A Foreword to the book edition of Anna Greenspan's 2000 PhD thesis, "Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine", published by Miskatonic Virtual University Press. PDF available here:

The book edition is available via Mistakonic Virtual University
Press. We thank Peter Heft & MVU Press for their fine work on this
publication and being happy with us mirroring the foreword here. Hat
tip to CritDrip for the beautiful design, and Amy & Matt for reading
it over.

{#nd9mye0o7w8}

Cover for the 2023 Miskatonic edition of
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine. Design by
CritDrip.

Foreword: Twenty-Two Years of Transcendental Time Machines

It has been 22 years since Anna Greenspan published Capitalism's
Transcendental Time Machine as her doctoral dissertation at the
University of Warwick, UK. Amongst Greenspan's acknowledgements, she
mentions the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), and indeed, it is
difficult at first to completely separate Greenspan's investigations
from the theory-production of the notorious collective. Points of
departure, connection, and convergence: Kant and Deleuze and Guattari,
alongside Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and Nietzsche, run through the varied
CCRU outputs that emanated alongside---and prior to---Capitalism's
Transcendental Time Machine.

Greenspan's style of writing in Capitalism's Transcendental Time
Machine is concise, measured, and didactic in tone---a sharp contrast
to the wilder nature of the CCRU corpus. Having said that, both the
thematic content of Greenspan's work and her methodological approach are
no less prescient or evocative; they are arguably more so. Greenspan's
materialist analysis of the concept of time is mediated through thinkers
as diverse as Plato, Marx, and Foucault. As a result, the text
incorporates philosophical positions from ancient to modern eras, in
parallel with associated conditions of social and material production.
Despite the breadth of the work under discussion, Greenspan's clarity of
thought allows a reader to approach Capitalism's Transcendental Time
Machine without any prior knowledge of either contemporary philosophy,
or the adjacent CCRU body of work. Indeed, Greenspan's discussion of
transcendental materialism, planes of immanence, and machinic autonomy
with reference to the temporal drives of capital increases the
legibility of other CCRU texts and concepts.

The notion of time is, inarguably, one of the most crucial pillars of
the CCRU theoretical fabric, later referred to as 'accelerationism.'
This isomorphic relation is best described by Amy Ireland when she
Tweeted:

Accelerationism is a theory of time. The end.

For Greenspan, as well as for Ireland, the development of conceptions of
time can only ever be thought of in relation to emerging
techno-capitalist apparatuses---which themselves generate time---and
it is the distribution, ordering, and arbitration of time that these
apparatuses control. Capitalist time is ultimately born of strict
equivalence with capital. In essence, 'Time = Money.'

Kantian Chronosis

Although radically different in scope and historical focus, both
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine and Greenspan's subsequent
work have, at their core, an engagement with Kant's framing of time as a
transcendental structure, delimiting the conditions under which
experience occurs. It is this temporal conception that Greenspan
rearchitects for the time of machinic capitalism. Her twist on the
Kantian subsumption of space into time arises from differing
perspectives as to where the conditions of experience are produced.

With Kant, then, the certainty of self-consciousness dissolves into
questions about the relation of time to itself.

Within his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant finds two basic requirements
for the cognitive faculty of the human subject: sensory perception and
understanding. A theory of perception, which is inherently bound to the
pure forms of appearance---time and space---is given by Kant in the
chapter on the 'Transcendental Aesthetic.' In his terminology, space is
defined as an 'outer' sense, and time as an 'inner' sense. Time becomes
the necessary precondition for any potential experience, inverting the
dependency-relation of pre-modern thought that follows on from the
Platonic tradition wherein space is the necessary precondition for
subjective experience. The crux of this claim: there is no experience
and, subsequently, no synthetic understanding of experience, that can be
constructed without this a priori spatio-temporality. For Kant, time
is abstract in that it undergirds the potential for experience to even
be understood.

Greenspan's reading of Kant might horrify the secular humanist. Reason
is not evaluated as an ordering principle, but rather as a misguided
by-product of a process that originates within the realm of the
transcendental. The Cartesian notion of the ego as an intentional,
legislative force is washed away by the autogenerative alterity of time,
with the ultimate determination of human interiority arising from the
outside. Given that the interiority of the subject is defined by 'what
happens in Time,' the exterior is the a priori productive force of
time itself. As a consequence, the human no longer appears to be an
enlightened subject guided by reason and free will, but instead
resembles a puppet unable to grasp what is pulling its
strings.

Through her readings of Kant and Deleuze and Guattari, Greenspan puts
forward a rectification of the Platonic concept of time which begins
with a dualism between time as perceived by the subject, and a realm of
transcendent, infinite 'eternity.' In the Kantian paradigm, this latter
category is structurally immanentized and absorbed into the synthetic a
priori. Consequently, exterior time is not only anchored in the
subject, but synthetically determines all experience. For Kant,
however, time does not only have a generative impact on perception, it
also serves as its precondition. To overcome the gap between mind and
perception---that is, to explain how the mind subsumes raw sensory
material under a concept---Kant needs a joint that is both rational and
sensually anchored. This joint---which Kant describes as a
schema---allows the application of a conceptuality to a sensual
non-conceptuality (experience). The mediating factor is time because it
is rooted in appearances and also in concepts, whilst being produced by
a different faculty: the productive imagination.

Time thus becomes an abstract diagram in Kant's transcendental
philosophy, without which cognition and epistemology would be
impossible:

The schema is neither an image nor a concept, but a diagram. Like all
true diagrams, it is not a static representation, but a functional
machinic component [...] With the chapter on 'The Schematism' then,
Kant frees time from being locked into any particular
determination---either on the side of the image or on the side of the
concept---and makes of it instead the abstract plane of connectivity
on which his whole system depends.

Even if Kant's discovery of the transcendental has freed time from
empirical movements and located it in an immanent outside, according to
Greenspan, the true horror is only beginning.

Thus, abandoning both the interiority of the subject and the
transcendent, eternal idea, the Critique of Pure Reason subordinates
thought to the abstract production of time.

Neither a materialist analysis of history---via Karl Marx---nor a
Kantian transcendental critique can alone shed light on the conditions
of this abstract production. At this point, Greenspan turns to concrete
and material practices of timekeeping to establish a connection between
the abstract concepts of transcendental philosophy, and the technologies
of time measurement.

These technologies simultaneously shape, and are shaped by, the
production-logics of capitalism. The clock, which for the first time
enabled a truly autonomous mode of timekeeping, was first essential to
ensure the synchronization of industrial production and transport
systems, while also being an instrument and symbol of hierarchical
power.

The introduction of global temporal standards such as Greenwich Mean
Time (GMT), time-zones, daylight saving time, and network-mediated
machinic temporalities all served to imbue timekeeping practices with
greater precision and universality. This was motivated by the desire to
better serve capital flows, enforce authority, and to cement the
production logic of 'Time = Money' as a universal and commensurable
epistemological infrastructure.

[T]he production of capitalist time converges with the Kantian
system inaugurating a revolution---not in time but of time---which
substitutes a transformation in time-marking conventions for a much
more fundamental shift in the nature of time itself.

Plateaunic Thinking

Aeonic occurrences break down the distinction between the constant
structure of time, and the changes which occur inside it [...]
Aeonic events do not occur in time not because they belong to a
transcendent outside, but because they are flat with the single plane
of immanence which collapses the distinction between time and that
which populates it.

For Deleuze and Guattari, transcendental critique has to be progressed
vis-à-vis Kant in a non-epistemological manner. Firstly, the synthetic
a priori is freed from the interior of the individual subject via
the recognition of the unconscious mind. Deleuze and Guattari use the
third injury to humanity---Freud's discovery of the unconscious and its
immediate Oedipalization by normative psychoanalysis---for a detailed,
generative critique in which the political conditions of production are
approached in holistic and material terms. Kant's binary distinction
between essence and appearance is then flattened through a Spinozistic,
monist interpretation of materialism.

Spinoza's concept of the plane of consistency is read by Deleuze and
Guattari as an abstract machine of production, which is by no means to
be understood as a metaphor. The bodies on it, bodies which can be
described mainly by temporal properties---slow, fast, at rest, and so
on---are real phenomena. While on this plane of production, effects are
expressed by speed and affect, juxtaposed with a plane of "forms,
substances, and subjects." One plane is assigned to linear
time-production, which subjectivizes, while the other is
"simultaneous[ly] too-late and too-early," as this plane itself
produces time.

Through her reading of Deleuze and Guattari, Greenspan invokes two
conceptions of time, both defined by Deleuze in The Logic of Sense:
Chronos and Aeon. Chronos is characterized as linear, successive,
metrical time, which corresponds with the empirical ego's experience of
corporeality and causality. In contrast, Aeon is an empty time of
intensive quantities and multiplicities, in which affects emerge through
interactions of 'Thisness.' At this point, it might dawn upon the
reader as to why Greenspan mentions the focus on "the occulted nature
of time" at the beginning of her thesis: Thisness, or Deleuze and
Guattari's 'haecceity,' is a de-subjectified mode of
individuation---that is, an effect or mode with individuality but
without subjectivity. Without explaining the exact
derivation of the term via Medieval scholars (and Deleuze's inversion of
it), it can be stated that haecceity denotes an individualization
without a subject---an event which temporally precedes any subjective
individualization process. Haecceities present a conceptual tool to
decompose the Indifference of Identity through affects of preindividual
events. In A Thousand Plateaus, the reader finds several examples of
such presubjective processes: a certain hour of a day, the wind, the
atmosphere, etc. In Greenspan, as in Deleuze and Guattari, haecceities
appear as networked and temporal entities; it is solely the interplay
and networking of different presubjective processes which give rise to
an emergence of affects.

[I]t is not in the same time, in the same temporality. Aeon: the
indefinite time of the event, the floating line that knows only speeds
and continually divides that which transpires into an already-there
that is at the same time not-yet-here, a simultaneous too-late and
too-early, a something that is both going to happen and just happened.
Chronos: the time of measure that situates things and persons,
develops a form, and determines a subject. Boulez distinguishes tempo
and nontempo in music: the "pulsed time" of a formal and functional
music based on values versus the "nonpulsed time" of a floating music,
both floating and machinic, which has nothing but speeds or
differences in dynamic. In short, the difference is not at all between
the ephemeral and the durable, nor even between the regular and the
irregular, but between two modes of individuation, two modes of
temporality.

This inversion of the Platonic division of lived time and static
infinity reanimates an immanent eternity as the proper locus of
experiential production. However, in this plane of Aeon, neither static
forms nor transcendent ideas manifest themselves as images in the world.
Instead, the effects of interaction of non-uniform singularities
manifest in Aeonic events that virtually haunt the sphere of Chronos.

Instead of claiming that these conditions are created in the "mind of
the knowing subject," Greenspan draws upon Deleuze and Guattari,
claiming that these conditions of experience are in fact "produced by
techno modernity." The place of production is always the
outside: the market and the technological-capitalist machinery.

Let Them Eat Y2Cake

An act of calendric insurgency, Y2K threatened the authority of the
Gregorian calendar by replacing it with cyberspace's own cyclical
count. Operating in this manner, it constructed itself as a time-bomb
that permeated the distributed network of contemporary technology by
directly targeting the pre-existing unity of capitalist
time.

As a literal and figurative representation of the limitations of digital
timekeeping and machinic mnemotechnics, Y2K was an atimely exemplar of
an Aeonic occurrence. Much of the work that went into producing
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine was undertaken with the
prophesied chaos of the year 2000 looming on the horizon, foretold but
not yet actualized. Y2K heralded the dawn of the new millennium in the
Gregorian calendar, dovetailing eschatological premonitions of
apocalypse with concerns regarding the widespread and synchronized
failure of critical, technical infrastructure worldwide.

Towards the end of the twentieth century, concerns began to mount that
many antiquated computer systems would experience issues at the end of
1999 due to the way that they recorded time. Many mainframe and
punch-card computing systems that were built in the 1960s and 1970s were
still in use decades later, their useful lifetimes extended far further
into the future than their creators would have imagined. As a result,
the year count in their primitive digital timekeeping systems only
extended to two digits---e.g., '1984' would be represented as
'84')---in order to minimise the use of then-precious memory and storage
space. The cost of storing information was prohibitively high in the
early days of digital computing (as high as $1/bit in the 1960s). A
century---or millennium---change would thus potentially cause
unpredictable effects to the systems reliant on these machines, as '99'
(1999) rolled over to '00' (2000).

At the root of this issue was a divergence between human and machine
time. Instead of staying in sync with the human (with '00' referring to
the year 2000), computers disrupted the linear accumulation of numerical
time by rolling back to 1900 when '99' reverted to '00,' spiraling back
to the start of the century as the number buffer 'overflowed' and began
the two-digit loop anew.

The increasingly networked and interdependent paradigm of computation
only exacerbated this problem. The 1990s saw a transformation of the
Internet from the domain of a niche cadre of computer technicians, to a
mass-usage medium, as captured by the notion of 'eternal September' in
1993. While this drive towards the distribution and networkization of
computation led to paradigm-shifting affordances in the scale and
dispersal of computing resources, it had the side effect of creating new
fragilities and contingencies, some of which may not have been
immediately apparent. The encroachment of Y2K brought these frailties to
the forefront of mass consciousness. All that having been said, it is
remarkable to look back at the turn of the millennium and see that,
ostensibly, nothing happened. At the stroke of midnight, the mouth of
the looming time-spiral simply dispersed.

Y2K occupies the whole of time, to a greater or lesser degree. Y2K
will never be anything other than a virtual catastrophe. Though it has
had enormous effects inside empirical history, it impacted Chronos
only as a pure potentiality; as an immanent machinic accident, Y2K is
intensive rather than actual. As such, it must be considered not as a
moment extended or unfolded in Chronos, but rather as a plateau or, in
other words, a virtual occurrence composed on the immanent and
intensive plane which constitutes the exteriority of
Aeon.

A key concern within Greenspan's thesis is, 'in what ways did this
catastrophe manifest?' For the first time in the machine age, it became
impossible to address the question with any degree of clarity or
confidence. In the logic of Greenspan, Y2K could be said to have
happened in Aeonic (transcendental/virtual) time but not in Chronic
(empirical/actual) time. Perhaps the most pertinent consequence of Y2K
itself---the fact that this question could even be asked by Greenspan,
regardless of the event's 'actual' occurrence---was a resurgent
Millennialism pre-Y2K that made evident the conceptual cracks in an
established global, temporal hegemony that began with the imposition of
GMT. These ruptures became evident not only to those working directly
with computational time-systems---at the time, a vanishingly small
percentage of the global population---but to a broad social milieu of
radicals across the religious and political spectrum, all of whom began
to prepare for the 'Approaching End' with renewed energies.

Technologies are shot through with myths that frame the story of time,
myths of utopia and cataclysm alike. So it should not be surprising
that many of the stories circulating about the "information
revolution" feed off the patterns of eschatological thought, nor that
technological images of salvation and doom keep hitting the screens of
the social imagination.

Y2K---we argue---heralded the now-evident Balkanization of machinic and
networked temporalities, manifest through the overflow of the incessant
accumulation of Chronic time though the finite nature of digital address
space. Temporal scarcity realigning Time and Money as necessarily
strict equivalents in the emerging techno-capitalist hegemony---in
order to support its globe-spanning apparatus of time-production---was
shown to have been built on shaky techno-material foundations. The
temporality of Y2K, according to Greenspan, was the time of cyberspace.
With its counting and representation, its standardization beyond
space---except for limitations of optical and electronic signal
transmission---once again enacted the Kantian paradigm. An absolutely
universalised temporal schema was produced which was necessary to
connect spatially separated network participants using a synchronous
distributed computer system such as the Internet.

Cyberspace, as the technological system of global capitalism in its
contemporary phase, supplements---and in part even replaces---the
previous dependence on physical trade routes and transportation
networks with a virtual web in which geographical boundaries have
become redundant. Dependent on instantaneous communications
irrespective of place, this virtual web makes the demand for a
standardized time that accompanied previous technological grids even
more urgent. Cyberspace, like the capitalist system itself, is a
distributed network which can only be united by a precisely
synchronized and globalized time.

By cementing the primacy of machinic time in cyberspace over the time of
the clock and/or calendar, Y2K signaled the dawn of a new Millennialism
which willed on the ongoing collapse of time into money as virtual
spatio-temporalities allowed for most of the physical and corporeal
limitations to information processing and transfer to be mediated away.

The virtual nature of Y2K---a nature which allowed it to be entirely
affective (as a potentiality) and yet never empirically
manifest---suggests that it cannot be understood through the
successive temporality of Chronos. Rather, Y2K is a sign---which
operates as both a name and a date---for an event composed on the
intensive plane of Aeon. It is as an Aeonic event that Y2K makes the
connection between the transcendental philosophy of time and the
socio-economics of capitalist timekeeping practices [...] it
dissolves the distinction between time and the materiality of
timekeeping systems.

The groundwork laid by European colonization of much of the world,
centering zero-time in London's Greenwich, was rapidly overlaid by the
signal cables of pre-millennium globalization. This was the beginning of
the world running on Unix Time, the first digital timekeeping metric,
distributed according to Network Time Protocol (NTP).

Mnemotechnics: An Aside on the Production of Digital Timekeeping

At this juncture in the journey---positioned at the precipice of the
millennium of machine time---we largely phase out of the specifics that
Greenspan laid forth in Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.
Immediately following the temporal rupture and virtual catastrophe of
Y2K, Greenspan's account reached its own "teleological termination
point" with the publication of her thesis by the University of
Warwick.[[17]](17: Ibid., 109. "null") With the benefit of
hindsight---arguably a transcendental time machine of its own---here
follows a speculative continuation of the trajectories extant within
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine.

Our goal is to situate and further develop Greenspan's theories in the
context of the present day (2022). Within the moment of Y2K, there was
present an understanding that the machinery of networks and digital
computation facilitates new potentials for universalities and
totalities. The remainder of this accompanying text serves to propose an
extrapolation from Y2K to the present, through a historical examination
of different modes of networked time, culminating in Bitcoin's
decentralized clock.

All of the techno-economic affordances of virtual capital flows through
cyberspace are rendered achievable through the proliferation of
chronometers for cyberspace, in the ascendance since Y2K. Digital
timekeeping at scale began in earnest at the dawn of the 1970s, with the
creation, ex nihilo, of Unix Time.

Unix Time is a 32-bit integer counting system, representing the number
of seconds that have occurred since the Unix Epoch---00:00:00 UTC on
January 1^st^, 1970. It takes its name from the early multiuser
operating systems derived from the original Unix project, which began
development at AT&T in 1969. The start date was decided upon by
programmers ostensibly out of convenience as the beginning of this
novel, and ultimately hybrid, time with one foot in the digital, was
still being rooted in the calendric. Unix Time is the first instance of
a purely digital time, and is distributed to other computers via NTP, a
'time-sharing protocol.' The architecture of NTP relies on different
strata of timeservers, all of which themselves receive time from a
master atomic clock. This master clock regulates Chronic time through
the stochastic measurement of the radioactive decay of elementary matter
via a quasi-digital binary process.

With common computers, we take timekeeping for granted. However, there
is a rigorous mechanism that works behind the scenes. The Network Time
Protocol (NTP), for instance, addresses the timekeeping issue using a
hierarchy of servers distributed globally. This includes up to 15
Stratums the routing paths of which are developed to synchronize in
the most optimized manner. This is also enabled by the construction of
a Bellman-Ford shortest-path spanning tree that decreases both latency
and transmission time inconsistencies.

NTP must take into account the locations of both the timeserver and
the client, given variables such as network latency and the physical
constraint of the speed of light. Unix Time is not trivially
spatialised, but relies on organized networks of strictly hierarchical
nodes providing an intermediation between the speed of light and
spatial distribution of nodes. This is undertaken in order to
facilitate the homogenous and globalized temporality of post-Y2K
capitalism handed down from the temporal authority of atomic clocks to
all clients in the network.

With Y2K now decades in the past, another Aeonic Epochalypse is
looming. In 2038, the integer representation of Unix Time will bloat
above the limitations of a 32-bit string, and the procession of
techno-time is set to again panic, overflow, or simply freeze in place.
Although Y2K38 is ostensibly bound to similarly remain virtual(ized),
its appearance on the horizon renders explicit the tradeoffs required to
maintain control of the unilateral, downward flow of temporal authority.
Starting from stochastic clocks, cascading through time server networks,
and from there to individual laptops, PCs, and phones; from the
network's eye view, we humans exist as hapless subjects between virtual
cataclysms brought about by techno-capital.

Chronaissance: The Rise of Networked Temporal Regimes

Having passed through the Aeonic Rubicon of Y2K and into the age of
ascendant cyber-spatio-temporality, the focus of this text now shifts to
the structure and composition of these nascent, virtualized, temporal
regimes. For Greenspan, the development of conceptions of time can only
ever be thought of in relation to a techno-capitalist apparatus, which
itself generates time: the time.

[T]here are mechanisms through which the machinery of
techno-capitalism has the capacity to create the form of time itself,
rather than just operate within time. And that's its most abstract
power [...] if you have the capacity [...] to create a form of
time at this abstract level, then there's a realm of experience or
appearance or manifestation that happens inside that. That's the
ultimate abstract power of techno-modernity.

But the time is only one possible instantiation of a temporal
regime, even one mediated by a digital networking apparatus such as the
post-2000s Internet. Temporal regimes---mechanisms for the distribution
of temporal authority---can be imagined with a variety of different
structural cues, which can be considered within the rubric of two
architectural ethea.

First, there are centralized 'command-and-control' structures for the
authoritarian dictation and imposition of universalized, temporal
constructions. Such structures are common in history, seen in the
imposition of Western temporalities in colonized lands---such as Railway
Time in India---and GMT as canonized by a coalition of Imperial-friendly
states in the late nineteenth-century. This is the architecture of
post-Y2K time: ever-more-precise measurements of sub-seconds cascading
downwards through layers of authority via NTP. Contemporary examples of
these methods include digital and Internet standardizations such as
Google's Spanner, as well as 'spatialized network clocks' such as the
USA's Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite array. The power
centralization in all of these approaches remains tightly concentrated
within institutions of material science, policy production, and
militarism.

The continuing efficacy of these institutions is, however, in crisis.
Post-Y2K capitalist time is fragmenting as the cracks appear in a
previously hegemonic temporal regime. The decidedly non-virtual crisis
of capital in 2008 led to a fundamentally different approach to digital
time production, with decentralization and peer consensus being the
foundational elements informing the nascent architectural designs. This
is the second form of temporal regimentation, and a multitude of novel
timekeeping systems adopting the logic of decentralization are being
built around protocols governing the creation of a canonical ordering of
networked events, recorded in a distributed but shared and verifiable
timeline.

The invention of a peer-to-peer consensus algorithm in applied computer
science points to a problem of industrialization that Greenspan also
discusses: how can clocks, and the production processes associated with
them, be synchronized? In post-Fordian capitalism, this question shifts
again, as capital itself becomes the very means of production: how can
information technology systems determine an order of events (for
instance, transactions of capital)? Decentralized ledgers start here
with a fundamentally paranoid foundation of 'trust minimization':
asymmetric cryptography allows the validity of transactions to be
confirmed by all participants at any time, with little effort required.
The information technology system becomes immanently verifiable without
any kind of transcendent authority.

Rather than marking the passing of seconds, minutes, and hours, these
systems order transactions broadcast from anywhere in the topology of
the network, agreeing upon discrete units of history as a method of
mutual yet competitive time creation and the construction of a shared
historicity. The passing of time is dictated not by institutions in
control of atomic clocks, but via a variety of different protocols
aimed⁠---at least in theory⁠---at decentralizing time-production away from
a single point of control (and failure).

Can we see in these two architectural approaches to techno-capitalist
temporality---⁠command-and-control, and peer-to-peer---respective
tendencies and affinities with Chronos' time of order and precision
measurements, and Aeon as the emergent and immanent temporality of
opportunity and subjective perception? It would appear that, in these
realized networked timekeeping systems, both Chronos and Aeon co-exist
in tension, in some form of spectral superposition, existing in mutual
opposition, yet reciprocal necessity.

We propose that distributed, consensus-based timekeeping
technologies---incorporating the mnemotechnics of what are commonly
known as blockchains, but more fittingly referred to as
timechains---can be apprehended as a realized instantiation of a
generative substrate for the spawning of occurrences in virtual time as
a by-product of their production of Chronic order. This 'ultimate
abstract power,' and the concomitant shift in the temporal apparatuses
at our disposal, has ramifications regarding the increasingly fragmented
era of patchwork modernity that now delimits the preconditions for
experience itself. This fragmentation is not merely a point of analytic
interest, however. In the past, radical movements with temporal
secessionism at the core of their manifestos include the May Fourth
movement in China, French Revolutionary Time, and the rearchitecting of
time-zones by nation states to distance themselves temporally,
economically, and politically from their imperial and colonial
oppressors.

[M]odernity is expressed by and through the then new technologies of
the clock and the calendar and the form of time that they produce. And
I think that you could read the May Fourth Movement as, in some way,
an acknowledgement of that. The May Fourth thinkers who wanted to
embrace this particular mode of the Gregorian calendar, this
particular mode of temporality, thought that this new form of time was
the transcendental condition under which China could be modern. I
don't think they were necessarily particularly Kantian, but they
nevertheless understood that in some way.

Given that distributed ledgers are "an example of technology that
doesn't happen in time, (instead) happen(ing) to time," this text may
shed light on how we may organise within a new temporality,
reconfiguring the delimitations of our conceptual apparatuses in the
process.

Bitcoin: Capitalism's Transcendental Timechain Machine?

Cyberspace's emphasis on temporal precision and accuracy is primarily
due to the intimate interactive dynamics which have developed between
technology and economic systems. In cyberspace, flows of
capital---which are never anything other than digital code---are
continuously subjected to virtual transactions that are sensitive to
minute variations in time. As digital code, time and money have
converged on a single numerical and technical plane, making the
conversion between the two ever more immediate and
immanent.

In the years since Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine was
written, instantiations of peer-to-peer networked computing
architectures have emerged that can be understood as mediating between
real and virtual temporal regimes, such as those of Aeon and Chronos. In
keeping with the timekeeping systems of the past, revelatory and
eschatological legends are projected upon these novel computational
substrates by the faithful and critics alike, as humans strive to
demystify and de-esotericize these nascent complex and headless
technologies.

Much has happened in the reification of techno-materialities since Y2K,
which can be retrospectively linked to, and rationalized by, the
conceptual themes and trajectories explored in Capitalism's
Transcendental Time Machine. The processes of techno-capitalist
time-production, so pointedly characterized by Greenspan, have been
exemplified by a novel technical system bridging the real and virtual,
incorporating Deleuze and Guattari's transcendental materialism at its
very core. In this section, approaches are explored that capture the
material and conceptual implications of the Balkanization of timekeeping
using a theoretical foundation built upon Greenspan's work. A particular
focus will be placed on distributed ledger technologies such as the
timechain. What roles do Chronos and Aeon play in the basic mechanisms
of these emerging timekeeping concepts?

For what is crucial in the convergence of time and money on the
digital plane is not only the immanence and speed of quantitative
conversion, but also the increasing importance of systems and
transactions that are hypersensitive to the date.

On All Hallows' Eve, 2008, a short technical paper was circulated on the
Cypherpunks Mailing List by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto,
describing a novel peer-to-peer protocol design called Bitcoin. The
system's design was intended to implement a network that would enable
users to exchange messages. The network would satisfy its security,
consensus formation, entropy generation, and coin distribution
requirements via an energy-intensive process known as proof-of-work,
also referred to as 'mining,' analogous to gold. Proof-of-work connects
the virtuality of the inside of the network with the materiality of the
outside 'real world' through a lottery-style race to compute 'costly'
and otherwise useless hashes, producing large amounts of heat and
e-waste as by-products.

In this paper, we propose a solution to the double-spending problem
using a peer-to-peer distributed timestamp server to generate
computational proof of the chronological order of
transactions.

{#no1kyg7mymf}

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin whitepaper §3, 2008

Cryptocurrencies are timestamping and event-ordering systems at their
core. In addition to the network architecture and consensus mechanisms,
Bitcoin also employs a noteworthy approach to record-keeping: a
discretized, linear, append-only data structure most fittingly referred
to as a timechain (also referred to as a blockchain). This data
structure, and associated mechanisms to achieve decentralized
network-wide consensus, provide a high degree of assurance that the
network will respect a particular set of transaction orderings, which,
when chained together in a precisely specified sequence, manifest a
canonical historicity.

Bitcoin is a decentralized timestamping server, and the transactions are
simply messages changing the effective balances that each network
participant has access to. These balances are denominated in the native
unit of the system, BTC, and are used to pay transaction fees to miners,
functioning as the de facto currency with which value is redistributed
amongst the users of the network. Satoshi Nakamoto used the word
'timestamp' on fourteen occasions in the Bitcoin whitepaper. Bitcoin is
an abstract timekeeping daemon incarnated through cryptography,
economics, and thermodynamics. After Kant, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Greenspan, we can regard Bitcoin (and other timechain networks employing
peer-to-peer consensus mechanisms) as a new form of time production that
is ever more deeply connected to capitalist processes than anything that
preceded it.

Aeonic events do not occur in time not because they belong to a
transcendent outside, but because they are flat with the single plane
of immanence which collapses the distinction between time and that
which populates it. Equally immanent within any given moment of
Chronos, in Aeon "everything happens at once." Operating with a mode
of distribution that is incommensurable with the order of Chronos,
Aeonic events cannot help but scramble the linear sequence of
extensive time.[

Timechain technology achieves its own temporal synthesis vis-à-vis the
mediation of both a virtual and recorded event by way of a
'schizotemporal duality' extant in such peer-to-peer networks.
Proof-of-work functions as a leaderless consensus mechanism whereby the
recording of virtual events (transactions) towards a ledger takes place,
creating a chronological, numerical order, thereby materializing the
potential of an immanent peer-to-peer network through computation and
energy.

Characterising this biphasic dualism is far from straightforward, but
Greenspan's work relating to cyberspace time provides a sound baseline
from which to make onto-epistemic approaches. Aspects of cyber-clock
time and block-clock time were characterised by Greenspan in
Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine with reference to a more
general conception of "cyberspace time." Greenspan
considered cyberspace time to be inhuman, mechanically simulatory, and
implying quantisation. As cyberspace is nonlocalizable, its regime of
time would be transglobal or post-global---today we might use the term
decentralized. An immanent machinic culture (peer-to-peer),
cyberspace-time would measure nothing outside of its domain of
orientation (hard-bounded). As an abstract yet empirical method of
timekeeping, cyberspace-time would require a larger paradigm shift than
the clock was to the calendar.

The temporal production via Bitcoin's network, proof-of-work, and the
timechain ledger proceeds in two modes. Firstly, a continuous
cyber-clock mode exists where nodes propose transactions in 'real-time.'
After being broadcast and propagated through the network by nodes
relaying transactions to their peers, these 'unconfirmed transactions'
are then held in mining nodes' working memory, typically traditional
RAM. Collectively, this provisional memory is referred to as a network's
'mempool' (memory pool)---itself pure virtual potential---as the
sequence of events to be confirmed and canonized has yet to be
determined. This is an existence outside of time, in deep
contingency.

Secondly, a discrete block-clock mode ticks to the sequential cadence of
confirmed blocks that is strictly under the regime of Chronos. In this
sense, proof-of-work is the immanent timekeeping mechanism, which
leaderlessly transmutes virtual network activity through the
computational power of capital into ordinally sequenced batches of pure
Chronos. The affect of abstract virtualities such as capital itself
leaches into the sequencing and ordering of time itself.

Invoking the neomillennial spirit, the thermodynamic costliness of
proof-of-work might be regarded as a burnt offering for an indifferent
god. In the collapsing of one temporal mode into the other, the
opportunity for arbitrages, slippages, and other temporally adversarial
behaviours emerge. Bitcoin transactions are confirmed by miners
selecting the user-broadcast proposals they wish to include in an
upcoming block, typically prioritized by the size of transaction fees
paid. As exemplified by Greenspan at length in Capitalism's
Transcendental Time Machine (with myriad historical references), in
Bitcoin, the marshals of temporal production apparatuses once again
wield outsized influence over which events are included within the
timechain, and in what order. On the timechain, history will always be
written by the winners, to paraphrase the tired cliché. The timestamps
supplied by Bitcoin miners utilise the Unix Time format mentioned
earlier, as 32-bit unsigned integers commencing in 1970. They are not
vulnerable to the Epochalypse bug in 2038, when 32-bit signed
integers using original Unix Time will overflow its limit. The Bitcoin
network will instead 'run out of time,' ceteris paribus, in 2106.

The cyclically rhythmic and discretized temporality of cryptocurrency
networks---the block-clock mentioned earlier---is hardly something to
set one's watch by. As proof-of-work is a random, lottery-style process
involving a search for a possibility space that iteratively uses
brute-force computational repetition, the time between candidate blocks
that fulfil the network-mandated validity conditions is variable. As a
result, the time between blocks is unpredictable and can differ widely.
The network periodically recalibrates difficulty: the probability of a
given hash satisfying the conditions for block creation, which in turn
serves to adjust the inter-block cadence. In Bitcoin, a median
inter-block cadence of 600 seconds is targeted, but it is entirely
feasible to take twice as long to find a block, with the next block
following just a handful of seconds later.

A mitigation that is taken in Bitcoin to deter attacks employing
deliberately false timestamps---a moving average of the most recent
eleven confirmed blocks' timestamps, known as Median Time Past
(MTP)---also has a side effect of helping make longer-term unions of
block and clock times, such that temporal averaging measures are
routinely used in slow-block networks such as Bitcoin. The
miner-supplied timestamp of the latest block must always be greater than
MTP. Thus, MTP is the monotonically incrementing temporal machinery
facilitating the Chronic production of Bitcoin's timechain.

Conclusion: The Time Is Out of Joint

To conclude this introductory statement on Capitalism's Transcendental
Time Machine, we usher the reader to bathe directly in the shifting
tides of Anna Greenspan's transcendental materialism rather than in this
mere diffraction of speculative extrapolation. Here we recap our attempt
to bring Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine into the 2020s as
Greenspan so clearly and concisely dragged Kant, Descartes, Marx,
Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, and others beyond the threshold of
the third millennium.

Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine's arrow of time begins with
Kant's Copernican Revolution, twisting the Platonic vision of
transcendent eternity through the newfound primacy of time over space
achieved via pure interiority, with the epistemological status of a
synthetic a priori form. Employing Kant's transcendental aesthetic,
Greenspan yields a dualistic sense of time. This sets up a discontinuity
between the insideness of time, which can be measured, and the
experience of duration as the passage of time as an outsideness.

Contorting this through Deleuze's exotic interpretation of Kant's theory
of time, Greenspan invokes the Deleuzean concept of Aeon to flatten the
outside of a somewhat Kairotic or Bergsonian duration into an extensive
plane of immanent intensities. Greenspan then brings this into the era
of computation, digitalia, machinery, and cyberspace-time.

Through an examination of the events incident with the nascence of the
third millennium, Y2K is proffered as a then-present example of an
Aeonic occurrence. Such manifestations of Aeon present themselves as
ruptures, caesuras, and discontinuities in the metaphysical fabric of
time. Y2K unfolded a new temporal regime, a new techn(e)o-millennialism,
with eschatological undertones of apocalyptic prophesies harking back to
the myths and spiritual technologies of Abrahamic faiths. Heralding the
dawn of the age of cyberspace, machinic temporality takes precedence
over the time of clock and calendar from here onwards.

In the orbit of the temporal rupture and virtual catastrophe of Y2K,
Greenspan's account arrived at its "teleological termination point" as
her doctoral dissertation was submitted to the University of
Warwick. Our wish for this supplementary text is to
situate and further develop Greenspan's theories of time in the context
of the present day (2022).

Ultimately, we conclude that the non-event of Y2K paved the way for the
ascendancy of machine time. The rapid proliferation of networked modes
of being---not least the Internet itself---was accompanied by a
concomitant increase in importance in modes of temporality which
facilitate and govern the synchronization of widely distributed
computational apparatuses. These approaches take varying flavors and
architectures, with some protocols resembling the hierarchies of
authority that human societies have taken since time immaterial, and
others that instead opting for the immanent flatness of a peer-to-peer
structure without intermediaries. Arguably the most evocative and
provocative exemplification of the new affordances of contemporary
chronotechnics is what we refer to as timechain technology, the linear
and append-only data structure that gives decentralized networks such as
Bitcoin their vertebral historicity. Timechain-architected distributed
systems---and the mechanisms by which peer consensus in the absence of
trusted authorities is achieved---can be regarded as a process of
transforming virtual network activity, through the computational power
of capital, into ordinally sequenced batches of pure Chronos. The
timechain instantiates a new clock, a new kind of time, far more
removed from that of the diurnal clock and solar calendar than has ever
been witnessed before.

What can we imagine to be the next part of this story? Does this
trajectory end here, with the prophesy of Capitalism's Transcendental
Time Machine seemingly fulfilled? We suppose not. But unlike Bitcoin's
radical mechanism of synthesizing historicities, as mere humans we have
no way of peering beyond the veil and seeing which of our possible
futures may be borne out. This is perhaps the most reassuring matter of
all: that in the age of ultra-precision and Chronic segmentation, the
future is anything but certain. One speculation seems uncontroversial:
that capital, and those entities in the service of it, will continue to
desire, enact, and exploit ever-grander conceptions and architectures of
temporal engineering. For as long as there is value to be redistributed,
there will be incentives to engineer more sophisticated machinery with
which to manipulate the nature and flow of time. Today, whether we
acknowledge it or not, we all live inside Capitalism's Transcendental
Time Machine.

Wassim Z. Alsindi, Max Hampshire, and Paul Seidler
Berlin, Germany and Vienna, Austria
2022

Thanks to Matt Colquhoun and Amy Ireland for helpful comments during
the preparation of this article.

References {#notes}

1: Amy Ireland, "Twitter Post," published May 5, 2018.
https://twitter.com/qdnoktsqfr/status/992961115112882176

2: Anna Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine (London,
CA: Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023), 28.

3: See CCRU, "Who's Pulling Your Strings?" in Writings: 1997--2003
(Falmouth, UK: Urbanomic, 2017): ((::))--:(:)((:)) [17--30].

4: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 39--40.

5: Ibid., 36.

6: Ibid., 57.

7: Ibid., 104.

8: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism
and Schizophrenia, Volume 2, trans., B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 262.

9: Ibid.

10: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 12.

11: Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 262.

12: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 131; Anna
Greenspan, "Interview," in Temporal Secessionism Sourcebook, 65--78
(Plaza Protocol, 2021), 70.
https://www.plazaprotocol.si/assets/other/Temporal_Secessionism_Sourcebook.pdf

13: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendetal Time Machine, 120--121.

14: Ibid., 113.

15: Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of
Information, (London, UK: Serpent's Tail, 2004), 302.

15: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 116.

16: Ibid., 133.

17: Ibid., 109.

18: Olga Hryniuk, "Ouroboros Chronos provides the first high-resilience,
cryptographic time source based on blockchain technology," on
Input|Output, published October 26, 2021.
https://iohk.io/en/blog/posts/2021/10/27/ouroboros-chronos-provides-the-firsthighresilience-cryptographic-time-source-based-on-blockchain/

19: Nascent, "Distributed Temporal Mutations: Consensus-Systems as Novel
Temporal Regimes," in Temporal Secessionism Sourcebook, 79--97 (Plaza
Protocol, 2021), 88.
https://www.plazaprotocol.si/assets/other/Temporal_Secessionism_Sourcebook.pdf

20: Greenspan, "Interview," 77.

21: Ibid., 70.

22: Ibid., 72.

23: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 116.

24: Ibid., 122.

25: Satoshi Nakamoto, "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,"
on Bitcoin, published October 28, 2008.
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

26: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 104.

27: Ibid., 115.

28: Wassim Z. Alsindi, "Bitcointingency: An Economics of Indeterminacy,"
on Weird Economies, published February 14, 2022.
https://weirdeconomies.com/contributions/bitcointingency

29: Greenspan, Capitalism's Transcendental Time Machine, 109.