When an Hour is no longer an Hour

...and Time falls out of Sync

@ex nihilo / Leonardo.ai 2025

Not too long ago, a report rippled through the press—which, nowadays, in the absence of the requisite paper, has long since dissolved into electronic rustlings, or pixelated, if you will—focusing on Generation Z’s strange work behavior – the age cohort that can no longer imagine a world without the Internet. So what was the problem? The answer is: »Taskmasking.« This refers to an employee's behavior merely pretending to be hard at work while they’re really focused on their dating app or live social media feed. This widespread nature of this practice is evidenced by the avalanche of posts offering helpful video tips for such displays of productivity theater on TikTok. Exemplars include: to demonstrate their eagerness to work, malingers may type on their keyboard as loudly as possible; it’s also helpful to grunt loudly while working, to Ghost-walk through the company corridors with a strained expression while carrying an open laptop – or to engage in loud conversations at the water cooler or coffee machine. There’s no shortage of practical tips for using a keyboard shortcut when someone glances at their screen to mask an employee’s actual work of checking their dating app. Now, while it's easy to get worked up about the Snowflakes' lack of work ethic, we’re dealing with the symptom of a much deeper fault here. If you have to simulate something, it's no longer there – and when productive theater becomes a workplace desideratum, productivity seems to be in short supply—forcing you to feign false pretenses.

Our productivity crisis has long been reflected in the statistics. For some time, industrialized societies have had to accept that, with the exception of the digitalised world, economic life is in a state of constant decline. If it weren't for the Zombie Economy’s interventions, our financial life would long since experienced. Thus, the productivity theater has long since become part of our everyday lives, with everyone striving to maintain a Potemkin village of normalcy. And considering that many of today's jobs could simply disappear once digitalised, then Gen Z's productivity theater is entirely understandable – and it’s nothing more than youthful exuberance of the behavioral change sociologists have termed quiet quitting, which they view as a fundamental shift in values. The reason given is that in this practice, work isn't life—indeed, a person's value isn’t defined by their productivity. These resistance formulas, which, depending on the case, invoke either a work-life balance or abstract notions of human dignity, are of little help when analyzing the reasons behind our general productivity crisis. If you shift your perspective and consider the consumer's viewpoint, even momentarily, you must acknowledge that every increase in convenience is met with enthusiasm – and consumers have no issue with these enhanced offerings. In this regard, no one finds it morally degrading to delegate such tasks to ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence rather than writing a paper themselves. In fact, Copy-Pasting has become so socially acceptable that some universities, like Prague’s Charles University, have deemed it unnecessary to read bachelor's theses, as they ultimately know they'll only be reviewing computer-generated texts. And if you look at it this way, you could come to a paradoxical conclusion: the productivity crisis goes hand in hand with the unleashing of digitalized productive forces.

Given such findings, the question arises as to whether what's being diagnosed as a productivity crisis isn't symptomatic of a much more profound upheaval. No, even more than that: whether our benchmarks are even suited to the new circumstances. This becomes clear if, mindful of the old capitalist formula ›Time is Money‹, we ask ourselves whether the hour is still the metric unit for measuring productivity or if we’re not dealing with a completely obsolete concept in this mechanical measure of time. When, more than thirty years ago, I conceived of the computer as a memory storage device, even as a museum of labor, this idea has since taken on a social virulence. The issues with this basic metric become clear when something as straightforward as a school lesson is used as an exemplar. On one hand, nearly nothing has changed here in decades – yet on the other, the education system is producing an increasing number of functionally illiterate individuals – in other words, it’s failing to impart skills that may have been taken for granted a generation or two ago. What was the world like when teaching in schools could still achieve its purpose? At the front of the classroom stood the teacher, who viewed himself as a representative of the knowledge system, while in front of him sat the students, or more accurately: an entire class. Translating this scenario into information theory terminology, we have a single sender assigned to a group of receivers as a one-to-many. Strictly speaking, this setting encapsulates the Central Perspective's social logic, a triangulation in which the teacher, as a kind of imago, is intended to guide students outward into life, or more precisely, into and through the knowledge space. If they follow the prescribed path, as ordained by universities and equipped with the corresponding certificates, the possibility opens for them to assume similar positions as experts. Now, as today's teaching staff can attest, this setting is profoundly disturbed. If the teacher—using information theory terminology—wants to go on air, he knows he can't be sure his students are ready to receive. This partly relates to how the smartphone has emerged as a competing transmitter. Of course, you can resort to measures such as a general cell phone ban, but this merely suppresses the underlying problem without addressing it. This becomes even clearer when we translate the terms back into Latin: here, transmission is understood as emissio and reception as acceptio. The latter clarifies that a message reaches its recipient if and only if the recipient is ready to accept it. If the recipient is otherwise occupied, as in being on the air, or if the offer seems unacceptable, any attempt to convey information is doomed to fail. From this perspective, the intermittent smartphone merely represents a communicative disorder affecting our entire knowledge space. And this doesn't just impact schools but also extends to fields requiring the highest levels of expertise and specialization. When science philosopher, Nicholas Murray Butler, characterized this narrowing of knowledge with the dry dictum:

»An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.«¹

This thought clarifies that specialization accompanies a kind of world loss – that you have to treat the elaborations of specialist idiots with the utmost caution. If the specialist embodies an atomized knowledge space that's shrunk to nothing, the smartphone represents the opposite end of the spectrum because, through the Internet, it connects each individual, virtually at least, to global knowledge.² From now on, anyone with a smartphone handy in their pocket can regard themselves as possessing that same knowledge. This availability of knowledge has a twofold devaluing effect: firstly, knowledge is perceived as arbitrary and ultimately superfluous; secondly, even those who’ve built their social status on it can no longer rely on broad acceptance. In this sense, digitalisation dissolves the Order of Representation established over centuries. Just as feudal lords lost their privileges, representatives as guardians of education, good taste, and the like are also losing their prerogatives. There is an emissio without acceptio – while conversely, individuals experience a tremendous sense of empowerment, even when they lack the necessary expertise. Because Copy-Pasters can upgrade themselves at will, they’re no longer polarized to receive but to also send. And that they no longer understand the world behind the screen doesn't bother them in the least. As social psychologists Dave Dunning and Justin Kruger discovered in 1999, profoundly incompetent people tend to overestimate their own abilities grossly³:

»If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent [...]. The skills you need to give a correct answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a correct answer is.«⁴

Insofar as this disease has also infected national leaders and educational policymakers to the extent they boast about it publicly, it would be fair to conclude that digital illiteracy has become a civilizational disease. However, it isn’t perceived as such – instead, it can appear as everyday madness. If it's enough to merely simulate expertise, similar to how Gen Z fakes its work ethic, you're spared the embarrassment of admitting that, as a digital illiterate, you're no longer able to read the present.

But let's return to the school lesson question and ask ourselves what would be needed to turn a profoundly dysfunctional educational program into a success. When Martin Luther's translation of the Bible has Jesus say, I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Revelation 22:1), this indicates that knowledge of the writing should be the be-all and end-all. Applied to our secular age, this would mean an educational project is successful when it allows the recipient to become a sender as someone who clearly understands the logic of digitalised writing. It goes without saying that this can't be accomplished with a swipe-and-go mentality because a lengthy and complex educational journey is involved. Since this is a literacy program, the question arises about how to engage a classroom filled with children who are more interested in transmitting information from point A to point B than in receiving it. So, let's imagine an ideal pedagogue with the ability and willingness to take their students on such a journey. This teacher must first be aware that the smartphone's Knowledge Machine is a formidable competitor – and they will only succeed in their mission by gaining their students' acceptio. Here's where another fundamental problem arises. Not only is he now forced to compete with computer game’s fascinoma, but the smartphone has also given his students the illusion of autonomy – namely, everyone can believe they’re blessed in their Façonnable way. In this sense, he no longer has a class of synchronized students in front of him but rather a collection of 30 free radicals. If our ideal pedagogue accepts this as the real challenge, the day's task would be to guide all 30 children from A to B—a feat that, in extremis, could lead to discovering thirty different paths and presenting them to the students in such a way that ensures the task gains general acceptance. If we follow this logic, an hour actually consists of multiple highly diverse paths that only appear as one lesson hour plan on the consumer side. In contrast, on the producer side, they accumulate as tⁿ, where n represents the number of different paths. If we take this task seriously, it is evident that the classroom, which turns all participants into passive single receiver-objects, is destined to fail—troubling too: this adherence to a teacher-centered approach means that the shifting of the knowledge space goes unnoticed. Now, the solution to this dilemma isn't far off – after all, hasn't the computer game world demonstrated how to guide highly diverse individuals through the most complex spaces without losing sight of the goal? Considering today’s buzzwords of equality, diversity, and inclusivity, it's clear that this can only be achieved by examining individual cases rather than treating all individuals equally. Seen in this light, the lesson is divided into multiple trajectories, and the Psycho-Physical Unit—the lesson in time and space—transforms into a knowledge landscape where users reach their goals in various ways. It's evident an approach that views the teacher's physical presence as a panacea is hopelessly outdated, so much so that it already fails when formulating the task. Our ideal pedagogue would be much closer to solving the puzzle if he viewed the lesson plan as a computer game guiding his students toward the goal in various ways, allowing their curiosity to become the acceptio. Insofar the art of the educator would involve leaving the silver bullet's phantasm behind and engaging with their students' mental blockages, inhibitions, and preconceptions. Here, too, the computer that stores its user's interactions would be a great tool – after all, it would enable our ideal pedagogue to take a close look at all the obstacles that stand in the way of teaching success. If the ancient Greeks understood heuristics as the Art of Discovery, then we're dealing with meta-heuristics. From then on, the goal is to identify all the different paths leading a student from A to B.

If the school lesson exemplum proves one thing, the lesson can no longer be grasped as a single Psycho-Physical Unit. Instead, it encompasses a multitude of hourly readings as trajectories resembling a book or a film – a Work of Art containing a multiplicity of readings. Quite apart from this hermeneutical overdetermination, the translation into virtuality amounts to a form of abstraction – the program, which can be accessed at will—anytime, anywhere—inevitably transcends space and time. This brings the actual purpose of the school lesson back to the forefront: that we're dealing with a rite de passage in which a user traverses a previously untrodden path from A to B. In this sense, the program should be understood as a form of concentrated attention, serving as a time buffer that allows users to satisfy their curiosity in their learning journey. Furthermore, because the user is approached as an individual who can follow at their own pace, it’s conceivable that such a program offers a glimpse of how an artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant can eventually assume the role of a private tutor – akin to what wealthy citizens of the 18^th century who could afford for their children. In any case, it fulfills what has been only a pedagogical pipe dream: everyone is picked up from where they are at the moment. If this demand has so far only been met by lowering standards, such as teaching only simple English—the individualization of the lesson plan would allow those with a high level of comprehension to be transported from A to B at a higher speed. In contrast, those with a lower level of comprehension requiring more intensive support would still achieve the desired goal. Taking the idea of memory time storage seriously, it becomes clear what’s at stake here than a new understanding of what was formerly called productivity. If economists have understood output and defined it as quantity per unit of time, it’s evident that such a mechanical concept of productivity is insufficient to reflect the logistics involved here. Because it’s no longer a matter of logistics but of Psycho-Logistics, the producer's task isn’t about performing a material function somewhere; instead, it’s to achieve a compressive densification of time that allows the recipient of his message to move from A to B – and ideally, as anOmega-human, to bless society with added value. From an economic perspective, it’s no longer about duplicating uniform material objects in increasingly shorter periods but condensing and storing complex figures of thought – and thus programming time-memory storage devices capable of accomplishing even larger, previously unimaginable tasks. If we understand the computer as a Time-Memory Storage Machine that can complete processes in the blink of an eye which would take humans thousands of Time–Units, then this may seem to be the destruction of human labor – but its logic also can unfold enormous potential for humankind. At this point, however, the question arises about precisely the metric of such a Time-Memory Storage. The thought figure emerging here is one we all recognize—something our contemporaries never tire of demanding, like sustainable growth, which often amounts to an empty, cloudy pipe dream. A Time-Memory becomes productive when it delegates labor-intensive processes to a Machine. It’s also productive when it opens up new future options for action and even more so when it enables its users to participate in such an upgrade.

Returning to the productivity theater mentioned at the beginning; it's no coincidence that the Taskmasking strategies all relate to interacting with the computer – whether it's navigating the purgatory of numbers with grunts and grimaces or using an elegant shortcut to conceal that instead of being productive, you're indulging in your passions. The unintentional humor in such behavior reveals how the work world’s business-as-usual has long taken on the form of a Potemkin village. Consequently, the overzealousness of our bureaucrats can be understood as their attempt to make us, the public, aware of their irreplaceability. Perhaps it makes sense to imagine the metastasizing State machinery as a somewhat overweight oaf who grunts loudly while hammering away at his keyboard, then mindlessly wanders through the corridors of the company with his laptop open, and finally stops at the coffee machine to deliver a never-ending speech to those around him.

Translation: Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt

1. »The elaborate training which they have so often received is a sorry substitute for education. They are high-minded, eager and devoted specialists and illustrate to the full the definition, marked as much by truth as by wit, that the specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less. For whatever other purposes this trait may be useful, it is quite futile as an instrument of education.« From the 1928 Annual Report of the President of Columbia University, Signature: Nicholas Murray Butler, Date: November 7, 1927, Page 18, Columbia University, New York. (HathiTrust Full View)

2. This, by the way, reflects the Internet’s genesis. To counter the atomization of knowledge and establish a unifying knowledge space, Vannevar Bush, the scientific coordinator of the Manhattan Project, set about constructing his Memex apparatus, an intersubjective knowledge engine that inspired the pioneers of the Arpanet to create their own knowledge space.

3. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, first discovered in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, refers to the dual burden of how people overestimate their everyday abilities; in other words, the overly confident can be both ignorant of something and unaware of their own ignorance. This effect is often thought to affect only those with lower intelligence, but it explicitly refers to the overconfidence of someone unskilled in a particular task. See Kruger, J & Dunning, D. – Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, Psychology, 2009, 1, pp. 30-46.

4. See Dunning D. – Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. New York, 2005.

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