Commodify

In “Saving Time,” with moss as muse, Jenny Odell deepens her approach and amplifies her pitch. She wrote this book to save her life, she explains, as she struggled to understand why the world came to be organized for profit and not for human or ecological thriving. She interprets how clocks emerged as “tools of domination”: the standardization of time by church bells, then by the nineteenth-century railroads; the colonial mission of using labor as a “civilizing” force; and the ways that time has been progressively commodified and disciplined, from the factories of the early twentieth century to the floors of contemporary Amazon warehouses. A capitalist, Western notion of profit and efficiency has stamped out other, more salutary and less linear measures of time, she argues, as she draws passionately if vaguely on Indigenous conceptions of time. Modernity has pulled us out of synchronization with nature and the needs of our bodies; it has depleted our inner and outer worlds.
–The New York