Ever since they started conquering the world, capitalism and technology have fundamentally changed a lot of things. But time was not supposed to be one of them. Something as elemental as time, one would have imagined, would resist man-made forces.
But we were wrong.
Deranged social networks, information floods, mutating algorithms and the cancerous attention economy have succeeded in warping our perception of time. When years happen in weeks, when months happen in hours, how do we retain the sense of time we grew up with?
It’s not as simple or linear as time slowing down or moving faster. Something far more insidious is happening. Time is disappearing within time.
Ouroboros disappearing within ouroboros. Six second reels are eating six second reels. Content is giving birth to content. We are a mimetic species and the digital environment has the perfect fecundity for our impulse to ape.
We are consumers. We are creators. We are the grand experiment of this age.
We no longer tell time by clocks, but by the duration of digital content Which leads to a warping of time in the real world, where things are not ruled by ones and zeroes.
Take for example the India-Pakistan conflict. It was not long ago when their drones were hovering over our cities and our missiles were flying over theirs. But it feels like it happened a decade ago. The details are blurry, the stories already old, the images have disappeared. There is a timeline preserved, everything is recorded, one can recreate everything if one wishes, but somehow those days seem distant, almost historical. It has all been buried in an avalanche of digital information.
We have been bombarded by successive world events since then. The algorithms, sensing our need, calculating the zeitgeist of the day, have figured out ways to serve us news which will interest us—but is not in our best interest.
While the Iran-Israel conflict is an important world event, there is no reason why Indians should devote hours and hours of screen time on Twitter and Instagram following every rocket launch and every statement made by even the most minor leader on each side. But the algorithm, sensing our blood thirst, incessantly feeds our feeds with Iran-Israel information. Years and years of words and images in a few weeks. A glut of information shoved down our gullet.
No wonder we, at times, have the urge to throw our phones in a river and abscond to a Vipassana course for ten days. We need a break, but there is none to be had.
As soon as the Iran-Israel conflict subsided, a new soap opera—equally meaningless to us as Indians—started taking place. The saga of Zohran Mamdani; the Democratic mayoral candidate of New York City. Millennials and Gen-Z Instagrammers were absolutely charmed by his erudition and good looks. Add to it the masala that he is filmmaker Mira Nair’s son and you have a feeding frenzy. He first took over the streets of New York and then our smartphones. His reels flooded Tik-Tok in the US and Instagram in India. How many hours of ours did Mamdani eat up? And for what?
Also, in between all of this, did a plane crash somewhere and did 270 people die and one man miraculously survive? What happened to that story? How did we forget it? What else do we not remember? When did this happen?
It doesn’t take a PhD in neuroscience to figure out that our brains were not built to handle this amount of information. So the fact that they quietly delete things is quite logical. And hence we enter the age of amnesia. Nothing is worth remembering. Memory is transient, absent, glitchy. Once the sun rises, the past is deleted. We wake up, pristine brains, hungry for the glut of information Silicon Valley will shove down our throats. We wait the feed eagerly. Unaware what day, what month, what year, what decade this is.
(Views expressed are personal)
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Karan Mujoo is the author of the novel This Our Paradise
