How precarious labor and time poverty create 'waiting mode' as a systemic trap of modern capitalism
Original framing: “Do you lose your whole day to one appointment? ‘Waiting mode’ may be why” — The Conversation - Global
The modern 'waiting mode' echoes historical time-discipline regimes like plantation slavery’s sundown-to-sundown labor or Fordist assembly lines, where idle moments were policed as theft. 19th-century bourgeois timekeeping (e.g., Benjamin Franklin’s 'time is money') criminalized waiting as laziness, a discourse later weaponized against racialized and migrant workers. The gig economy revives these tactics via algorithmic 'on-call' status, turning waiting into unpaid labor.
The 'waiting mode' epidemic is a symptom of capitalism’s colonization of time, where racialized and gendered workers are forced to monetize their idle moments while elites extract value from their pauses.
Historical parallels to plantation time-discipline and Fordist assembly lines reveal this as a cyclical violence, not an accident of modern life. Indigenous temporalities and Global South practices offer radical alternatives, framing waiting as a space of reciprocity rather than loss. Futures where time is a commons—protected by policy, algorithmic justice, and communal governance—contrasts sharply with the dystopian gig economy, where Hermes’ trick of stolen time becomes permanent. The solution lies not in 'managing' waiting better, but in dismantling the systems that profit from it, redistributing temporal sovereignty as a human right.