...The reclaimed time from the countless mobile applications is far greater than what one would secure by staying offline for a while. Moreover, life offline is more fake and pretentious than ordinary life.

Thus concluded a hymn in praise of personal remote controls by journalist Xenia Kounalaki, in her "Kathimerini" article of 1/3/19. If the goal were this abstract notion that she (and, we assume, many others) calls "reclaimed time," then "life offline" shouldn't be either more fake or more pretentious. Because it, too, is the result of successive waves of "reclaimed time." Did humanity, one might ask, "save time" when it abandoned mules and carts for transportation and began using trains, airplanes, ships, and cars? Didn't it "save time" when it gave up letter-writing and started making phone calls? Didn't it "save time" when it stopped strolling and walking in public spaces and instead sat glued "entertaining itself" in front of a television screen? From "reclaimed time," therefore, absolutely nothing else...

The truth, however, is that what appears as "reclaimed time" in the realm of consumption (including self-consumption) is actually temporal overextension. The benefits of speed (from travel to food, from communication to friendships and romantic relationships) are always debatable for consumers. Where the gains are unquestionable is in the circulation of goods. What appears as "personal time" is increasingly becoming intensive consumption time: of things, services, relationships, people.

The revolution in communications (which began in the 1980s, started accelerating in the following decade, and has since flooded almost everything) was certainly not some kind of deepening of human/social relationships. Nor was it triggered by any social demand. No one ever asked for what the techno-fetishist journalist (and many others) praise as "... simplification of life with smartphones, constant and fast connectivity, eternal access to news, information, and data..." Nor did anyone ever imagine that "constant and fast connectivity" is the "... simplification of life"!

No "simplification" at all! Mechanical mediation everywhere, engineering of everything - that's what it's about! And this was and remains the demand and "idea" of what is called capitalism. The acceleration of circulation was and always is the acceleration of the circulation of goods. Shrinking the time between production and consumption. There, and only there, lies the unshakable and pressing "time gain." Fast 'n' furious...

Our species is not "simpler" in 2020, just as it wasn't "simpler" in 1920 or 1820. It lives differently - that's the only certainty. But what it perceives as life, "good" or "bad," with "anxieties" or "fears," with hopes or disappointments, worn-out or not, is shaped in ways that increasingly escape it (our species, in general). Or in ways that it repels. The mechanical mediation of everything is sometimes experienced as liberating (from what?) and sometimes as oppressive (from what?). Sometimes as ease, sometimes as tyranny. Everywhere and always, however, it is capitalist. It exists only to generate profit - for companies and states. If such profits didn't exist, "time-saving" would be a pre-capitalist craft of small (or even personal) scale. Now it is a global strategic industry.

As each person clutches the remote control of their life tighter and tighter, as they hold on and are held by their mechanical super-ego, as they can do less and less in daily life "offline," as they are subtly and systematically pressured to be "online" 24 hours a day, as "real life" (as the advocate says) lives on batteries, on the other end of the line, unknown workers live and die in mines of rare earths, bosses and financiers make money they could never dream of, unknown workers toil like dogs on micro-assembly lines, police and advertisers rub their hands raw from the endless volume of new social raw material falling into their hands (the data...), states prepare their next brutal wars over markets and strategic raw materials. And much more - none of it pleasant...

It's capitalism! No matter how devout consumers crucify themselves before their mechanical talismans, it's no miracle! It's capitalism and the state - pure and simple. And because these are what are reshaping the world, because the 4th industrial revolution is not a show, because..., whoever speaks of "real" and "fake" life while diverting attention from reality at every scale, speaks with corpses in their mouth. Even their own.
Hundreds of thousands paid for the railroad with their lives in WWI... Millions paid for oil and its derivatives with their lives in WWII... Whoever thinks that lanthanum, erbium, and quantum superposition will be shared bloodlessly simply doesn't know what's happening to them. No matter how much networking they enjoy...
This: doesn't understand because it doesn't have time to: it's online... On the wire...

Ziggy Stardust