Porn Work and Late Capitalism

 

“Every porn scene is a record of people at work,” begins Heather Berg’s Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, a deeply researched book examining the nuances of labor within the adult industry. This declaration echoes the familiar rallying cry that “sex work is work,” but Berg immediately complicates it. “Sometimes it is also something else,” she adds. “Again and again, porn workers told me that they left straight (non-sex-work) jobs for porn because they ‘hated working,’” she explains. It was an escape from the nine-to-five grind. Then again, many porn workers also told her that it was “a job,” “a gig,” one with all the potentials for monotony, as well as exploitation, that come with any job or gig.

 
In her interviews with 81 performers, managers, and crew members across genres—from mainstream to amateur, and in gay, straight, queer, and feminist productions—she found reports of enjoyment and hatred, “pleasure and tedium.” These tensions are familiar to work in general, because the adult industry “is not exceptional,” argues Berg.
 
That said, porn is exceptional for being steeped in societal shame and taboo. It bucks the convention that sex should be “private and free,” as Berg puts it. Porn also appears to fail to conform to dated office-job cliches of staid cubicle farms and sober TPS reports. But, in fact, Berg shows how the experiences of porn workers are revealing of a broader “moment in late capitalism.” Workers of all sorts are “called to ‘do what you love.’” Authenticity “is a work requirement and one that can serve to extract more from workers, for less.” The many tensions in porn work fundamentally reflect the “deep contradictions at the core of (late) capitalism,” she argues. Workers flee the constraints of traditional jobs only to “find precarity on the other side.” People seek pleasure in work, which both makes it more “livable but also gets us to do more of it.”
 
Porn workers have long faced the realities that are now considered indicative of a new economy in which “intimate life is increasingly brought to the market; individual workers, rather than employers or the state, assume the economic and health risks of doing business; and a hypermobile gig economy is eclipsing more stable ways of working.” Having lived for decades in this “new” reality, porn workers have “found ways to hack and reshape its conditions for as long,” she writes. This includes everything from mutual aid for out-of-work performers to whisper networks of insider information around everything from unscrupulous talent agents to the potential side-effects of herbs used for erectile dysfunction. Berg also points to organizing efforts, like the recent formation of the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, which seeks to address industry racism.
 
Berg has a sober view of the limitations of “hacking” and “reshaping” within capitalism. These efforts are “not always transformative—sometimes intervening means ascending hierarchies rather than dismantling them,” she writes. Many of these “strategies chip away at the status quo, even as they sometimes also maintain it.” Berg argues for the importance of acknowledging sex work as work, and improving the conditions of that work as a “politics for the meantime,” while also crucially and radically imagining a post-work reality. The epilogue of the book is titled, simply: “Fuck Jobs.” The phrase was taken from an interview with performer Conner Habib who said, “I don’t like the idea of jobs. The most obscene thing is ‘working for a living.’”
 
Jezebel spoke with Berg by phone about the nexus of labor and pleasure, and what porn reveals about the future of work.
 
JEZEBEL: You write of an interesting tension between the need to recognize sex work as work and many of your interviewees expressing that they chose porn because they “hated working.” Can you explain that seeming contradiction?
 
Heather Berg: This tension can’t really be resolved. What became really important for me in the book was to frame the reality that porn work not only is work but also feels like work, often in its tediums and hierarchies and forms of exploitation. In all of that, it is a job like other jobs.
It’s also true that it is absolutely a way to refuse other, and worse, straight jobs. That is a tension that can’t and shouldn’t be resolved. It became really important for me to frame that tension not as a miscalculation on workers’ parts, but instead as struggle. It’s this thing that so many workers in sex industries and outside of them are grasping at—the hope of doing something that feels more autonomous, that feels more pleasurable. There are these moments in porn where that delivers and other moments where it feels very much like the kind of retail, food service, and office work that people leave behind.
 
J : Your book is full of these tensions. One of them is the subject of authenticity, which can be both an extractive demand and a sustaining part of porn work. Can you explain what you found there?
 
HB : On the one hand, as various labor scholars have been writing for the last twenty years or so, we’re in this moment in which more and more workers are expected to do their jobs not because they need money but because they love them, because they feel like a vocation. For you and I, in journalism and academia, we have a much longer history of that, and there are all sorts of workers for whom that’s not new, that’s not a product of neoliberalism. But that’s always been the case for various forms of service work, domestic labor, teaching, and certainly for unpaid care work in the home. Those expectations around the affect that you bring to work are being democratized where all workers are expected to perform authenticity.
 
That’s more intense sometimes in sex industries because the weight is so far in the direction of disproving anti-sex worker ideas that people only do sexual labor because they desperately need the money, and also disproving the idea that the sex that happens on-set or for in-person work with a client is devoid of any kind of human connection. One response to that, particularly among feminists and queer pornographers, has been to really highlight the authenticity at work in their scenes and also to demand that performance of performers. It’s a PR strategy, but it’s also a labor market strategy, because performing authenticity makes it harder to ask about pay, it makes it harder to say you need to go home at the end of the day. That can create really significant burdens for workers. In the parts of the industry in which authenticity is most prized and also most celebrated by folks on the outside, pay tends to be lowest. That’s a classic dynamic—anyone who has worked for nonprofits or independent bookstores knows what that feels like.
 
On the other hand, authenticity sometimes matters to workers, which is why so many of us come to these industries in the first place. For autonomy and also for a sense that you can bring some part of yourself to the job, that the job doesn’t feel alienating in the classic sense. I want to take that seriously too. These glimpses of connection between costars and pleasure on the job, they’re not just disciplining, they don’t just get more work out of people but they can also be a foundation for organizing and community building. On the individual level these moments of pleasure can make the workday less bad for people and that matters. It’s both a thing that gets them to work more and something that lets us leave a little bit less of ourselves at work.
 
J : In the book, you hit at the idea that for viewers the demand for authenticity might arise from a discomfort with sex work, with commercialized sex. And that this wish might arise from a place of shame.
 

HB : Absolutely. Anti-porn feminists have engineered that shame and consumers absorb it in all sorts of ways, the idea that having sex for money is bad and that paying people to have sex for money is maybe even worse. Management’s response to that is to offer up to consumers products that make them feel ethically safe. There’s this unholy collaboration between anti-porn feminists and managers, who agree that money is a bad reason to have sex and who together coordinate, without ever talking to each other, to in some ways compel workers to pretend to work for some other reason.
 
On fan chat boards you can see all sorts of discussion around people who are “dead in the eyes” or don’t seem to be into it, or who at conventions don’t seem to really like their fans. That’s primarily mainstream fans who are demanding a ton of unpaid labor from performers, either chatting with them on OnlyFans or Twitter. On the other hand, you have self-identified queer and feminist consumers who seek out this content, which in some ways does have better working conditions, but in others is much like buying fair trade coffee. It’s more for the consumer’s ego maintenance than anything.
 
J : Similarly, how does pleasure play into work in the porn context?
 
HB : Often the narrative on the part of labor scholarship is that anytime we feel pleasure at work—whether it’s the Google slide or Casual Fridays, these kinds of cheap gestures toward worker pleasure—it’s only a transparent effort to try to get people to work more. Sometimes that’s true. Anyone who has been in a workplace like that knows how thin it can feel. At the same time, again, I don’t view any of these processes as only top-down, as only management figuring out better ways to exploit workers and workers passively accepting that.
 
The counter to that, which exists not in contradiction but alongside it, is that pleasure can make not just work but also life more livable. That matters for people. That certainly can get folks to work more for less, but there is something about life under late-capitalism that is profoundly pleasureless and un-erotic, and that expects workers to grind themselves into dust. In that context there can be something really resistive about claiming pleasure in your work day.

 
J : You write about the blurred line in porn, increasingly, between life and work.
 
HB : Another tension, and the book is full of them, is that folks often come to porn work with the promise of more money and fewer hours, a job that pays in five or six hours what they used to make in a week. That’s really crucial for folks dealing with disability or chronic illness, who have caretaking responsibilities, who are artists who need time to pursue other things, and also, I always want to add, just for people who want to work less who don’t necessarily have some lofty reason but want more time for the rest of their life. Sometimes porn delivers that, but it does so, like a lot of creative work and gig work, at the cost of any boundary between your job and your life. That offers some real benefits to people insofar as much of the work can be done at home. As people have found during the pandemic, there’s some pleasure in that for some people. All of that’s true and at the same time it can be really hard never to be able to clock out. Workers talked about how they navigated these demands where, unless you have really strict boundaries around your time, you’re never really on vacation.
 
You’re always uploading content to your OnlyFans or updating your subscription site or quoting fans on social media. People have a lot of smart hacks around that, you can automate a lot, but it can feel difficult to have any sense of separation. But that’s not unique to porn, that’s something all sorts of freelancers identify. I’m not framing that only as something that takes more from people, there are real benefits. It’s not just a neoliberal managerial perspective to say that no one wants to go into an office—that’s actually true for people and I don’t think we should pretend it’s not.
 
J : What are some of the issues with looking toward the state for support and protection?
 
HB : The primary consideration here is that employment law is set up to force a choice upon workers in a really artificial way born out of a very brutal compromise between industrial labor organizers and capital during the New Deal era. It forced this choice between autonomy and some semblance of protection. That is the origin of the distinction between independent contractors and employees and the longstanding rule that it’s only people designated as employees who are nominally protected at work. In order to get access to that protection, whether it’s around anti-discrimination law or occupational health or protections from wage theft or access to social security, you have to give up control over your labor, which is why some people have always refused that.
 
At the same time, it’s also true that even for people designated as employees, those protections are slimmer and slimmer by the day and they’ve been so eroded under neoliberalism. Even at their height, they were only designed to benefit the white male industrial worker, so they always left out domestic workers, migrant workers, racialized workers, gendered workers, and sex workers and other folks in the informal economy. You give up a lot in name in not working under a boss, but as mainstream workers have learned over the course of the pandemic, plenty of formal employers can put you at risk with no liability, can lower your pay with no responsibilities to you. The risks of relying entirely on state protection are two fold. One, that it forces this choice and, two, the crumbs you’re given on the other side are so paltry.

 
J : What is it about porn work itself that adds an additional challenging dimension to reliance on the state?
 
HB :  Porn workers, like other sex workers, have had this longstanding antagonistic relationship to the state because the state regards sex workers primarily as unruly bodies to be controlled rather than workers who need workplace protection. There’s this tricky dynamic where workers often ally with management to resist state interference in ways that would look very strange to a labor organizer outside sex industries. The reality is many workers make this calculation that they would rather have no state intervention than state intervention that treats them solely as vectors of disease.
 
You can see that in the state’s incredibly single-minded focus on STI transmission over and above all of workers’ mundane health concerns—but also concerns around discrimination and wage theft—that, if you ask workers, they’re much more concerned with. Legislators are just obsessed with the idea of rampant HIV transmission on porn sets, for example. Workers are right that the state’s interventions there will be violent ones rather than pro-worker ones. On the other hand, it does create this dynamic that looks like libertarianism from the outside, but I don’t think is, in which you have workers with no ability to appeal to state response when their legal rights are violated.
 
So much state policy regarding porn work has actively made conditions worse. One example of that is FOSTA-SESTA, which have not only materially made it harder for workers to work, but also harder to work independently without giving some of their pay to management, whether platforms or individuals. It’s also made it harder to organize.
 
J : Absent state assistance, you write about collective and individual struggles in porn work. What approaches have been most effective?
 
HB : For a time, porn workers had really tight networks of mutual care and community and had figured out ways to take care of each other when the state and employers had failed to do so. That looks like information sharing, daily acts of mutual aid, teaching each other how to do the work in ways that are less extractive, whether that be tips for performing in ways that protect your body or letting people know how to get out of work with a bad agent.
 
Now, with the overwhelming transition to digital, some of the in-person network has dispersed, but much of that has moved online. In the early days of the pandemic, so many people were figuring out how to make ends meet and sites like OnlyFans were oversaturated. Even then, porn workers were sharing information with either sex workers who had primarily done in-person work before or folks who were newly out of work in their straight jobs and trying to make some money on digital sex work hustles. Seasoned sex workers were sharing information on how to do it safely, how to make money. It was such generosity, even amidst the labor market compression and scarcity, in ways I don’t think you would find in many jobs.
 
J : Recently, we’ve seen the resurgence of an anti-porn movement targeting tube sites. What do you make of this in the “porn work” context?
 
HB : Part of the problem is that anti-porn campaigners, even those who say they’re trying to protect workers, don’t talk to them. They have not just inaccurate but also outdated ideas about how any of this works. If anti-porn campaigners had been paying attention fifteen years ago when workers were starting to organize against tube sites, there might have been some possibility of making themselves useful, if what they actually wanted to do was make it harder for tube sites to steal content and allow fans to consume sex workers’ labor without paying them. But we’re not there and, of course, that’s never been their genuine aim.
 
In this moment, tube sites are so ubiquitous and sex workers are so crafty, they have spent years cultivating strategies that make tube sites work for them. Now, the primary effect of anti-porn intervention into tube sites specifically is to shut down all of those hacks that workers have already devised. That’s one issue, the other is the implications this has for legal precedent. Historically, struggles over free sexual speech have often focused on studios and traditional managers, but as more and more sex workers have access to class mobility within the industry through producing their own content, then those assaults on sexual speech have a direct impact not on some big studio head, but on sex workers’ own ability to make a living.
 
J : What lessons can be drawn from porn workers’ navigation of these tricky tensions around work, life, authenticity, and pleasure?
 
HB : First, porn workers and sex workers more broadly have already been living in the conditions that are just now hitting other kinds of workers in straight industries. The kinds of trends that labor scholars and activists are observing in other fields as a recent crisis have been par for the course for sex workers since the inception of the work. That is, again, these blurred lines around life and work, and this total lack of state support for worker safety. It’s also blurred boundaries around class—we don’t have one tidy community of workers and another of management that can be easily organized against. Also, this double bind where we want work that feels pleasurable, but then that pleasure can be used against us.
 
All of these conditions—especially these recent concerns that civilians are just figuring out, like, “Oh, it’s a problem for Uber drivers that the state doesn’t see them as workers”—sex workers have been figuring how to survive in spite of that forever. Straight workers can learn so much from those strategies.
 
In terms of what that looks like around surviving state violence and neglect, porn workers’ strategies around mutual aid, information sharing, and subtle ways of intervening in their conditions that don’t rely on the protection or permission of the state are so inspiring. My two cents are that other gig workers would be served in not asking for recognition and permission, and taking what they want in less direct ways. In terms of navigating the blurry boundaries between life and work, it’s less that porn workers have figured out some secret, because it’s something folks talk about struggling with all the time, and more that they just remind us that life isn’t better when you have that clear boundary, necessarily. So many people leave jobs that they did clock into, that weren’t at home, that had nothing to do with their own desires, and those jobs were awful too. The main lesson is that work sucks and nobody wants to have a boss.
 
This economy is set up to punish people who try to escape that. You can’t have total autonomy and also security under capitalism. That’s not a porn problem that’s a capitalism problem. Porn workers reveal the impossibility of that and are also really smart about how to survive in the meantime.
 
'Pleasure and Tedium': What Porn Reveals About the Future of Work. By Tracy Clark-Flory.  Jezebel, June 10, 2021.

Porn Work, Gig Economy, and the Politics of New Labor. Heather Berg writes about sex, work, and social struggle. She is the author of Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism and assistant professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Labor Solidarity Project, April 16, 2021. 

Every porn scene is a record of people at work. But on-camera labor is only the beginning of the story. Heather Berg’s new book, Porn Work, takes readers behind the scenes to explore what porn performers think of their work and how they intervene to hack it. Blending extensive fieldwork with feminist and anti-work theorizing, Porn Work details entrepreneurial labor on the boundaries between pleasure and tedium. Rejecting any notion that sex work is an aberration from straight work, it reveals porn workers' creative strategies as prophetic of a working landscape in crisis. In the end, it looks at what porn has to tell us about what's wrong with work, and what it might look like to build something better.
 Porn Work : Sex, Labor and Late Capitalism . Connor Habib, Cassandra Troyan, moses moon, Heather Berg,  moderator is Kathi Weeks

Red May TV , May 16, 2021. 

Hey, everyone, Jessie here! As a sex worker and founder and managing editor of Peepshow Media (a multimedia online magazine featuring news and stories from the sex industry), one of the most common questions I see around the discussion of porn is: How can I consume porn ethically?
If you have been paying attention to what has been happening in the porn industry — even a little bit — you have probably noticed that being a porn performer isn’t without its complications.
 
While there are a handful of high-profile porn stars who seem to live a life of excitement and luxury, most performers are making more moderate incomes, and many are struggling just to make it in an industry that has become oversaturated by the rise of independent content creation platforms like OnlyFans. Furthermore, the pandemic has pushed in-person sex workers — like escorts and strippers — as well as nonprofessionals, to online sex work.
 
In addition to the oversaturation of the porn market, there have been many public allegations of on-set assault that have pushed performers to call for a #metoo moment within the industry, not to mention a global pandemic that has halted porn production and made it unsafe for performers to collaborate.
 
And if that wasn’t bad enough, banking discrimination has meant that many porn performers have had trouble accessing their money and in many cases, have had their accounts shut down. And none of this even takes into account the considerable social stigma that porn performers regularly face, including anti-pornography feminism that espouses the inherent harm of all forms of sex work, including pornography.
 
And yet, porn performers provide a valuable service that I would venture to guess most of the readers of this article have at some time indulged in. A thoughtful consumer who wants to make sure not to contribute to any of these harms probably asks themselves a seemingly simple question: How the hell do I ethically consume porn? To dive into this, I turned to three experts: Dr. Heather Berg and porn performers Lotus Lain and Lena Paul.

Berg, assistant professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, points out that when the question is aimed at the performers themselves, it creates a lot of unpaid work for performers (thus being antithetical to the aim). She says, “There is a way that the hope to consume ethically ends up requiring a lot more labor of performers to convince consumers that they are doing the right thing.”

 
Lain, an adult performer and activist within the adult industry says that it is complicated, in part, because ethics are subjective: “My feelings are, everyone has a different set of ethics.”
 
What’s more, consumption — in porn or any other industry — is complicated. “I wish that there was one convenient answer to this question,” says porn star Paul. “It is such a simple question, but the more we unpack it, the more complicated it becomes.
 
While there is no simple answer to this question, here are a few things to consider when you think about consuming porn more ethically in the future:
 
Unfortunately, porn is not ethical just because it is branded so or looks like it was ethically produced.
 
In her interviews of porn performers for her book, Berg says that they quite often expressed their frustration with working for production companies that were branded ethical. “Performers had a lot of critiques of feminist and queer porn,” she says. “It often requires extra and unpaid work to communicate ethics to consumers.”
 
This often includes pre- or post-interviews wherein performers express their pleasure in the scene or demands other signaling that is ultimately not for the benefit of the performers. The purpose is to make consumers feel better about their consumption. “The companies want aesthetic and postproduction add-ons to convey to the customers that it is ethically safe.”
 
Lain points out that scenes with the sort of signaling that make the consumers feel good because they either are soft-core or make an aesthetic show of consent and ethics don’t necessarily feel that way to the performers themselves. She says that even though the scene may feel good to watch, “the actors could have been underpaid, the location could have been dangerous, etc.”
 
In looking for studio porn, both Lain and Paul suggest that consuming your favorite star’s performances alone won’t give you insight into how they feel. After all, they are performers.
 
Instead, customers can do their research by following performers online and paying attention to how they talk about their work experiences. Lain suggests, “Twitter is the best way of finding out how performers feel about working for particular companies.” She asserts that looking at what people who are not currently a company’s favorite say will give you a more accurate picture. “Find out what former favorites feel about the company when they are no longer favorites,” she says.
 
Paul says that if your concern as a consumer is mitigating suffering of individual performers and you want to make sure that the performers are not being mistreated, following them and being positively engaged are also good ways to know. She says, “The biggest way to have ethical consumption is to have a degree of interaction online, be it with a studio model or independent content creator." It is important to remember, however, that contacting and interacting with your favorite performers on their work social media accounts requires labor on their part and you should be compensating them for their time — even when your interactions are not sexual in nature.
 
Another advantage of following your favorite performers on social media is that they will show you where they prefer to sell their content. Some platforms take larger cuts than others, and Berg suggests that everyone ought to be “paying attention to platforms’ own rate structures and following your favorite performers to the platforms they prefer.” Or, in other words, Berg says, “Subscribe to platforms that give performers higher cuts.”
 
Paul agrees that trying to pay the models you follow as directly as possible is best for performers. She reminds us, “As performers, we receive no royalties from studio porn.” She adds, “The odds of your money going to a model if you buy porn directly from them are orders of magnitude higher.”
 
Lain echoes Paul’s sentiments: “Obviously the most ethical way is to buy it from the performers.” She is quick to add, “Pay them if you want to see certain things. Don’t hassle them on their Instagram comments.” Many performers are more than happy to create custom content when they are being paid for it. They do not, however, appreciate being told what to do on social media by folks who aren’t paying them.
 

In terms of paying for your porn, Berg also points out that if you have seen a performer's work that you really like on one of the big tube sites, tipping them encourages them to continue to create what you like. She says, “If you are pirating, most performers have a Cash App. You can find that and pay them directly for content you’ve already seen.”
 
One last thing to remember is that not all of your porn budget needs to be spent on visual prerecorded videos. In Lain’s words: “There are many different ways to be titillated.” She suggests considering interacting with your favorite performers on pay sites like NiteFlirt and SextPanther, where you can chat, text, send pics, and create custom fantasies.
 
If you have reasons that make it impossible to pay for your porn, there are other ways you can be conscious about supporting the performers you admire. On Pornhub, for example, you can make sure you are only giving your traffic to verified users (they will have a blue check by their name) so that they get kickbacks for your view. If you enjoy webcam performances, you can positively contribute to the room by engaging the performer in conversations that help to keep the spirits up in the room and encouraging others to tip and help the model reach her goals. And you can also help to promote the work of your favorite models on social media by retweeting and sharing their promo tweets if and when applicable.
 
Not All Porn Is Ethical — Here's What You Should Know. By Jessie Sage. Buzzfeed, March 21, 2021.

“Every porn scene is a record of people at work.” So begins Porn Work: Sex, Labor, and Late Capitalism, a new book by the Washington University feminist studies scholar Heather Berg. It’s an arresting statement, at once self-evident yet also likely to confound many readers. How many people who do not make porn have thought much about the labor conditions of those who do?
 
Apparently, not many scholars. Porn scholarship, Berg writes, focuses overwhelmingly on “issues of representation and consumption,” on porn as a text rather than as a workplace. “Labor scholarship, on the other hand, has strenuously avoided critical engagement with porn and other sex work,” she continues. Thus, Berg has written a book that seeks to unite these two disparate scholarly fields. The result is a breathtaking work of scholarship — the product of 81 interviews Berg conducted with performers, managers, and crew members, the interviewees ranging in age from 21 to 70 — that challenges preconceived notions and tidy assumptions on every page.
 
Intended less as a traditional ethnography and more as an effort to “bring interviewees’ expertise to bear on porn, sex, and work,” Porn Work builds on deep theoretical engagement and nearly a decade of fieldwork. Porn as work, Berg ultimately argues, exemplifies the deep contradictions of late capitalism but also models a work landscape unlike most others. Contrary to the traditional Marxist understandings of class position, for instance, porn workers often move between various positions within the industry, from performer to director to producer and back again, often doing so rapidly and sometimes simultaneously. Porn workers have also been navigating precarious workplaces for longer than laborers in many other industries and job sectors, and thus they have long grown adept at thwarting management and exercising power in the workplace in ways that are usually ignored by outsiders committed to imagining porn workers as powerless and pitiable.
 
“Everybody gets used in one way or another,” Dominic Ace, a veteran porn publicist, tells Berg in one interview. “Whether you’re a secretary, a janitor, whatever. The difference here is it’s sex.” Perhaps Berg’s most important intervention is that she takes that last sentence seriously. In many ways, porn work is unexceptional, and that’s because porn work — like all work — is exploitative and often sucks. But the presence of sex “brings both particular vulnerabilities and resources — intensified state violence and stigma on the one hand and the potential for pleasureful refusal on the other.” Taking pleasure seriously makes it impossible to treat porn as just a job. “I get to have and give pleasure every day for my job,” the performer-activist Conner Habib explains to Berg. “Is that not in some ways a great potential to sidestep ‘I get to give and experience misery’?”
 

 
It’s striking that so many people’s perceptions of porn are a decade or two out of date; in fact, as Berg claims, “[t]he porn industry as it has been traditionally understood does not exist.” While many outsiders imagine a conventional media landscape with powerful producers and established studios and a small number of recognizable “stars,” the 2008 financial crisis, combined with the proliferation of piracy and widespread access to cheap production technology, has resulted in a “glutted labor market but one that is also open to a range of workers’ creative interventions.” For many porn workers, the 2010s meant less stability, scarcer profits, a more diffuse performer community, and greater competition for fewer gigs. However, it also meant the advent of direct-to-consumer and “interactive” content — often filmed from home and advertised for free via social media — which has disrupted managers’ power and eased entry into porn for more workers from more diverse backgrounds.
 
Berg begins by describing the “shop floor” for porn performers who work under a director and a producer. The porn workday starts with workers negotiating the terms of their labor — the details and boundaries of what they will do. (“No interviewees reported being forced to perform scenes they had initially refused,” Berg notes. It’s expensive when performers walk off set, and “with so many willing workers, there is little reason to cajole unwilling ones.”) Next comes STI test authentication, paperwork, hair and makeup, and other body preparations (for instances, douches, enemas, other medicines). Then, generally, waiting. Long days and delays are common on porn sets — a source of anxiety or anger for some performers who just want to go home, but also sometimes an opportunity for community-building and side-hustling.
 
“It need not reinforce the conservative idea of a neat distinction between porn sex and ‘real’ sex to acknowledge that most sex on set is labor intensive in ways off-set sex generally is not,” Berg writes. Performers need to convincingly manufacture sexual chemistry with a scene partner even if they’re not attracted to them; they need to avoid reaching orgasm or ejaculation too soon; they need to pause often for difficult still shots. And they need to learn how to position their bodies to reduce discomfort, chafing, and repetitive stress injuries. All of this is work, and all of it takes skill.
 
There is also the invisible labor that happens off-camera and off-set, which often destroys any boundary between work and life. Porn workers (like other gig workers) need to constantly market themselves, which nowadays means cultivating a consistent social media presence — a time-consuming proposition, and, when it involves interactions with fans, one that requires heavy emotional labor. Porn workers often spend hundreds of dollars a month and countless hours maintaining their appearances — labor that falls more heavily on “workers who fall outside the white, cis-feminine norm.” Many now engage in “satellite work,” such as erotic dance, webcamming, and escort work, which can provide vital income but is sometimes seen as lower on the “whorearchy” of sex work. Some porn workers also take on “straight work,” meaning work outside of the sex work sector, though their visibility often renders them vulnerable to harassment or firing from which they enjoy no legal protection.
 
The varying rates porn workers are paid are highly secretive, but performers are often aware of disparities in compensation. White, cisgender, and thin performers generally have an easier time finding work on high-budget studio productions that pay well; the few performers of color or trans performers who do get cast in such features often encounter lower pay and demeaning fetishization. Some non-Black performers refuse to do “interracial” scenes, or even charger higher rates for them. (Some agents, meanwhile, told Berg that “they disallow ‘interracial’ work in order to maintain what they see is a valuable fan market of racist consumers.”) Women (cis and trans) who perform in penile-vaginal or penile-anal intercourse scenes make an average of $800 to $1,000, while cis men make $300 to $600 for the same scenes (though they make $800 to $1,200 for gay scenes). Blow jobs and solo masturbation pay less. Performers in so-called “feminist” productions (supposedly produced in an equitable manner, though this is much contested) generally make flat fees, usually $200 to $600 per scene. Some lower-end director-producers told Berg they don’t need to pay male performers at all, as amateur men would jump at the chance to have free sex with a “porn star.” Of course, this sort of arrangement undercuts the labor market for those who depend on the industry for their incomes and other means of security. “Sex work tourism can be a kind of scabbing,” Berg concludes.
 
The sex itself is, predictably, the part of porn work on which most critics and scholars focus their attention. Berg does likewise, though in an innovative way, devoting an entire chapter to parsing porn workers’ feelings about “pleasure [a]s a working condition.” Sometimes porn workers find sex on set to be physically uncomfortable; others find porn sex not too rough but rather too tame, perhaps because directors want to “appeal to an imagined feminist audience.” Some porn workers withhold full effort from a scene or seek to maintain an emotional detachment from the work, but many do not — either because a lackluster performance could affect their ability to get future work or because they find genuine pleasure and authentic fulfilment in the work. Invocations of “pleasure” and “authenticity” can be a means of managerial manipulation, a way for bosses to coerce workers into doing free or informal labor. But the porn workers Berg spoke to demand that their authenticity and pleasure be taken seriously. “In sex work as elsewhere,” Berg explains, pleasure can make “work feel less like work. And authenticity claims can be a means of refusing anti-sex-worker stigma.”
 
Porn Work thrives on such ambiguities and contradictions. Many of Berg’s interviewees discussed porn as a means of real self-expression even as they critiqued the obsession outsiders have with whether porn is “authentic” or not. One performer pushed back on the notion that porn is “work” because the term connotes suffering, but in the same interview acknowledged that there was plenty of suffering in porn. It’s difficult, Berg admits, to discuss the authentic pleasure some workers find in porn while also recognizing that, for most workers, porn is “a way to make do and get by.” Porn is work, then, but it’s not merely work. Ultimately, Berg concludes, porn workers’ “refusal to resolve this tension is instructive.” Taking pleasure seriously is vital to recognizing the ways that workers struggle, win autonomy, and “take something from porn performance that exceeds what racial capitalism intends.”
 
As our rapidly warming, pandemic-ravaged society descends ever deeper into precarity and despair, many critics, scholars, activists, and artists are in the midst of a major reevaluation the ethics of work itself, and Porn Work must be understood as part of this broader trend. Berg credits many sex worker theorists for creating new ways of thinking about pleasureful subversions of capitalism; femi babylon, for instance, has urged thinkers to “move beyond ‘sex work is work’” to “‘sex work is (anti)work.’” Outside of this context, journalist Sarah Jaffe has just published a deeply reported manifesto titled Work Won’t Love You Back, while fellow reporter Anne Helen Petersen titled the epilogue her recent book about burnout “Burn It Down.” Historians like Louis Hyman have excavated the origins of the workplace as gig-ified hellscape, and anthropologists like the late David Graeber have decried the resulting rise in “bullshit jobs.” The legal scholar Daniel Markovits has recently argued that even elite white-collar workers are increasingly miserable.

 
Berg’s argument that porn work is different is persuasive, but such an argument can also be overstated. Work sucks, and workers across sectors and across borders are increasingly recognizing the need for radical change. Solidarity depends on such widespread and mutual recognition. In this context, perhaps Berg’s most significant contribution to the discourse is to highlight the creative ways that porn workers have found to resist work.
 
 
Porn workers engage in struggles for control and respect in myriad ways, which Berg details with laudable attention and care. She writes that she began her research looking for traditional forms of worker organizing, like union drives or lobbying efforts, and, though she found plenty of that, her interviewees ultimately convinced her that these do not represent their strongest means of resistance.
 
The Screen Actors Guild excluded porn workers in 1974, a policy that has remained unchanged and has been followed by pretty much all of the mainstream labor movement. And though there have been some attempts at traditional union organizing, workers told Berg that the more impactful advocacy efforts were “nontraditional forms of organizing,” such as peer education and building support systems. These have been vital as new porn workers learn to negotiate terms and deal with untrustworthy managers. (“It was not uncommon for non-sex-worker interviewees to suggest that sex workers are not terribly bright,” Berg writes, “only to later describe a situation in which sex workers had outsmarted them.”) Mutual aid networks allow porn workers to assist each other in securing housing and transitioning into straight jobs. Shortly before Porn Work went to press, for instance, organizers founded the BIPOC Adult Industry Collective, which engages in a range of mutual aid work — from skill shares and virtual workshops to transferring money directly to porn workers in need.
 
Porn workers’ struggles for autonomy and respect take place in other areas, as well. For instance, many resist one-dimensional stereotypes with irreverent social media presences. The “best thing about twitter,” Vex Ashley tweeted in 2018, is that “in 1999 you could keep the dream alive your favourite porn girls were perma-horny, passive, and amenable, but now it’s unavoidable public record that we’re all basically acerbic, snarky communists who do not stand for bullshit.”
 
The rise of social media, as well as the affordability of audiovisual recording equipment, has also allowed many performers (especially those with large fan followings) to produce their own scenes. This can enable them to circumvent industry racism or niche casting, often employing other workers in the process. Many more use technology like OnlyFans to work on their own, which has rendered the entire industry less dependent on large production companies. This democratized access to the means of production has not, however, created a world with no bosses. Personalized services still frequently require a middleman; some webcam platforms take massive cuts of performers’ profits, and (as in the world of straight work) they rely on “algorithmic management.”
 
State surveillance can further limit the emancipatory potential of DIY and direct-to-consumer porn. In 2018, Congress passed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) and Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) legislative package, which was pitched as a way to create legal consequences for websites that facilitate sex trafficking. The law’s sponsors had framed it as protecting sex workers, but sex workers themselves were shut out of the drafting process, their insights and objections ignored. As a result, SESTA/FOSTA have made sex workers less safe, shuttering websites through which they could screen potential clients, forcing many onto the streets, and rendering them more vulnerable to the possible violence of clients, pimps, the police, and — ironically and tragically — traffickers.
 
In the world of porn, workers’ distance from fans insulated them to some extent from the negative impacts of SESTA/FOSTA, but the laws’ “deliberately broad definition of trafficking” led numerous sites to shut out sex workers, including video conferencing and payment processing technology. “Google Drive erased performers’ video files without warning,” Berg recounts, “in some cases destroying workers’ only scene files.” As with sex work more broadly, this has led many porn workers back to conventional porn managers.
 
In the months leading up to the passage of SESTA/FOSTA, sex workers began to organize against the legislation, and in the aftermath of its passage many began providing education for workers rendered vulnerable by the laws and media training for workers to try to shift the dominant media narrative. More broadly, porn workers have long had to engage in anti-stigma activism (especially because the major producers that once spearheaded free-speech lawsuits now “have a fraction of the power and wealth they once did”). Many porn workers are forced to fight against discriminatory landlords, stigmatizing or disrespectful medical care, and even exclusion from basic banking privileges.
 
The porn workers Berg interviewed “overwhelmingly” distrusted the state to remedy these vulnerabilities, in large part because their primary interactions with the state come in the form of surveillance. Porn workers want occupational health protections, but policy-makers tend to focus monomaniacally on two areas where workers largely just want autonomy: HIV prevention protocols and mandatory condom laws. In California, many legislators fought for a ballot initiative that would have allowed private citizens to sue “producers” who violate the law by failing to use condoms during filming; according to porn workers, this would have left many performer-producers vulnerable to harassment and even given stalkers access to their personal information. In the face of such unresponsive regulators, what porn workers want, Berg argues, “is freedom from both state and employer control.”
 
This desire for freedom can be confused with run-of-the-mill libertarianism (a philosophy commonly attributed to the porn industry), but to Berg’s credit she refuses to flatten the complexity of porn workers’ critique. Their opposition is not so much to state intervention as to invasive or carceral state intervention. It is no contradiction for vulnerable workers to simultaneously reject state surveillance yet also decry state neglect. Once again, porn workers’ critique has relevance far beyond porn, or sex work more broadly. In so many sectors of work, we are well past the point at which the liberal state — or liberalism itself — could save us. Only an insistence on a radical redistribution of wealth, power, and control could allow workers to liberate themselves from bleak and broken work. And only continuous struggle will result in this radical break.
 
 

 
What might this look like? One possibility can be found in the title Berg chose for her epilogue: “Fuck Jobs.”
 
While liberals may promote reforms that would classify porn workers as “employees” and thus eligible for certain wage and health protections, Berg argues that this would “represent a backward-looking attempt to bring a few more workers into a broken category (and one that, again, some workers do not want).” Porn work does not track easily on the law’s artificial boundary between private life and public work, and, in any case, “there is no going back — the conditions that created limited security for a privileged subset of mostly white, male workers in the mid-twentieth century are gone.”
 
Instead of fighting for a less miserable system of work, Berg and many of her interviewees adopt a resolutely anti-work perspective. There is something genuinely disruptive about getting paid to exchange pleasure, Berg writes. “It is an exchange that beckons a postwork utopia in which guaranteed annual incomes replace the compulsion to work and pleasure seeking takes the place of drudgery.”
 
Berg’s three-page-long epilogue does not comprehensively lay out what precisely this utopia might look like, or how exactly we might get to it, but this was not her project. Rather, canny readers can glean from her work “vital clues about surviving this moment of profound capitalist crisis,” she writes. Excluded from legal protections and the larger labor movement, porn workers have had to be creative, to establish their own education and support systems, to buy their own means of production and employ their friends, to take pleasure seriously. Berg’s interviewees may have found traditional union organizing to be less helpful than other means of mutual aid and resistance, yet readers should not conclude from this that they should disregard unions; indeed, the future of the planet may well depend on passage of legislation like the PRO Act and the revitalization of the labor movement. Nonetheless, labor organizers and political activists should take heed of porn workers’ creativity and success in disrupting the paradigm of work as misery or monotony.
 
Porn work necessarily “reimagines porn, and work,” Berg concludes. And then, quoting performer-activist Conner Habib: “Okay, fuck jobs.”
 
Sex Work as (Anti)Work: On Heather Berg’s “Porn Work” By Scott W. Stern. Los Angeles Review of Books, June 7, 2021. 

Tyranny of Time

 

On a damp and cloudy afternoon on February 15, 1894, a man walked through Greenwich Park in East London. His name was Martial Bourdin — French, 26 years of age, with slicked-back dark hair and a mustache. He wandered up the zigzagged path that led to the Royal Observatory, which just 10 years earlier had been established as the symbolic and scientific center of globally standardized clock time — Greenwich Mean Time — as well as the British Empire. In his left hand, Bourdin carried a bomb: a brown paper bag containing a metal case full of explosives. As he got closer to his target, he primed it with a bottle of sulfuric acid. But then, as he stood facing the Observatory, it exploded in his hands.
 
The detonation was sharp enough to get the attention of two workers inside. Rushing out, they saw a park warden and some schoolboys running towards a crouched figure on the ground. Bourdin was moaning and screaming, his legs were shattered, one arm was blown off and there was a hole in his stomach. He said nothing about his identity or his motives as he was carried to a nearby hospital, where he died 30 minutes later.
 
Nobody knows for sure what Bourdin was trying to do that day. An investigation showed that he was closely linked to anarchist groups. Numerous theories circulated: that he was testing the bomb in the park for a future attack on a public place or was delivering it to someone else. But because he had primed the device and was walking the zigzagged path, many people — including the Home Office explosives expert, Vivian Dering Majendie, and the novelist Joseph Conrad, who loosely based his book “The Secret Agent” on the event — suspected that Bourdin had wanted to attack the Observatory.
 
Bourdin, so the story goes, was trying to bomb clock time, as a symbolic revolutionary act or under a naive pretense that it may actually disrupt the global measurement of time. He wasn’t the only one to attack clocks during this period: In Paris, rebels simultaneously destroyed public clocks across the city, and in Bombay, the famous Crawford Market clock was shattered with gunfire by protesters.
 
Around the world, people were angry about time.
 
The destruction of clocks seems outlandish now. Contemporary society is obsessed with time — it is the most used noun in the English language. Since clocks with dials and hands first appeared on church towers and town halls, we have been bringing them closer towards us: into our workplaces and schools, our homes, onto our wrists and finally into the phone, laptop and television screens that we stare at for hours each day.
 
We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. Our working lives and wages are determined by it, and often our “free time” is rigidly managed by it too. Broadly speaking, even our bodily functions are regulated by the clock: We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired and attribute more significance to the arresting tones of a clock alarm than the apparent rising of the sun at the center of our solar system. The fact that there is a strange shame in eating lunch before noon is a testament to the ways in which we have internalized the logic of the clock. We are “time binding” animals, as the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin put it in his 1987 book, “Time Wars.” “All of our perceptions of self and world are mediated by the way we imagine, explain, use and implement time.”
 
“The clock does not measure time; it produces it.”
 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people reported that their experience of time had become warped and weird. Being trapped at home or laboring unusually excessive hours made days feel like hours and hours like minutes, while some months felt endless and others passed almost without notice. It seemed the time in our clocks and the time in our minds had drifted apart.
 
Academic studies explored how our emotions (such as pandemic-induced grief and anxiety) could be distorting our perception of time. Or maybe it was just because we weren’t moving around and experiencing much change. After all, time is change, as Aristotle thought — what is changeless is timeless. But rarely did the clock itself come into question — the very thing we use to measure time, the drumbeat against which we defined “weird” distortions. The clock continued to log its rigid seconds, minutes and hours, utterly unaware of the global crisis that was taking place. It was stable, correct, neutral and absolute.
 
But what makes us wrong and the clock right? “For most people, the last class they had devoted to clocks and time was early in primary school,” Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York who has been studying clocks for more than 30 years, told me recently. “There’s this thing that is central to our entire society, that’s built into all of our electronics. And we’re wandering around with an early primary school level of knowledge about it.”
 
Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth wrote in his book “Objects of Time.” That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.

 
The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally confused” about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of “hours” or “weeks” do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans.

 
During an era in which social constructs like race, gender and sexuality are being challenged and dismantled, the true nature of clock time has somehow escaped the attention of wider society. Much like has happened with money, the clock has come to be seen as the thing it was only supposed to represent: The clock has become time itself.
 
 
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Clock time is not what most people think it is. It is not a transparent reflection of some sort of true and absolute time that scientists are monitoring. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes. Daylight savings, for instance, is an arbitrary thing we made up. So is the seven-day week. “People tend to think that somewhere there is some master clock, like the rod of platinum in the Bureau of Weights and Measures, that is the ‘uber clock,’” Birth told me. “There isn’t. It’s calculated. There is no clock on Earth that gives the correct time.”
 
What’s usually taught in Western schools is that the time in our clocks (and by extension, our calendars) is determined by the rotation of the Earth, and thus the movement of the sun across our sky. The Earth, we learn, completes an orbit of the sun in 365 days, which determines the length of our year, and it rotates on its axis once every 24 hours, which determines our day. Thus an hour is 1/24 of this rotation, a minute is 1/60 of an hour and a second is 1/60 of a minute.
 
None of this is true. The Earth is not a perfect sphere with perfect movement; it’s a lumpy round mass that is squashed at both poles and wobbles. It does not rotate in exactly 24 hours each day or orbit the sun in exactly 365 days each year. It just kinda does. Perfection is a manmade concept; nature is irregular.
 
For thousands of years, most human societies have accepted and moved in harmony with the irregular rhythms of nature, using the sun, moon and stars to understand the passage of time. One of the most common early timekeeping devices, sundials (or shadow clocks) reflected this: The hours of the day were not of fixed 60-minute lengths, but variable. Hours were longer or shorter as they waxed and waned in accordance with the Earth’s orbit, making the days feel shorter in the winter and longer in the summer. These clocks didn’t determine the hours, minutes and seconds themselves, they simply mirrored their surrounding environment and told you where you were within the cyclical rhythms of nature.
 
But since the 14th century, we’ve gradually been turning our backs on nature and increasingly calculating our sense of time via manmade devices. It began in the monasteries of Northern and Central Europe, where pious monks built crude iron objects that unreliably but automatically struck intervals to help bellringers keep track of canonical hours of prayer. Like any machine, the logic of the mechanical clock was based upon regularity, the rigid ticking of an escapement. It brought with it a whole different way to view time, not as a rhythm determined by a combination of various observed natural phenomena, but as a homogenous series of perfectly identical intervals provided by one source.
 
The religious fervor for rationing time and disciplining one’s life around it led the American historian Lewis Mumford to describe the Benedictine monks as “perhaps the original founders of modern capitalism.” It is one of the great ironies of Christianity that it set the wheels in motion for an ever-unfolding mania of scientific accuracy and precision around timekeeping that would eventually secularize time in the West and divorce God, the original clockmaker, from the picture entirely.

 
By 1656, the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens had invented the first pendulum clock, which delivered homogenous and regular slices of a small unit of time: seconds. Unlike the inconsistent mechanical clocks of before, the clock time of pendulums was nearly perfect. That same century, the British astronomer John Flamsteed and others developed “mean time,” an average calculation of the Earth’s rotation. Science had found a way around the Earth’s wobbly eccentricities, producing a quantifiable and consistent unit that became known as Greenwich Mean Time.
 
Standardized time became vital for seafarers and irresistible to corporate interests, such was the ease it could offer trade, transport and electric communication. But it took longer to colonize the minds of the general public. During the British “railway mania” of the 1840s, around 6,000 miles of railway lines were constructed across the country. Investors (including Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill and the Brontë sisters) climbed over each other to acquire rail company shares in a frenzy of freewheeling capitalism that caused one of the biggest economic bubbles in British history. Companies like Great Western Railway and Midland Railway began to enforce Greenwich Mean Time inside their stations and on their trains to make timetables run efficiently.
 
Every city, town and village in Britain used to set its clocks to its own local solar time, which gave each locale a palpable sense of identity, time and place. If you lived in Newcastle, noon was when the sun was highest, no matter what the time in London was. But as the railways brought standardized timetables, local times were demonized and swept aside. By 1855, nearly all public clocks were set to GMT, or “London time,” and the country became one time zone.
 
The rebellious city of Bristol was one of the last to agree to standardized time: The main town clock on the Corn Exchange building kept a third hand to denote “Bristol time” for the local population who refused to adjust. It remains there to this day.
 
“Railway time” arrived in America too, splitting the country into four distinct time zones and causing protests to flare nationwide. The Boston Evening Transcript demanded, “Let us keep our own noon,” and The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette wrote, “Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars.”
 
The 1884 International Meridian Conference is often framed as the moment clock time took over the world. The globe was sliced into 24 time zones declaring different clock times, all synchronized to the time of the most powerful empire, the British and their GMT. Nobody would decipher time from nature anymore — they would be told what time it was by a central authority. The author Clark Blaise has argued that once this was implemented, “It didn’t matter what the sun proclaimed at all. ‘Natural time’ was dead.”
 
In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. From South Asia to Africa to Oceania, imperialists assaulted alternative forms of timekeeping. They saw any region without European-style clocks, watches and church bells as a land without time.
 
“European global expansion in commerce, transport and communication was paralleled by, and premised upon, control over the manner in which societies abroad related to time,” the Australian historian Giordano Nanni wrote in his book, “The Colonization of Time.” “The project to incorporate the globe within a matrix of hours, minutes and seconds demands recognition as one of the most significant manifestations of Europe’s universalizing will.” In short, if the East India Company was the physical embodiment of British colonialism overseas, GMT was the metaphysical embodiment.
 
The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures. When British colonizers swept into southeastern Australia in search of gold, they depicted the timekeeping practices of the indigenous societies they encountered as irregular and unpredictable in contrast to the rational and linear nature of the clock. This was despite the fact that indigenous societies in the region had advanced forms of timekeeping based on the moon, stars, rains, the blossoming of certain trees and shrubs and the flowing of tides, which they used to determine the availability of food and resources, distance and calendar dates.
 
“Nineteenth-century Europeans generally conceived of such closeness to nature as calling into question the very humanity of those who practiced it,” Nanni wrote. “This was partly determined by the fact that Enlightenment values and ideals had come to associate the idea of ‘humanness’ with man’s transcendence and domination over nature; and its corresponding opposite — savagery — as a mode of life that existed ‘closer to nature.’”
 
In Melbourne, churches and railway stations grew quickly on the horizon, bringing with them the hands, faces, bells and general cacophony of clock time. By 1861, a time ball was installed in the Williamstown lighthouse and Melbourne was officially synchronized to Greenwich Mean Time. British colonizers attempted to integrate indigenous peoples into their labor force with unsatisfactory results due to their unwillingness to sacrifice their own form of timekeeping. They did not believe in “meaningless toil” and “obedience to the clock,” wrote the Australian sociologist Mike Donaldson. “To them, time was not a tyrant.”
 
In some parts of Australia, the indigenous resistance to Western clock time continued defiantly. In 1977, in the tiny town of Pukatja (then known as Ernabella) a giant, revolving, electronically operated clock was constructed near the town center for the local Pitjantjatjara people to coordinate their lives around. A decade later, a white construction worker at a town council meeting noted that the clock had been broken for months. Nobody had noticed, because nobody looked at it.
 
The movement toward standardized time reached its apex in the 1950s, when atomic clocks were judged to be better timekeepers than the Earth itself. The second, as a unit of time, was redefined not as a fraction of the Earth’s orbit around the sun, but as a specific number of oscillations of cesium atoms inside an atomic clock.
 
“When you look at precision timekeeping, it’s all about insulating and isolating these clocks from responding to anything that goes on around them,” Bastian told me via a video call from her home in Edinburgh. A poster with the words “A clock that falls asleep” hung on the wall behind her. “You have to keep them separate from temperature, fluctuations, humidity, even quantum gravity effects. They can’t respond to anything.”
 
Over 400 atomic clocks in laboratories around the world count time using the atomic second as their standard. A weighted average of these times is used to create International Atomic Time, which forms the basis of Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC isn’t completely non-responsive. Every few years, a leap second is added to it to keep it reasonably close to the rotations of the Earth. But in 2023, at the World Radiocommunication Conference, nations from around the world will discuss whether it is in our best interest to abolish leap seconds and permanently unmoor ourselves from the sun and moon in favor of time we manufacture ourselves.
 
 
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“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to imagine is what capitalism has done to our perception of time via clocks. It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.
 
Capitalism did not create clock time or vice versa, but the scientific and religious division of time into identical units established a useful infrastructure for capitalism to coordinate the exploitation and conversion of bodies, labor and goods into value. Clock time, the British sociologist Barbara Adam has argued, connected time to money. “Time could become commodified, compressed and controlled,” she wrote in her book “Time.” “These economic practices could then be globalized and imposed as the norm the world over.”
 
Clock time, Adam goes on, is often “taken to be not only our natural experience of time” but “the ethical measure of our very existence.” Even the most natural of processes now must be expressed in clock time in order for them to be validated.
 
Women in particular often find themselves at the wrong end of this arbitrary metric. Unpaid labor such as housework and childcare — which still disproportionately burdens women — seems to slip between the measurements of the clock, whereas the experience of pregnancy is very much under the scrutiny of clock time. Adam quotes a woman’s account of her birth-giving experience: “The woman in labor, forced by the intensity of the contractions to turn all her attention to them, loses her ordinary, intimate contact with clock time.” But in the hospital environment, where the natural process of childbirth has been evaluated and standardized in clock-time units, a woman is pressured to follow what Alys Einion-Waller, a professor of midwifery at Swansea University, has called a “medicalized birth script.”

 
The firsthand experience and intuition of the woman giving birth is devalued in favor of timings and measurements related to the expected length of labor stages, the spacing of contractions, the progress of cervical dilation and other observations. Language such as “failure to progress” is common when a woman doesn’t perform to the expected curve, and diversion from the clock-time framework can be used to justify medical intervention. This is one of the reasons that the home-birthing movement has recently grown in popularity.
 
Likewise, new parents know that the baby itself becomes their clock, and any semblance of standardized time is preposterous. But in time, of course, the baby joins the rigid temporal hierarchy of school, with non-negotiable class and meal times, forcing biological rhythms to adhere to socially acceptable clock time.
 
As Birth put it to me: “The clock helps us with things that are uniform in duration. But anything that is not uniform, anything that varies, the clock screws up. … When you try to schedule a natural process, nature doesn’t cooperate.”
 
 
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In 2002, scientists watched in amazement as Larsen B, an ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula 55 times bigger than Manhattan — which had been stable for 10,000 years — splintered and collapsed into hundreds of shards the size of skyscrapers. A glaciologist who flew overhead told Scientific American that he could see whales swimming in water where ice a thousand feet thick had been just days earlier.
 
Virtually overnight, previous clock-time predictions around the mass loss of ice needed to be rewritten to acknowledge a 300% acceleration in the rate of change. In 2017, a piece of the nearby Larsen C ice shelf fell off, creating the world’s biggest iceberg — so big that maps had to be redrawn. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls such abrupt events, which happen more often than you might think, “surprises.”
 
The climate crisis is a realm in which linear clock time frequently and fatally misfires. It frames the crisis as something that is measurable, quantifiable and predictable — something we can envisage in the same way as work hours, holidays, chores and projects. Warming temperatures, ocean acidification, ice melting and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are constantly being translated into clock time to create tipping points, thresholds, roadmaps and sustainable development goals for us to beat or aspire to. When a “surprise” happens, time estimates crumble in the face of reality. Nature doesn’t cooperate.
 
It works the same way for putting limits on the amount of time we have to stop global warming. The Guardian launched a blog called “100 months to save the world” in July 2008 that used scientific research and predictions to make it “possible to estimate the length of time it will take to reach a tipping point.” That was 154 months ago. Are we 54 months into the end of the world? Perhaps. But one can’t help but wonder if the constant framing of the climate crisis in clock time deadlines, which then pass without comment, has contributed to the inability and inertia of many to comprehend the seriousness of what is actually happening.
 
 “We can’t say that clock time isn’t important,” Vijay Kolinjivadi, a researcher at the University of Antwerp’s Institute of Development Policy, told me. “There’s certain times when that metric makes a lot of sense, and we should use it. For instance, you and I decided to talk at 10 a.m. There’s no way to escape that. But when we are thinking about capitalism, social crisis and ecological breakdown, it gets problematic.” Clock time, he went on, “is always geared towards production, growth and all the things that created this ecological crisis in the first place.”
 
One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaster” ignores those for whom disaster has already arrived. The reality is that it’s a privilege to live by clock time alone and ignore nature’s urgent temporalities.
 
Every few years, the American Midwest is ravaged by floods as the Missouri River swells from intense rainfall, upending the lives of millions. When the floods came during the summer of 1993, a New York Times journalist interviewed a resident about the night he was evacuated. “He remembers everything about the night the river forced him and his wife out of the house where they had lived for 27 years — except for this. ‘I can’t tell you what day it was. … All I can tell you is that the river stage was 26 [feet] when we left.’” The headline of the article was, “They Measure Time by Feet.”
 
 
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In 1992, the astrophysicist turned author Alan Lightman published a novel called “Einstein’s Dreams” in which he fictionalizes a young Albert Einstein dreaming about the multitude of ways that different interpretations of time would play out in the lives of those around him. In one dream, Einstein sees a world where time is not measured — there are “no clocks, no calendars, no definite appointments. Events are triggered by other events, not by time. A house is begun when stone and lumber arrive at the building site. The stone quarry delivers stone when the quarryman needs money. … Trains leave the station at the Bahnhofplatz when the cars are filled with passengers.” In another, time is measured, but by “the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of women, the duration of loneliness.”
 
Recently, there have been many attempts in both art and literature to reimagine the clock and the role it plays in our lives. At the end of 2020, the artist David Horvitz exhibited a selection of clocks he had created, which included one that was synchronized to a heartbeat. Another artist, Scott Thrift, has developed a clock called “Today,” which simplifies the passage of time into dawn, noon, dusk and midnight as opposed to seconds, minutes and hours. It moves at half the speed of a regular clock, making one full rotation in a day.
 

Bastian herself has proposed clocks that are more responsive to the temporalities of the climate crisis, like a clock synchronized with the population levels of endangered sea turtles, an animal that has lived in the Pacific for 150 million years but now faces extinction due to temperature changes. These and other proposals all have the same idea at their core: There are more ways to arrange and synchronize ourselves with the world around us than the abstract clock time we hold so dear.
 
Clock time may have colonized the planet, but it did not completely destroy alternative traditions of timekeeping. Certain religions maintain a connection to time that is rooted in nature, like salat in Islam and zmanim in Judaism, in which prayer times are defined by natural phenomena like dawn, dusk and the positioning of stars. The timing of these events may be converted into clock time, but they are not determined by clocks.
 
In places where globally standardized time is enforced, some still rebel, like in China, where the entire country is under one time zone, BST (Beijing Standard Time). In Xinjiang, nearly 2,000 miles west of Beijing, where the sun sometimes sets at midnight according to BST, many Uighur communities use their own form of local solar time.
 
And indigenous communities around the world still use ecological calendars, which keep time through observations of seasonal changes. Native American tribes around Lake Oneida, for example, recognize a certain flower blooming as the time to start plowing and setting traps for animals emerging from hibernation. As opposed to a standardized clock and calendar format, these ecological calendars, by their very nature, reflect and respond to an ever-changing climate.
 
In one of the last dreams in Lightman’s book, Einstein imagines a world not too dissimilar from our own, where one “Great Clock” determines the time for everyone. Every day, tens of thousands of people line up outside the Temple of Time where the Great Clock resides, waiting their turn to enter and bow before it. “They stand quietly,” wrote Lightman, “but secretly they seethe with their anger. For they must watch measured that which should not be measured. They must watch the precise passage of minutes and decades. They have been trapped by their own inventiveness and audacity. And they must pay with their lives.”
 
The Tyranny Of Time. By Joe Zadeh.  Noéma, June 3, 2021.