On Work, Play, and Time
5 min read
Barış Onur Örs
Let's play a game together.
Sorry, we don't have time for that. We have work to do. It's as if the sun has set and our mother called us back home from the street. Give the present, take the future, that's the deal. So, the end of this article must have come.
Little bird, oh don't you know?
Your friends flew south many months ago
Your friends flew south many months ago
(Davendra Banhart, Wake up, Little Sparrow)
The cold evening breeze seeps into our bones. Maybe we're a bit sweaty too. We, the ones who haven't returned home, continue our game. Our friends are somewhere "in the future." We never saw them again because the "now" we are in has always continued. We are here, still in these lines, which means we take our game seriously.
In January 2007, we might be Joshua Bell in a Washington metro station, with a violin in our hands, as thousands of people pass by. No matter how hard we try, we cannot make eye contact with those who "exchange the present for the future." We are in the same place, but living in completely different times.
In 1789 in France, we might have shot at clock towers. Because they made our intangible times divisible and exchangeable... In 1896, as a clerk at the Swiss Federal Patent Office, we immersed ourselves in scientific research, secretly played games at work, and took our game seriously, laying the foundations for the Theory of Relativity, which fundamentally changed the understanding of physics. Or in 1990, while working at CERN, we designed the Web and strived to make it for "everyone." We could have been a Zen monk tirelessly sweeping the stone paths of a temple in Tibet. Or a watchmaker who has forgotten time in his small shop (Hidden Face, Ömer Kavur). We used our time as we wanted, playing games that allowed us to grow and develop, to become whoever we are. We took our game seriously.
Since the day we took control of our time, we have been flowing as freely as rivers. Being ourselves has a lot to do with being able to have our own time. The word "school" comes from the Ancient Greek skhole, which means "free time" or "leisure time." During this period, people used the concept of skhole to express the time they spent acquiring knowledge in philosophy, mathematics, literature, and other fields. While the term askhole meant occupation, work, or obligation, that is, situations in which a person's freedom was restricted and could not participate in intellectual processes. Those who had skhole could freely use their time in the sacred Akademos gardens, from which the Academy took its name, develop themselves and contribute to society.
In the 18th century, the popularization of clocks and the more precise measurement of time led to tighter regulation of working hours and the increasing loss of the times that should have belonged to us. Thus, while the pressure on the labor force increased, the nature of labor also changed. Jobs requiring quality were now reduced to exchangeable muscle power. Our bodies, one by one withdrawn from the sacred akademos gardens where we had our own time, became alienated from the work they did. At the same time, work, which was a way of establishing social ties based on our abilities, was stripped of passion and turned into a grim achievement that only served to keep us alive, to which we completely surrendered our will and could be easily traded. Since then, we have had less time, and our mother calls us home from the streets more often. And we play fewer games.
When we programmed the first versions of Linux, we worked late into the night, sometimes not dealing with our job at all and playing games to get inspired. We blended the idea of "open source code," which means the free sharing of knowledge, with the idea of the academy, and strived to build unbounded academies where we had our own time (skhole) instead of university buildings that have now turned into monasteries. Or we might have resigned from our job at a state laboratory and settled on our inherited farm in Japan. There, without dividing our life dedicated to "natural farming" experiments into units of time, we dreamed of afforestation deserts with seed balls.
Maybe none of this happened. That evening, we went home and did what we had to do. The next day, we never noticed the man playing the violin we encountered in the Washington metro. We looked at the clock towers and suddenly found ourselves in the future. We realize the present when we come to the end of the world. Most of the innovations that provide social benefits were not designed in nine-to-five offices. They came to life in the imaginations of those who could have a say over their time, through the collective labor of generations, with passion and dedication. At the heart of this passion lies a playful temporality that no delicate clock can measure. As we are torn away from the unique cycles of our games, the sparkle in our eyes gives way to great cynicism. So, since you are still here, we will all play a game together now. This game will be about work and time.
