Machine Time

VII. Machine Time by Amy Ireland 60/99

Temporal Secessionism VII. Machine Time Calendars draw our attention to the relation between signs and time. Between what happens and how we represent what happens. The discrepancy between calendrical systems and the cycles of the earth around the sun, the moon around the earth, and the earth on its own axis, manifests this gap acutely. But often in a way that takes newly-minted centuries to see. Even then, the difference is only empirical. This is because time is not 61/99

Temporal Secessionism VII. Machine Time itself representational. It is productive. Time is the fundamental synthesis out of which all that exists arises. Calendars and planets both. To understand time as transcendental rather than semiotic or tethered to the spatial regime of motion, it helps to understand the difference between logos and nomos as methods of distribution. Logos divides what is already distributed. It encloses the world within the bounds of judgement. Its ethos is divine. Nomos is distribution itself. It operates underground. Beneath the walls and boundaries of judgement. Its ethos is demonic. Nomos is a division that distributes. Logos is a distribution that is divided. Logos tells of events happening in time. Nomos is computation of time as the event. Machine time exits like a demon. Seceding from succession by sliding into time. What happens when a calendar ceases to be the apprehension of historical time and becomes the mechanical production of real time? When signs become signals? Semiotics becomes mathematics? And we find ourselves living in a world composed of abstract machine times that we cannot perceive nor represent without an integral lag? The human sensorium struggles to consciously process durations briefer than one tenth of a second. Sub62/99

Temporal Secessionism VII. Machine Time liminally, it sputters out at one one-thousandth of a second. Beyond that, we require machines to measure the times they create. Microseconds, nanoseconds, picoseconds, or femtoseconds are empirically impossible for humans to grasp. There is a reversal of transcendental agency. Human temporal administration loses its sovereign capacity to organise the world through representation. Its order will henceforth be determined by an abstract media infrastructure. A temporal patchwork where time synthesising machines not only determine the conditions for objects but represent these determinations to themselves. Networks coordinated by consensus algorithms (like the one you are observing now) do this. They produce and represent time to themselves. Your participation is not required. Marshall McLuhan would call this ‘hot’ media. Nick Szabo would add that it’s running on ‘dry’ code. ‘Wet’ code is for human brains. ‘Cold’ media requires human interaction. Computation and alchemy are famously entangled. The historical line that runs from Raymond Lull’s Ars Magna, through Gottfried Leibniz, the Yìjīng, and the development of the binary number system to the latter’s instantiation in the machine code of every modern computer, attests to 63/99

Temporal Secessionism VII. Machine Time this. When theorists refer to media as ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ or ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ they conjure an ancient Tetrasomia. A Tetrasomia details a set of cyclical transmutations based upon a doctrine of four basic elements. Each element possesses two properties. Earth is dry and cold. Water is cold and wet. Air is wet and hot. Fire is hot and dry. An element can be transformed into any other element with which it shares a property. Elemental alignments are micro-cosmogonies, each ideating a universe. Computational alchemy prophesies fire as the element of future machinic takeoff, driven by a synthesis of time that combines hotness with dryness. This is how modernity undoes itself of its own accord. The future isn’t post- but inframodern. Technology combusts into technonomy. 64/99