memory ‘recounts’ and chronicles, content is simply an ‘account’, an accumulation (Han, 2017: 68). It approaches history as if it were a series of unchanging, unaltering points of presence, perpetually recalling the same incident in the same way. Content is undead because is not allowed to die, but neither is it allowed to live. It is memory that has lost its animacy.

Time is always affectively structured. In Amy’s case, it is being affective restructured, leading to a standardizing and utilitarianizing of the past. Rather than trying to ‘remember with the future in mind’ (Zeitlyn, 2015 390), Amy has begun to store and retrieve, allowing the future to be put out of mind. As a result, the present is no longer ‘awakened’ (Bryant, 2020: 16) in the same way, and a more limited kind of being-towards-the-future is enacted.

Amy’s process of embodied remembering now exists alongside a process of storage and retrieval – she is dabbling in different ways of recalling, anticipating and deliberating. Unlike memory, storage and retrieval is a practical instrument, a logistical system used to recount – not an emotional, narrative account of self and place. This means that she no longer has to deal with the stress of keeping on top of things, but much of the process of remembering becomes inanimate – or undead – in the process.

Schull’s interlocutors have their lived moments disembodied and rendered as time on device. In Amy’s case, it is the process of recalling these moments which has become disembodied and a-temporal. She is not remembering, rather she is consulting storage, a fundamental shift in the relationship with, and role of, the past and the future.

Into the wormhole

Before meeting Lee, the visitor finds traces of him on the walls of his house – on pictures he has painted directly onto them or books which bear witness to his enthusiasm for wilderness cooking and bushcraft. In the farm’s visitors book, there are many references to him as a gregarious and active community member.

These days he cuts an isolated figure, confining himself to his room. He is very rarely seen by almost all other members of the community, who exempt him from farm duties on account of his depression. He mostly declines to join me and the rest of his family in his house for our twice-weekly dinners, foregoing the opportunity to eat and converse. I am told by them that he often does not feel the need to eat, to engage in social interaction or even often to sleep while he is on his computer. Although they are rarely sure what he is doing, they are happy to leave this knowledge to him. For the first 2 weeks of my fieldwork, I spend long evenings in his house but never observe him leave his room, even to use the toilet.

The other members of the co-op attribute Lee’s absence to his fragile mental state. They see him as the prisoner of his own mind, secluded in his room. They comment that the practicality for which he is known has fallen away, and he has become unreliable. He is now incapable of conducting even small mechanical tasks on the farm that he would usually be the best candidate to complete. Although they are sympathetic to Lee’s situation, there is some gentle exasperation at the fact that he has been absent from the social and economic life of the farm for such a long time.

Later on in fieldwork, I see more of Lee, coming to understand his own perspective on his retreat from the shared life of the community. It becomes clear that the perception of being incompetent is central to Lee’s depression. His inability to complete the work for which he is responsible – and which he is no longer asked to perform – generates a sense of impotence, which he vocalizes in scathing critiques of his own ability. He is, for example, highly damning of himself throughout the process of cooking and eating – chastising himself for small errors in the recipe – and quick to either give up or write off his work as a failure. He feels a sense of general uselessness pervading all of his actions, losing himself in self-doubt. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that ensures he rarely completes work successfully.

But his lack of productivity on the farm itself is matched by – what he would describe as – highly productive time spent on his computer. In his own eyes, he is not simply a desperate shut in, whose potential is wasted, and should be pitied. He may have given up on communal work, but on his computer, he is taking advantage of opportunities far more expansive than the farm has to offer.

Lee is studying for an engineering degree over the internet at the Open University. He talks about his latest University project, for which he has been asked to disassemble a digital object and write up how it works. He plans to do this for an object that only exists in theory, the schematics for which he has developed on his computer. Proficient in coding, he also built the farm’s website, one of its main forms of communication with the outside world. He has a vast television, games, music and film collection on his own server, in addition to subscriptions to a variety of YouTube series’. In engaging in these activities, he is actualizing himself in ways he can no longer manifest in the offline world.

He refers to his extended periods of computer activity as going into the ‘wormhole’. When he uses the term wormhole, he is using a variant of a term that many of us will have heard colloquially – whether it is going down a digital ‘rabbit hole’ or entering an internet ‘black hole’. But where ‘rabbit hole’ speaks to entrapment in a fickle, subterranean nether world of dark spaces and blind corners – and ‘black hole’ implies the irresistible pull of a dead star in distant space – the term ‘wormhole’ suggests something of both.

Lee delights in his time on his computer – on it, he can explore virtual worlds of ideas, discourse and experience. At first glance, this seems to be an overdose of enchantment – no wonder Lee has stopped engaging with the world around him when his computer offers such potential for self-enrichment and play. This seems to be a case of a man who, like the characters in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Infinite Jest’, slips away from the world when confronted with entertainment so compelling they waste away in front of it.

For what kind of enchantment cancels out all other forms? Lee’s life is in reality not one of boundless enchantment but one of increasing anhedonia and solitude. A consequence of his computer use is that he is often not around – and his relations to the other co-op members and to the farm itself are almost non-existent. His presence on the device entails absence almost everywhere else. It separates him from the activities which once gave him pleasure, which he – by his own account – no longer finds interesting. It sinks him further into his malaise, whose grip is tightened by his ongoing estrangement from his friends, community and livelihood.

It even divorces him from his basic bodily functions – as those close to him testify – allowing him to suspend his need to eat, sleep, talk, work, exercise and even use the toilet for extended periods. It has rendered the rhythms of his body – the repetitive pattern of meal consumption and the flow of his circadian rhythm – unpredictable and erratic. I indirectly question Lee about these digitally induced suspensions of bodily need. He replies that when he is on the computer, he just does not feel his body as much; he will become so absorbed that he does not notice his own hunger or the need to sleep. These patterns of self-neglect have coincided with his trips into the wormhole. They are a corollary of the fact that he is no longer attuned to the embodied cues that would normally notify him that time has passed and change is needed.

To use a digital device is to dwell on the very edge of the living body’s perception. It is an existence that only the tip of the fingertips and the end of the retinas are required to engage in, with other sense organs largely superfluous. Mouse and keyboard are the prosthetic limbs that navigate the virtual world, superseding arms and legs. Using a computer allows presence to be withdrawn from large parts of the body for extended periods. In this way, the experience of using a computer entails a muting of, and a desensitization to, embodied sensation and, as I will expand on, a simultaneous slip into the machine body.

During a late-night chat, Lee speaks to me of the grace of the machine and expounds to me his theories on topics around singularity and transhumanism. He tells me that he looks forward to a world where human and machine interlink and digital technology does everything from dispense medicine to manage social interaction. He already often feels an intense connection with his computer, to the point that his behaviour and that of the device seem to synchronize. As an example, he tells me about an indie game he has recently downloaded, for which he finds the controls so intuitive that they come as second nature. He feels great pleasure when he is able to move in concert with the computer, when the actions of the cursor are often indistinguishable with the actions of his own body and sees further progression as natural. In comparison with his inability to actualize himself in the material world of the farm, the level of control he feels during his digital engagement is striking.

With the term wormhole, Lee is not suggesting that he is physically taken elsewhere when he goes online. Rather, he ceases to explore the space around himself with his limbs and senses, becoming less aware of the sensations of his body, falling out of touch with his physical surroundings in every possible sense of the word touch. He is engaged in a limbless, disembodied exploration of digital space, within which he achieves a sense of precision, competence and control that he finds he cannot manifest in his offline activities. In this state, time does not pass as it otherwise would. From the perspective of his friends, Lee’s trips into the wormhole seem like marathon sessions. From his perspective, the gradual build-up of embodied needs is suppressed, and it hardly seems like any time at all.

When Lee uses his computer, he feels he leaves the room – and the body – he is in. He enters a world where hours and days slip away. He ceases to notice the body which has become the object of self-hatred and gains a sense of precision and control. Given enough time on the computer, the movement of pixels comes to seem more immediate than that of his own body, which sits in extended stasis. As a result, he is less conscious of the biological processes that would normally punctuate time. The word wormhole, and the experience it describes, bears resemblance to Schull’s term ‘zone’, indicating that the a-temporal effects of digital gambling screens are replicated on other networked devices. The wormhole and the zone are of course distinct experiences, not experientially the same; but it is useful to think of them under the same umbrella.

The metaphor of the wormhole captures the embodied, phenomenological experience of using a computer – evoking the feeling of being whooshed away through spacetime – seemingly invisible to others. It takes seriously the idea that use of a digital device allows for an unusual form of temporal transportation. It also suggests that the journeys we make on our devices are not without peril. Our journeys in the wormhole can leave us, and the people around us, damaged. Once on the inside of the wormhole, a person might prefer what they find to the pedestrian realities of everyday life and be reluctant to return.

Conclusion: Out of time

In this article, we have tried to advance discourse around the temporal experience of digital devices. Many scholars of the digital define it by its speed, arguing that the main problem for people studying it is its rate of change; in other words, they see it placing an additional emphasis on movement. Our interpretation of the digital encouraging ‘a-temporal’ experience moves away from this, arguing that, for our interlocutors, the experience of the digital is characterized by a diminishing of the experience of time. For them, the digital’s defining temporal feature is the value it removes from the present, past and future.

Our interlocutors slow down the idea of acceleration, complicating it with the possibility that the ‘loss of bearings’ Virilio describes (Virilio, 1995) has its roots in a-temporality, not accelerated forward movement. That is to say, it is not necessarily that time is moving faster but that it has become more difficult to orient the self in. If our interlocutors look back and wonder where the time has gone, it is not simply that they have sped through it but that they have lost their bearings in a landscape that has become less visible, where salient points are harder to pick out.

Harry destroys the present over and over, only to return to it; when he comes down from his highs, he is confronted by the brute reality of life in the moment. His long-term memory tragically endures even as he tries to obliterate it. Danny escapes to his digital heterotopia, negating his present by temporally distancing himself from the space around him. But in doing this, he stops being able to imagine the future he once wanted and becomes detached from the things that provide meaning to him. Amy uses digital technology as a mental prosthesis to help organize the past and future, abdicating some of the process of remembering to it. In doing so, she also weakens her hold on the present and with it the synthesizing hold on temporality. Lee sits in front of his screen, motionless, in an immobility that allows him to withdraw from the present. He replicates the autonomic state of the dreamer, shutting down his body in order to plunge into the otherworldly space of the wormhole.

A retreat from the present is a factor each of these experiences has in common. Without a present, the whole of human temporality is undermined; unravelling the present thus unravels past and future. Their departure from the present advances the writing of thinkers like Francois Hartog and Fredric Jameson (Hartog, 2016; Jameson, 1992). Hartog argues that the contemporary world exists in a state of ‘presentism’. Unable to make meaningful history from the past, and faced with a foreboding future, people are argued to take refuge in a superficially comforting present. But it is a flat, shallow present that encloses, separated from the prospect of a hopeful future. Similarly, Jameson argues that post-modernity is ‘depthless’, a world where all meanings are skin-deep, and history loses all but a stylistic dimension. The concept of a-temporality goes beyond even these pessimistic analyses. The present ceases to be a place of refuge and dwelling; instead, people find comfort in a timeless state. Rather than speeding towards the future, or diminishing the present, they escape both.

Borrowing from Fisher and Schull, we argued that – for our interlocutors – digital temporality is not one defined solely by instantaneity, acceleration or homogeneity. There has been a loss of orientation – a change in perspective – in our interlocutors, but this is not only triggered by speed, but a change in the way that chronology, memory and presence are experienced. Rather than the digital opening the door to infinite worlds of accelerated ‘new’, everything is ‘old’ now. Their experience suggests that a-temporality is not simply a product of urban capitalism, as Fisher suggests, but comes into being in relationships with various digital devices. It also elaborates on Schull’s work by suggesting that the logics of temporal change she identifies have spilled out of the casino. Digital technology has allowed the new capitalism to slip in through the back gate of the farm. The community have fallen prey to distant technology companies, whose temporal logics have invisibly permeated the space in which they live.

It is worth re-iterating here that the a-temporal experience is multiple, implicating each of our interlocutors in a different way. Just as not all casino visitors are gambling addicts, not all internet users relate to it problematically. Our interlocutors are drawn to a-temporality by particular, personal difficulties. But their problems are not uncommon, and a-temporal digital experiences could feasibly be replicated in similar cases.

We argue that it is precisely the a-temporal effects of digital technology that cause our interlocutors to, in many cases, return to it compulsively, despite their otherwise techno-sceptic lifestyles. They are using the a-temporal qualities of the digital in order to self-medicate, taking advantage of it to disassociate from emotional pains. Interpreted this way, a-temporality is a makeshift therapy, a tool which allows them to step away and forget. But in the process, they produce solitude in the presence of each other, becoming detached from the place – and time – in which they live.