NCE upon a time, I knew a true believer in AI; prophet of a post-human future. Like pilot fish that swim with sharks and eat scraps caught between their teeth, he got symbiotic with apex predators: corporate big fish in the digital sea. Versed in psychology, history and ancient religions, yet blinkered by left-brain tunnel vision, he prospered from the ‘If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’ philosophy.

And why not. But is it wise to put so much faith in talking heads? Those most highly educated, hence most entrenched in consensus reality? Sever the mind from the heart and the instincts and you get a cadre of tech bros psyched to rule the world (if AI doesn’t annihilate us). Along with all the wannabes who scavenge the crumbs that fall from their table? Entrepreneurs, speculators, take-no-prisoners technophiles…

Technology: making itself more compact as its impact expands exponentially, spanning ever more space only to colonise and debase it, exploiting all it finds in the name of the human race it holds captive, trapped in linear time – a long haul or a short fall on a road to nowhere.

Time: a tomb for the living dead, a loom for weaving immutable fates, a maw consuming its own seed and castrating its maker. Time and tame can sound the same (depending on your accent), thanks to the ambiguity of time’s accomplice, language. Time: it’s tyrannical. Totalitarian. Speaking of which…

Capitalism: a system based on the monetisation of all that is – a lengthening list augmented by inventions. Disorders, dysphorias, diverse diseases – pathologised responses to toxicity. Time is money: a concept traceable back to ancient Greece. And yet what is it, really? Can you hunt or gather it, hide or hoard it in a bank? Eat, drink, wear, love, care for it? Time: constraint, construct, con. A mindset designed to keep us in line, online, on tap, on tiptoe, dishonest. Tick tock, TikTok, tic-tac-toe, noughts and crosses, ones and zeroes, yes or no; binary code defining our newly ordered globe.

How swiftly and easily Big Tech has domesticated most of us under the whip of ‘progress’, convincing us that convenience makes up for fascistic censorship, collecting and using our personal details while covertly controlling us. Deep dependence on anything shrinks your point of focus (to palm-size in the case of a smartphone). At first the world opens wide. And that’s how you’re hooked, and then those windows of wonder keep shrinking until nothing remains but a race against time, the mind-numbing grind of maintaining supply.

Finding time, spending and buying time, passing or pissing it away… Gaining or losing time, making or taking it, marking, killing, serving, saving it… Yet what is time but a measurement that shuts us out of the present? Linearity – a trick that constricts and simplifies the past while flaunting the future like a carrot? Time: a bore, abhorred, a shaft, a story with a before and after, a resource bound to wind down or run out, a form of torture that weakens resistance, a bully issuing death threats. Time: of the essence when we needed a pandemic to wake up to the extent of the new world order normal that had been advancing exponentially since we got collared by technology.

Most folk don’t ask why I own no smartphone. Does not compute. Even if I do. I’m no technophobe. And yet compared to reality, virtual contact pales: policed, trolled, patrolled, paternalistically surveilled. So subtle and sensual energies get lost, distorted and drained in the course of never-ending indirect exchange; absorbed by a system that distracts us from our ecstatic potential so as to capture our attention solely to harvest our souls data. Like battery hens deprived of flight, we tolerate unnatural lives and sacrifice privacy so that vast corporations can thrive.

And in return, we get AI – a saviour promising eternal life as, hurtling towards obsolescence, we delegate ever more functions to phones, as if survival hinged on text reminders or messages from folk who can’t leave their phones alone either. ‘AI’? Artificial, yes. Intelligence? Not unless you accept an absurdly limited definition. Yet AI has got lots of intelligent humans hyped. It’s fast at what it does, so even if it can’t save us, it can save time. But for what?

After all, isn’t time artificial? Our sense of it relies on man-made devices, not the seasonal flux of our solar orbit, or lunar waning/waxing, or the Earth spinning on its axis. A mental construct, it blurs and morphs with the help of psychoactive drugs or Eastern mystical practices.

Time and tide wait for no man, or so the saying goes. But the Moon turns the tides to a rhythm. Our minds parse time’s passage erratically. The narrower the mindset, the straighter time flies; the broader the mind, the windier its path. Yet if time is a tide, I’m swimming against it. And since I’m not of my time in the sense that I sure as fuck can’t identify with it, am I then ahead of or behind it? Maybe both… but also beside it because I can’t even draw a straight line, let alone walk one like a sheep in a chute.

Yet how to defy (vs. deify) it? Lose track. Dethrone timetables. Walk to my destination if possible, listen and look around on the way, talk face to face with folk who don’t keep checking phones or watches, minimise virtual contact and just say no to the Zoombie apocalypse.

How many of our transactions with others are timed? And school institutes this arbitrary segmenting of consciousness, trains us to self-monitor and break our own flow, to dissociate from whichever space holds us and wrench ourselves loose from what starts to unfold as soon as we slow down, breathe and ground ourselves. Time: a tool of repression.

Just like a cat that plays fetch because she was raised around dogs, a human plugged in to computers learns to think technologically. Nature collides with nurture, or the lack thereof, and the mind is a mimic responsive to cues from its context. Stick humans in numbered boxes called houses or (tellingly) units or flats (or offices) laid out in rows or grids and often stacked, and they’ll act like chattels or wares produced for profit. And – like factory-farmed critters sitting in their own shit chewing each others’ ears off while they get fattened for slaughter – when death comes, they won’t know what hit them.

Train a human brain on a digital treadmill called Time and the pressure to keep up will curb peripheral vision. But treat the mind to a holiday – a loopholey day of freedom from deadlines and headlines to loopily swoop and spiral – and its frontiers will shift and widen.

So what became of the AI tragic, that prophet of posthumanity for whom lack of time is a predictable excuse, and who claimed to understand ‘the truth of our age’? Who knows? But with one eye on the past, one to the future, and his third eye closed, how could he see his own feet, let alone address the truth of our shared present?