Meditações - Internet, atemporalidade e globalização

However, if standardized time was a fiction more or less driven by capitalism, it might be possible that atemporality is a fiction more or less driven by capitalism, as well. Railroad time coincided with the Industrial Revolution, with the division of labor and the rise of the machine, with the valorization of efficiency. Internet atemporality has coincided with globalization, with a vast market that never closes; its ideal citizen-consumer would never sleep and never cease to spend. But we do sleep, and we still die, putting an end to our shopping. In recent popular films such as “Her,” “Transcendence,” “Lucy,” and “The Congress,” sentient beings either arise from or meld with eternal virtuality, with mixed results; but all the actors playing or voicing or creating these beings are, in fact, temporary, composed of cells that grow, age, and perish. (Why several of them are played by Scarlett Johansson — and I’m not even going into her role as a selectively embodied alien sex predator, in “Under the Skin” — is an essay for another day.) The Internet may not be subject to time, but we are, and so is everything around us. As the Japanese Zen Master Dogen said, in the thirteenth century, “all being is time.” And so we hunger for more. Another second, another minute, another hour, another day. Just one more afternoon with you. We know, we know, but not yet. And what if it is the case that quantum mechanics and the Internet and even the theories of Einstein are expressions of the same wish for more: for one more time, for sugar that never dissolves? Would their beauty be diminished? Or burn brighter for being a decaying illusion?

Stacey d'Erasmo