Okay, confession time. I’ve been wasting too much time on social media again, getting lost in the flow, the soporific and anhedonic thrill of swiping. Happily, there are still moments in which you can come across something that jolts you back into yourself. One of these moments has been stuck in my head and so I wanted to write about it and revisit some thoughts I’ve written before about my own relationship to discourses around AI while mentioning an excellent book I read recently. So, while going through TikTok, I’ve been shown a whole bunch of AI adverts lately, all along a similar theme. It’s a guy driving in his truck, talking to his phone and asking AI agents how much they spent on his business yesterday. He’s pissed away thousands of dollars on ads, chasing sales and cold-emailing people. Crucially, the advert doesn’t tell you what his business actually is or what product he’s actually selling. This is funny and kind of revealing in itself but not the point – rather, the point is what the guy in the truck says to the camera as the advert finishes: “I can do all of this on the way to work out.”
Optimizing your business is supposed to free up your time. The obvious questions – free up your time to do what? From what I can tell, the principle purpose of this kind of AI optimization of ones own life is to free up time in order to make short video content showcasing how efficiently you can use your time. This is just the tip of the iceberg of course – contemporary culture is drowning under a sea of hustle, side-gig, grindset slop in which we’re supposed to ensure that every moment of our lives we are being better optimized: better sleep, better nutrition, greater productivity. Watching this commercial, or when I come across people in the real world who are all-in on AI and allow it to effectively run their schedules for them, all I can think is what the fuck are we even doing here?
You can free up so much of your time! Time to do what? Apparently, nothing but talk about how much time you’ve freed up. Optimization is a brutal recursive loop. The history of technology is full of these moments in which the machinery that was supposed to reduce the demands of labor were implemented in such a way as to make workers both more productive and efficient. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, wrote this back in the nineteenth century:
A Greek poet of Cicero’s time, Antiparos, thus sang of the invention of the water-mill (for grinding grain), which was to free the slave women and bring back the Golden Age: “Spare the arm which turns the mill, 0, millers, and sleep peacefully. Let the cock warn you in vain that day is breaking. Demeter has imposed upon the nymphs the labor of the slaves, and behold them leaping merrily over the wheel, and behold the axle tree, shaken, turning with it’s spokes and making the heavy rolling stone revolve. Let us live the life of our fathers, and let us rejoice in idleness over the gifts that the goddess grants us.” Alas! The leisure, which the pagan poet announced, has not come. The blind, perverse and murderous passion for work transforms the liberating machine into an instrument for the enslavement of free men. Its productiveness impoverishes them.
To talk of optimization is to talk of a life entirely subordinated to work. I’ve written before that I think AI is powered by a specific kind of political theology and I think one of the distinctive elements in it is the degree to which all things outside of the dogma or creed becomes functionally unthinkable. The question isn’t what else could you be doing – optimizing your life in the way that AI evangelists suggest make alternative modes of living not only less possible, but actually erode ones agency to work towards them. There’s a new study from a team U.C Berkeley that shows just ten minutes use of AI a day substantially reduces a person’s ability to work at something hard and make their own decisions or solve problems unaided. Freeing up ones time is the promise, but the reality is not only does this reduce all life to that of laboring life, but that labor becomes more repetitive, less interesting and fundamentally more alienated. How could it not when it is posited on giving away our already limited and precarious agency to what the economist Cecilia Rikap calls “the cloud hegemons.” (Her entire book is excellent by the way, and an invaluable intervention into the anti-democratic nature of these technologies).
There’s something so grimly depressing about being told to use these tools in order to speed up bullshit production and to intensify one’s own cognitive deskilling. I was asked at work why I didn’t draft my emails with AI, why I didn’t free up my time to use it to keep notes during meetings, why I didn’t want it to tell me what my schedule was or other such mundane facts about my own life. I struggled to give an answer beyond the prosaic truth that I could do all of that myself and the idea of this kind of cognitive outsourcing is profoundly depressing. Most of the talk of “freeing up time” is best understood as a managerial euphemism, a kind of authoritarian vision-quest for burning through the hard-limits of time and labor which are posited as the ultimate drag on the accumulation of profit. The manager (who of course loves AI) can only think that if only workers were not so inefficient, had been properly optimized, then the final shackles on profit margins could be squeezed out a little further.
What would any of us give to free up our time? It doesn’t come through a subscription to SpaceX AI, freed time comes from two spheres: the elimination of precarity, wage dependency and exploitation, and secondly a conception of time that doesn’t see the cognitive friction of human subjectivity as something to be eliminated or mitigated against. In other words, freeing up time is another way of insisting on the possibility of an un-alienated human subjectivity. It is, therefore, a utopian demand. For the capitalist, time is something to be rationed out and controlled (as the fights over the working day proved) but also the time between the demand of the consumer and the fulfillment of that demand should be honed to be as close to instantaneous as possible. For example, goods should arrive to market just as they are needed. For the contemporary capitalist, immediacy is not only beneficial but increasingly necessary in a global economy increasingly tilted to benefit those with first mover advantage. In contrast, freeing up time means working against the demand for the immediate. I don’t think any of this is a new problem, but the increasing popularity of a technology that is predicated upon its immediacy represents a particularly intensification and acceleration of a familiar logic. I don’t have the time for this – none of us do.
