THE TIMISTS

TIME CZAR

“…precision, expediency, economy, and thus beauty.” 
Leon Trotsky 

A revolution is afoot. And like all revolutions, it is jaw dropping. 

On the plus side, the surveillance of privacy has gone. On the minus side, the surveillance of privacy has gone. It is obsolete. The Timists are here. 

Timists wield Chronocards. I happened upon my first one this morning, waved in my face like an experimental twin-barrel machine gun. Annihilation of the self is revolutionary sublimation, suicidalism, the Nothing: neither write, read nor speak, simply accept. Tap your Chronocard against the nearest time cell and carry on. The League of Time has abolished inefficiency. Time cells have been set up. The factories, government departments and schools have been synchronised. Wasted motion and talking eat up valuable seconds, as does clock watching. Think of the Nothing and hone your time discipline. They say President Zula has the shock brigade productivity points pasted to the wall behind his desk. 

They’ve had me on the social-engineering machine. The pulleys pull the cogs as I pull the weights. A thing of unfathomable beauty. The machine teaches us how to behave in the robot age. Not a second wasted. Not a step out of place. 

This afternoon I go to class at the Centralized Institution of Labour for group drill. We stand in front of benches, with places marked out for our feet. We repeat separate elements, and then gradually build up our movements into a socially appropriate repertoire. 

The human body must be re-engineered. A new kind of human is to be modelled. Motion capture helps us become more like the cybercasts. As the President says: aspire, achieve, and assimilate. No jerky worker is ever hired no matter how much cheaper than a robot they are. The jerks get category C’ed and shipped out to Mexico – or so the contrarians claim. 

I am no übermensch, but I'm energetic and intelligent enough. On 31st August, I shall attempt to breathe in 102 tonnes of fresh air in under four hours and 45 minutes. On 19th September, my hot air crew and I aim to more than triple the record.

Fellow workers, join me and redouble our efforts. In Derby, a worker in a carbon-neutralizing factory managed to siphon off a thousand lungfuls in a single shift. A hot air-maker in Liverpool cleaned out 1,400 pairs of bellows in a day. Three female fresh-airers from Staffordshire proved they could open and close windows faster than humanly possible. 

Nobody wants to be a tortoise. As long as humans labour as robots do, their repetitivity will rise. The process sets you free from the friction of independent control, and all of its associated stresses. The contrarians are drunken fools, intoxicated on the anodyne of personal autonomy. They would do well to remember the data flows upstream towards the algorithm police. 

Complete monitoring of time and motion is here, making redundant the petit bourgeois illusion of self-determination. It has shrunk to size zero. We live in a world of self-surveillance. It need not be a problem. Trust me. I am a Timist.