Geek Temporalities and the Spirit of Capital

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Jeff Bezos begged to appear on Star Trek Beyond. Sergey Brin drew inspiration from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. Elon Musk loves video games and cites Isaac Asimov, Douglas Adams, and Star Wars as some of his biggest influences. Peter Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after a magical orb from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.1

How did the ruling class become such geeks?

On the face of it, geekiness — variously defined as an ethos, a subculture, a set of practices — might seem antithetical to the prevailing corporate culture.2 According to Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello's landmark study of management discourse, The New Spirit of Capitalism, the so-called "great men" of contemporary capitalism succeed by quickly adapting to change and deftly moving between projects, all the while building their personal and professional networks.3 Unlike the geek, the ideal manager or project lead is known for being inspiring, open, and extroverted, capable of fitting into the most far-flung of crowds. He travels lightly, shedding attachments and possessions with ease; one cannot imagine him lugging a bulky collection of unopened action figures on his cross-country job relocations. Because he is plugged in everywhere, the project lead can leverage a wide variety of geographically and socially distant connections to acquire information, personnel, resources, and employment.4 The geek figure, on the other hand, remains absorbed in a narrow set of references, returning to the same exclusive focus over a long duration.Nevertheless, the project lead and the geek are complementary figures. As Boltanski and Chiapello argue, the networked professional obtains power and prestige by linking up with more isolated nodes. The manager's dilettantism depends on the geek's deep knowledge and expertise.5 Moreover, even if managers tend to flit from firm to firm, their current projects frequently demand their full attention, crowding out all other personal obligations. Capital requires flexibility, but it also needs worker engagement.6 The mobile and multitasking project lead finds his necessary counterpart in the geek, who is pressed into the service of capital whenever sustained and single-minded effort is needed.

If project leads and geeks represent compatible personality types and locations within their networks, they also represent compatible temporalities and aesthetics. Boltanski and Chiapello suggest that, as an abstract and amoral process, capitalism can only justify itself to professional-managerial class workers by borrowing the spirits or value systems from other discourses.7 One way that it does this is by co-opting the styles of its own critiques. Bohemians since Baudelaire have attempted to rebuke the possessiveness and traditionalism of the bourgeoisie through a pursuit of carefree detachment and transitory experience.8 Now, under what Boltanski and Chiapello call the new spirit of capitalism, management literature promises employees the freedom of the flâneur, recasting their labor as a wandering adventure taking them on unpredictable turns that lead from project to project without the drag of old Fordist burdens such as job security or home ownership. By reorganizing workplaces to appear more authentic, exciting, and informal, capital in the final decades of the twentieth century succeeded in hijacking the "artistic critique" of capital to displace egalitarian demands that, if fulfilled, would change the distribution of wages or transfer ownership over the means of production.9 As stable careers break apart into endless retraining opportunities, workers and managers alike cease to experience their biographies as progressive narratives moving toward accumulated personal wealth and character development, giving themselves over instead to the fragmented, frustrated, and uncertain temporality that Jasper Bernes locates in the contemporary office novel.10

Geek labor differs from the old model of middle-class advancement as well, but it tends to coalesce around ongoing obsessions. Geeks frequently return to the same activities, objects, or domains to recapture the pleasurable experience of altered or suspended time. When geeks give themselves over to their favorite hobbies or media, they enter a heightened or ecstatic temporality that does not follow the order or tempo of clock time. Because geeks seek out opportunities to lose track of time, they tend to diverge from normative schedules. Many geeks fail to maintain clear work-life boundaries or regular sleep patterns. Geeks are said to linger in early developmental stages such as childhood or adolescence when they put off threshold events for heteronormative maturity such as romantic coupling or penetrative sex. Some of these tendencies can make it hard for managers to work with geeks, but they also free geeks up to pursue their technical occupations with a single-minded devotion.

If the new managerial ethos constitutes a banalization of the modernist or avant-garde aesthetic, I would suggest that the geek lifestyle enjoyed by engineers, scientists, and computer programmers takes its cues from what John Rieder calls — with no value judgment intended — the mass cultural genre system.11 According to Rieder, mass cultural genres such as popular science fiction and fantasy emerged to meet the needs of advertisers. Serialized narratives that followed conventional formulas ensured a dependable and therefore lucrative audience. At the same time, their "otherworldliness" helped sell the compensatory or escapist utopias of consumer fantasy.12 These structural features of mass cultural publicity helped produce some of the most enduring characteristics of fan phenomenology, including an affinity for repetition and a desire to lose oneself in another temporality. Geeks are drawn to any activity that rewards compulsive attention — some geeks prefer military history, German-style board games, birdwatching, citizen science, or philately — but the mass cultural genre system has proven to be the most elaborated cultural framework for organizing geek time.When capital needed to maintain the enthusiasm of STEM professionals for their work despite conditions of increased exploitation, austerity, and inequality, it drew upon practices of engagement borrowed from popular media.13 It is therefore no accident that Rieder's third age of science fiction — the mainstreaming of mass-cultural science fiction beginning with the premiere of Star Wars in 1977 — roughly coincides with the emergence of the new spirit of capital and the neoliberal regime as responses to the crises of the early 1970s.14 Geek obsessions came to provide a refuge of constancy and familiarity, even as economic and social life grew increasingly precarious and turbulent. The geek spirit has proven so successful in maintaining capital's hegemony over technical experts that it is embraced by members of the capitalist class itself, especially tech founders and CEOs such as Bezos and Musk.15 At the same time, I maintain that geek culture goes beyond winning the consent of the professional-managerial class. Geek culture also trains professionals in capacities such as thoroughness, detail orientation, memorization, concentration, avidity, and endurance, all of which make them more responsive and efficient workers. In workplaces like startups and video game companies, geek temporalities enable capital to achieve both the expansion and intensification of the workday.

More than just technologically savvy professionals, geeks stand at the vanguard of a broader shift in the labor process, one in which white-collar or no-collar employers increasingly lay claim to the entire cognitive and affective lives of their workers. For this community, the distinction between labor time and leisure time erodes as programming swallows up all available free time in what Andrew Ross calls "geeksploitation."16 Some scholars cast the geek ethos as a site of resistance against these trends in techno-capitalism. Christopher Kelty's Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software names geeks as the caretakers of recursive publics, critical technologists fostering open debates on media infrastructure, while Christina Dunbar-Hester's Low Power to the People: Pirates, Protest and Politics in FM Radio Activism paints a picture of radio geeks as leftist and libertarian activists who fight media consolidation by building pirate radio stations. However, in both of these cases, geek work does not remain entirely separate from capitalist labor: companies have moved to exploit the commons produced by open-source software geeks while many radio geeks treat their volunteer work on low-power FM as job training.17 Indeed, as Alan Liu suggests, similar kinds of playful technical experimentation have become central to the postindustrial office, where workers express their ironic distance from labor by performing gratuitous and aestheticized demonstrations of computing expertise.18 Geeks thumb their noses at management's obsession with the bottom line by disregarding their strict deadlines to focus instead on writing the most elegant code or designing the coolest graphics, an attitude that allows them to maintain a sense of autonomy even as they draw on their artistic creativity to produce value for their employers. Meanwhile, within fan culture, corporations regularly monetize what was once leisure or hobbyist activity through "playbor," expropriating practices such as modding that geeks perform freely off the clock.19Being a geek often means spending too many hours consuming, playing, and working, more so than are actually manageable, productive, and profitable. Geeks' frequent disregard for everyone else's time means they do not always play well with others. Coders steal time at work to develop their own passion projects. Rick and Morty fans rioted at McDonald's in 2017 when the store ran out of rereleased Mulan-branded Szechuan sauce.20 Toxic internet subcultures demand universal basic income ("NEETbux") so they can devote their entire waking lives to gaming.21

Through these examples, we begin to see that the geek subculture emerges out of the breakdown of clearly delineated schedules or timelines under late capitalism. The geek ethos is more than an identity or lifestyle — it is a temporal orientation. To better understand the geek and the particularities of what I am calling "geek temporalities," this essay will examine texts from management science and narratives such as Ellen Ullman's The Bug: A Novel (2003) and the Netflix Original Series Russian Doll (2019) to find moments in which a geek temporality runs up against other rhythms or timelines and appears as a problem or a bug.22 Both texts feature characters who experience geek time as disturbing, if not traumatic. By focusing on texts that resist geek culture's allure, I hope to provide a more critical assessment of this ethos's promises and pitfalls.

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According to folk etymology, the programming term "bug" originated when computer scientist Admiral Grace Hopper extracted a deceased moth from a faulty Harvard Mark II computer.23 After taping the moth into a logbook, Admiral Hopper wrote underneath the caption, "first actual case of bug being found."24 As her wry note suggests, this joke presupposes prior usage of the term. Before finding her wayward moth, Hopper doodled a small bestiary of personified system errors that she dubbed bugs.25 The term actually predated Admiral Hopper by many decades: engineers from Thomas Edison onward spoke of "bugs" when referring to errors, failures, and other unexpected results.26 Technology workers and users alike have long cast malfunctions as malicious gremlins and, indeed, the word "bug" derives from the same root as "bugbear," originally denoting a "bogeyman" or "imaginary evil spirit."27 Admiral Hopper's dead insect turns out to be a revenant, a spectral trace of the pre-secular past, the insistence of something lost that must be retrieved. Many fictional narratives mine the bug's more uncanny dimensions — think of the glitches in The Matrix, repetitions that reveal the disturbing unreality of Neo's world. Bugs insistently demand technical expertise, making geek labor not only visible but remarkable and strange. They therefore offer a useful entry point for a critique of geek time.The Netflix television series Russian Doll follows video game programmer Nadia Vulvokov through the process of debugging her life. Nadia and a gamer named Alan find themselves stuck in a loop that terminates and restarts every time they die, which they do frequently. As in similar time travel narratives, the main characters are forced to break unhealthy routines, develop better habits, fix old mistakes, and reckon with buried traumas. While Alan seems to experience this metaphysical predicament as a video game death returning him to a prior save point, Nadia likens it to a crashing program, one that can only be fixed after the two are able to successfully replicate the "flaw in the code" through a series of targeted experiments or unit tests.28 Along the way, Nadia realizes that "time is relative to your experience."29 Although at first the world appears to reset whenever they are killed, clues like rotting produce suggest that linear time persists for other people or objects even as the protagonists repeatedly cycle back to the same evening every few hours or days. Both the gamer and coder are trapped in their own temporalities, following a timeline separate from other characters who are not geeks.

While Russian Doll sometimes conceptualizes this scenario as an exercise in coding,30 many critics have suggested that Russian Doll's structure also follows the repeat viewing patterns that characterize geek media consumption, a practice which proves to be remarkably similar to the debugging process. With its intricate mystery and fast-paced episodes, Russian Doll invites us to binge watch the program multiple times in a row to decipher hidden details that might explain its world.31 Even without an enigma to unravel, geeks enjoy returning to their favorite media properties, replaying or reinventing them. Writing about television programs such as Doctor Who and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kristina Busse has likened this mode of fannish engagement to the "time loop scenario" in Groundhog Day.32 As in Russian Doll and the Bill Murray comedy it was patterned on, geek pleasure depends on the tension between repetition and variation, expectation and surprise. In short, Russian Doll trains us to experience time like a geek.

Russian Doll is not the first narrative to try to debug geek culture. Ellen Ullman's The Bug arrived at a similar conclusion in suggesting that geeks follow an alternate temporality. The novel follows the downfall of computer geek Ethan Levin, a senior engineer at a fictional 1980s software startup, Telligentsia. Overworked and overscheduled, Ethan attempts to put his intimate life on hold to log the hours he thinks he needs to prove himself to other coders. When his live-in girlfriend Joanna asks him to join her on a vacation to India, Ethan decides to stay home to get more work done. Joanna, tired of Ethan's emotional absence and self-involved attitude, ends up going on the trip with a mutual friend she finds more "time compatible," while Ethan stays home.33 With Joanna gone, Ethan luxuriates in the "childish absorption" of uninterrupted work-time: "Time felt spacious, unbounded. All the little accommodations he normally made for her — not reading at the table, the how-was-your-day-dear conversation — were in suspension."34 These scenes reflect the author's firsthand observations on the coding life, as she described them in "Out of Time," her 1995 essay, which argues that computer programmers' need for long, undisturbed periods while coding leaves them "strangely asynchronous" with other human beings.35 Based on her two decades of experience in the computing field, Ullman argues that Silicon Valley motivates tech workers to keep working long hours through a "puerile" culture that combines endless play and endless labor — what Ullman describes as the "cult of the boy engineer."36 Caught up in this cult, Ethan enjoys the adolescent freedom of a temporality in which labor and leisure time become indistinguishable, an arrangement that allows him to remain on schedule while all other programmers in the company fall behind.Of course, time continues for everyone else while the geek is lost in activity. Three weeks into his girlfriend's vacation, Ethan receives his first communication from Joanna — a postcard with the note "I hope you're also enjoying your time away from me" — which triggers his first conscious realization that she is having an affair with her travel mate, a liaison that eventually spells the end of their relationship.37 Joanna is able to synchronize with her new lover in a way that she could never with her soon to be ex-boyfriend because Ethan repeatedly disconnects from her so as to organize his life around the temporality of his work machine.

Mikki Halpin's The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, a humorous dotcom era manual for managing geek employees, similarly argues that geeks do not experience time "the way the rest of us do":

Geeks process their time, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, but always according to internal drives. Man-made markers (especially those tied to nature such as A.M. and P.M., daylight savings, etc.) mean little to the geek in his world. Time zones also mean little to the geek, who can e-mail anyone at any moment.38

Geeks follow irregular patterns of work, play, and sleep, often pulling all-nighters and sleeping during the day. In Russian Doll, for example, Nadia stumbles into a meeting late before swiftly debugging an error in a computer animation and leaving just as abruptly. Tech geeks have long resisted rules about reporting hours, preferring to see themselves as independent artisans rather than alienated waged employees governed by the punch clock.39 This sense of vocation serves as a point of pride for many tech geeks, who boast of being uniquely capable of ignoring unimportant pursuits and pushing their bodies to the limit to get their work done. Time becomes as important as intelligence, excitement, and other markers or qualifications for geek affiliation. One of the Oxford English Dictionary's example sentences for "geek," drawn from a 2001 article in the Independent, makes just this point: "We're the nerds, the geeks, the dweebs: the men and women who can spend 20 hours straight contemplating 600 bytes of obscure, arcane, impenetrable computer code."40 How one spends one's time serves as the ultimate test for geek belonging.

Even outside of the technology field, this shared temporality predominates in geek culture. According to Matthew Hills, cult fandom is a matter of time. What makes an individual or community part of cult fandom is not "the intensity, social organization or semiotic/material productivity of the fandom concerned, but rather ... its duration, especially in the absence of 'new' or official material in the originating medium."41 Most consumers move on from media properties once they have faded from popular consciousness. Geeks, however, demonstrate abiding attachments to past media in spite of widespread forgetfulness or disfavor. Just as tech geeks work for long periods on their projects, geeks in science fiction or comic book culture maintain fannish relationships to cult artifacts over long and even excessive timespans. To be a true fan, then, means to geek out over a media property from the very beginning while putting in the time to master its trivia.

Why do so many fans and software developers share the same tastes, the same sensibility, and the same self-description? I would argue that geek culture actually serves a formative purpose for technocapitalist workers. Joshua Landy argues that the value of formative fictions resides not in how they convey a meaning or message — which might be understood in a single reading — but in how they operate as training mechanisms for transferable skills or capacities that can only be acquired as habits through re-readings.42 By the same token, geeks acquire much of their ethos, including their temporal orientation, through reencounters with their favorite media.In geek culture, for example, we can see this formative function in the transmedia world-building that now dominates so many mass cultural genres. Prequels, histories, spinoffs, invented languages, maps, and in-world reference materials all encourage fans to plunge repeatedly into the sprawling, interconnected back stories of their favorite narratives. As Hiroki Azuma suggests about Otaku genres such as anime or manga, these transmedia stories are structured like databases rather than meta-narratives, encouraging fans to ignore chronology or causality in order to select and recombine elements at will.43 To successfully treat these worlds as playsets, fans must cultivate the ability to summon up entire encyclopedias of details. Some fans prove their mastery over the canon by working like debuggers, systematically confirming each transmedia world's consistency by searching for plot holes and continuity errors to expose in online venues such as YouTube. These interpretive methods push fans to think at once the past, present, and possible futures of their favorite settings.

This is precisely the kind of cognitive feat required of computer programmers. The capacities fostered by popular media can just as easily be exploited by capital.44 Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, observes that expert programmers — like great mathematicians — "try to understand [the program] well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in ... You hold the whole program in your head, and you can manipulate it at will."45 What better way to build this skill than to treat Middle Earth as a memory palace? Moreover, because this task demands so much concentration, programmers try to work for long, undistracted periods. Here again, transmedia franchises provide a useful formative fiction: geeks stretch their endurance through surviving back-to-back marathons of The Lord of the Rings films, speed-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows the day after its release, or caffeinating their ways through forty-hour LAN parties. Fandom turns out to be a nearly ubiquitous feature of technical professions because it entrains geeks to temporalities that have proven uniquely suited to the 24/7 temporality of late capitalism.46

Geek culture thus proves to be central to the reproduction of labor power in the information and technology field. We encounter this in The Bug when Ethan becomes immersed in his own hobby, an artificial life program modeled on John Horton Conway's Game of Life. Ethan discovered the Game in college and took to it with "the enthusiasm of an adolescent deciding to become an astronaut."47 When Ethan's plans to write a Ph.D. dissertation on artificial life founder after his father dies, leaving him in debt, he keeps working on the Game intermittently as a way to bring order, continuity, and cohesion to his otherwise aimless and uneventful life. It is a relic of his lost future as a computer scientist, a place where the knowledge of loss can be left out of the program, and an alternate reality in which he might play God. Although it promises to be a refuge from his pointless career, Ethan's simulation ultimately ends up "a dull, repetitive place," trapped in "endless cycles."48 In other words, the rhythms of Ethan's leisure prepare him for his time at work.Ethan's "ritualistic compulsions," which manifest on the job as "superstitious programmer behavior," point to another fundamental tendency within geek temporality. ⁴⁹ Fans revisit the same media, return to the same conventions, rehearse the same archetypes, and retell the same in-jokes. Anyone who has joined a tabletop roleplaying group has experienced this fannish tropism toward routine, a tendency seen in habits ranging from rites to preserve lucky dice to more ingrained customs such as house rules and scheduled playtimes. The geek desire for regularity extends beyond the gaming table: Sheldon Cooper, the brainy main character of The Big Bang Theory, insists on always sitting on the same seat on his couch and becomes upset whenever this habit is disrupted.

We see this need for routine in Russian Doll, as well. Nadia's gamer companion Alan desperately cleaves to his daily routines despite living in a repeating world with no apparent consequences, and while Nadia attempts to break Alan's cycles, she also holds herself together through a series of habitual gestures, including smoking. Indeed, one could argue that Netflix has operationalized geek tendencies to return to their favorite formulas: many users undoubtedly saw Russian Doll after it popped up as the result of a recommendation algorithm based on predicted preferences derived from their ratings and viewing history. These personalized categories based on past behavior now replace broadcast schedules in determining what Netflix users typically watch. As Ed Finn suggests, "Netflix has constructed a distinct temporal aesthetic, a kind of eternal consumer present or network time."50 Like the unknown forces trapping Alan and Nadia, Netflix keeps each subscriber in their own closed loop.

In some ways, geek ritualism seems to conflict with the prevailing critical tendency to emphasize the originality of fan culture. However, I am not suggesting that fans are inherently conservative, nor am I denying that fans take part in a participatory culture that is both innovative and critical.51 Geeks are not passive spectators demanding more of the same.52 Nevertheless, transformative works including fan fiction, cosplay, remixes, and mashups all depend upon a commitment to return to prior media. The most daring and novel fan productions presuppose not only the desire to re-experience favorite narratives but also the deep familiarity that comes with repeated watching, reading, or playing.

Zara Dinnen's perceptive reading of The Bug suggests that coders experience time as circling round to an impasse. She writes, "In the persistent present of digital techno-time, the past is not left behind and the future is never fully realized; the present is a rote command to refresh, banally, to recur."53 However, that is not the only temporality one finds in the novel. What keeps Ethan attached to his own frustrating routines turns out to be the same thing that keeps him engrossed in his work: the hoped-for time when regularity gives way to the miraculous. During these moments, Ethan falls into what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has theorized as "flow state," the experience of intense, almost transcendent immersion one feels when skillfully carrying out a challenging activity.54 According to geek management guru Paul Glen, during the flow experience "[t]ime and language stop while you float in a pure world of ideas and experience the joy of puzzles."55 While Ethan keeps on top of his work and even makes time to delve into his computer hobbies, the hours seems to speed by in an undifferentiated blur.56 Here, Ethan embodies one of the dominant temporal experiences in geek culture. Descriptions of fan phenomenology also often recount a pleasurable experience of timelessness. Brooks Landon describes the "sense of wonder" evoked by science fiction as "timeless" or "atemporal."57 Even when a science fiction text fails to hold up upon re-reading, the original experience of media consumption possesses an "affective immortality."58 Just as flow can be achieved by holding an entire program in one's mind at once, wonder might be the sublime experience of apprehending many components of a story world simultaneously.59 Ultimately, the purpose of geek ritualism is to recapture these moments of wonder.Fan phenomenology experiences the time of media engagement as expanded, contracted, or simply anachronous. An alternate temporality turns out to be the source of the mystery surrounding the titular computer bug, as well. Ethan cathects his feelings about his breakup into UI-1017, a persistent bug the office dubs the Jester. Because of the Jester, the program Ethan's working on sometimes crashes when the mouse passes over the bottom of a menu screen. The underlying glitch seems simple enough — one function reads the menu screen as a single pixel larger than another — but this discrepancy proves maddeningly difficult to catch because it causes system failure only intermittently, making the Jester hard to replicate and document. After Ethan's death, his coworker Roberta "Berta" Walton — who serves as the novel's frame narrator — solves the mystery after a software update increases the sampling rate of the mouse and, in so doing, causes the bug to become instantly reproducible.60 As the novel explains, the mouse takes flickering "snapshots" of its location in space.61 Therefore, when the cursor passes over the incorrect menu boundary to its next position on the screen, there is a chance that it might not sample that location on the screen, in which case the computer does not register the bug. In those instances, the cursor may appear like it is moving over the boundary error but it is actually disappearing and reappearing on the other side of the system-crashing line of pixels.

This detail may seem like technical minutia but, in fact, the bug reveals a fundamental difference between realist and geek temporality. According to the narrator, who claims fidelity to realist ideals, humans experience time in narrative form while machines record the world as a series of separate states:

Time, motion through time — the thing we call analog, continuous, flowing, infinitely variable — had to be interpreted by the digital, on-off workings of the machine; had to be turned into discrete moments with no relationship to one another — here, now here, now here. This is not how we humans see, not how we feel time and space. For us, time seems to be inevitably moving, each moment becoming the next, inexorably. Time for us doesn't just move; it unfolds.62

Berta's meditations seem to offer the moral of the story, but perhaps Ethan would question her appraisal of digital time. Berta and Joanna might experience time as a flowing stream or a plot in which each event informs and entails the next but, as we already know, Ethan is not time compatible. Ethan follows his own temporality, and this quirk of an early graphical interface reveals the way that Ethan moves through time. Throughout the novel, Ethan spends his spare hours working on the Game of Life and, every time he finishes a coding session, he leaves himself a comment that reads, "Here you are, Ethan."63 Although these messages ostensibly allow Ethan to find his place in the code, they actually represent to the programmer "a thought sent from the present day's Ethan to the Ethan of the Future ... Here you are. He returned to the idea in progress, to the thought continued across time."64 Whatever turmoil or change might happen in between coding sessions, Ethan speculates that he can pass over it without passing through it, blinking in and out of his simulated world like a cursor. This is also what Ethan does to Joanna: he assumes that he can absent himself from their relationship and return to it days or weeks later, as if their time apart had never happened. As Nadia from Russian Doll would put it, Ethan "has the capacity to think like a computer."65 Mirroring the machine, the geek's resume is a timeline punctuated by deep engrossment in disconnected projects and disparate media properties. Rather than contravening some universal human temporality, geek time merely represents a departure from the linear biographies that once characterized realist characters and the life trajectories of middle-class professionals.In many ways, scenes like this provide a richer description of what is presented in more schematic terms in contemporary business literature. Geek temporality has become central to the management of technology fields such as software or video game development and, more broadly, technical work. Since the advent of the computing field in the 1950s and 1960s, remaining on schedule has proved to be an enormous problem for digital labor.66 Predicting how long it should take to produce the next hundred automobiles or refrigerators on a factory assembly line requires a trivial calculation, but every new software application is unique. This difficulty is only compounded by the fact that managers seeking to speed up projects by adding additional workers find their products further delayed because communicating and coordinating between programmers only pulls them away from the task at hand.67 Therefore, few software projects are completed on time and under budget. Delay poses serious challenges to profitability in the information and communication technology sector, especially for the video game industry, where the difference between economic success and failure often depends on finishing the game before the launch date.68

In response to the time crisis in the technology field, management science has undergone a temporal turn. Temporal organizational research emerged alongside the dotcom boom in a series of articles focusing on software development teams before being formulated as a self-conscious research framework in a 2001 special issue of The Academy of Management Review. Although some temporal researchers focused on more prosaic topics in time budgeting and planning, others waded into continental philosophy and social theory, reading Bergson as business literature.69 Surprisingly, management science embraced and instrumentalized many of the insights that would later come to animate queer theory. Rejecting universal clock time, temporal organizational researchers asked management to recognize time as a "collective noun" referring to a multiplicity of contingent and culturally constructed temporalities.70 Once more, capitalism internalizes critique while neutralizing or diverting its more radical possibilities.

This new strain of management science argues that managers should not simply impose a single timeline on the work team or organization by fiat. They must exercise what management science calls "temporal leadership," orchestrating a whole host of varying and at times conflicting temporalities, negotiating among the discrepant time norms that govern employees, managerial teams, organizations, industries, economies, cultures, and technologies.71 Temporal leadership might manifest as composing a work team with the right balance of time personalities, entraining cycles within the company to follow the tempo of technological change, or reorganizing a firm to respond to the opposing temporal orientations (e.g., exploiting existing technologies in the present while also researching new ones for the future).72 All of this depends on the manager's sensitivity to qualitative differences among temporalities. For example, an employee who experiences labor time as an even, incremental movement toward a goal responds to temporal reminders differently from one whose work moves between slow periods of slack time and fast periods of deadline-motivated frenzy.73 Whereas Taylorism submitted all processes to a single measure in the time study, postindustrial organizational research teaches managers to appreciate time as heterogeneous so as to better manipulate its rhythm, pace, and flow.

Taking this insight into account, temporal leaders cultivate temporalities such as the flow state in their geek subordinates. Management literature recommends creating insulating cocoons for tech workers, free from distraction. Managers are told to act as gatekeepers and hosts, blocking out gossipy coworkers while offering workers free pizza to stave off interruptive meal breaks.74 When geeks fail to terminate their connections to the competing temporalities of social life and reproductive labor, managers step in to help or force them to unplug. One way they do this is by encouraging rituals or rites of passage that signify the end of normal work time and the beginning of flow time.75 Just as often, though, geeks draw upon their own etiquettes, using indicators such as hand signals to preempt conversation when one party is in flow.76 Geek reputations for abruptness or absent-mindedness are founded in part on cultural practices for sustaining the flow state.The Bug distances the reader from these geek practices to show us how programmers might deform themselves to keep following this temporality. Tormented by the computer bug, Ethan begins to drink heavily and, by the end of the novel, he is blacking out and waking up to discover that he has spent his bender coding, teleporting through time and space like the sampling mouse cursor. During these bouts of amnesia, he begins to resemble the faulty machine he is working on. Remarking on the "sense of uncanniness" that surrounds the bug, the narrator suggests:

[T]he front end's behavior seemed a species of brain damage, memory run amok, the system an autistic child, freezing the keyboard and the mouse, shutting out communication with the world but going on to exist in some odd, internal state that was neither exactly dead nor exactly alive.77

Ethan, too, strives to block out everyone else to enter into a half-life. The tempos of the outside world intrude on Ethan's work in the form of rhythms, real or hallucinated, from loud music that he thinks is being played by his neighbors and one of his coworkers. Ethan's irritation leads him to try to muffle all other sound with elaborate makeshift headgear, an accessory he supplements with a parachute draped over his desk to screen out light, as well.

Boltanski and Chiapello argue that complete exclusion from all networks now means death.78 Ethan's laser focus leads him to cut ties to all other human beings, but it is repetition that drives him to suicide, which he carries out as a desperate attempt to end the unceasing recursions of debugging. His final thoughts as he ties a cord around his neck and stands on a chair are a series of commands: "Round and round. No way out. He should go to hell. Yes, now he knew what he had to do ... Go to hell. Goto! Ha! Unconditional. Jump."79 As Berta suggests elsewhere, when programmers pun like this it betrays a machinic literalism and, indeed, Ethan seems to think that he is giving himself over to the non-conscious computational processes that he believes produce conscious life. In Fortran, an unconditional GOTO statement can be used to end the computer's repeated execution of an instruction set, breaking the loop operations to come to a complete stop. Bringing these elements together, the reader becomes the compiler of Ethan's suicide.

Ullman presents this novel as a cautionary tale of overreaching technology, interleaving quotations concerning Mary Shelley's Frankenstein between accounts of the Jester bug, but I would argue that the novel offers just one outlook on a larger and more multifaceted shift in the nature of temporal experience. In a form of task-oriented time, the geek measures and apportions her life based on the tempo of media technology.80 Flow emerges as a common response to this re-emergent temporal order because, as Csikszentmihalyi explains, to enter into flow means to submit oneself to the time of the task at hand: during flow "[t]he objective, external duration we measure with reference to outside events like night and day, or the orderly profession of clocks, is rendered irrelevant by the rhythms dictated by the activity."81 The coding session, indeterminate in length, replaces the contractual workday.

With the advent of geek temporality, we see an erosion of the checks on labor-time achieved during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but we also see a growing defiance of any schedule that is not dictated by media itself. Ethan's digital temporality aspires to treat events as independent states, allowing him to jump between them with no chronology, defying Berta's tendency to sequence events into a realist narrative and Joanna's longing for a Bildungsroman that progresses toward hetero-familial fulfillment. The narrative thus betrays a small hint of moralism when it condemns Ethan for choosing to give his time to a computer program rather than a child.82 As I argue elsewhere, geeks inhabit a non-normative temporality that does not find its ultimate end in the achievement of heterosexual maturity.83Of course, the fact that Ethan's temporality defies norms does not necessarily make it liberatory: his desire to supersede developmental time through his cellular automata Game of Life program threatens to replay a common patriarchal narrative within the field of artificial life, a sub-discipline that has often looked to computer simulations of biological systems to fulfill the promise of masculine transcendence over feminized nature, reproduction, and embodiment.84 More to the point, though, Ethan's ability to choose work over everything else is predicated on his partner's subordination to his own idiosyncratic schedule: by the end of the novel, Ullman reveals that he pressured Joanna to get an abortion against her wishes because a baby would have gotten in the way of his career. In other words, the geek figure improvises new ways of inhabiting time even as it proves pliable to capital.

Management scientist Allen C. Bluedorn clarifies the implications of this insight in his essay "Temporal hegemony and the end of times (or should the Harlequin repent?)." Drawing on Harlan Ellison's science fiction classic, "Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman," Bluedorn calls on managers to move beyond chronocentrism, a temporal chauvinism that privileges one social organization of time over others.85 For too long, Bluedorn suggests, managers have acted like Ellison's Master Timekeeper, a dictator who imposes strict punctuality on his citizenry by deducting minutes from their lives for tardiness. Widely known as the Ticktockman, the Master Timekeeper's arch-nemesis is a jester figure known as the Harlequin who has dedicated his life to bucking every schedule and making as many other people as late as possible. Childlike yet atavistic, playful yet dangerous, the dimpled Harlequin introduces the anarchism of geek time by sabotaging the Taylorist dystopia, throwing jelly beans into conveyor belts and disrupting supply chains by distracting workers with goofy antics. Bluedorn refuses to fully back either the Ticktockman or the Harlequin, arguing instead that organizations should engage in a process of negotiation about what counts as on-time, one that takes into account social, cultural, and pragmatic concerns.86 Bluedorn turns to science fiction not only because it provides one of the best repositories of models for representing geek time but also because citing science fiction has long served as management science's go-to method for taming futurity.87 Just as management science's myths about virtual organizations and cyborg employees transform the future into an inevitable extension of the capitalist present, Bluedorn's deployment of Ellison's story allows him to incorporate the Harlequin's wild temporality into an organizational ordering of time all the harder to resist due to its complexity and suppleness. Temporal practices that once seemed marginal or detrimental to the workplace now serve to habituate workers to management's ever-growing demands on their time.

However, the geek ethos does not always succeed in smoothly facilitating the increase of absolute and relative surplus value. Often, the temporal logics of geekiness and capital collide in what is called crunch time. Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter define crunch time as "an ostensibly unusual period of crisis in the production schedule, when hours intensify, often up to sixty-five to eighty hours a week, sometimes more."88 During crunch time, tech workers sacrifice their own leisure and possibly even their future health to make up the discrepancy between the deadline imposed by management and the actual time required by the labor process with all of its necessarily unforeseeable stoppages, slowdowns, and hold-ups. Besides this contradiction, temporal organizational researchers have located another dynamic that results in crunch time — the difference between managerial time and flow time.

Echoing the literature surveyed by Boltanski and Chiapello, management scientist Leslie A. Perlow finds that software managers follow a temporality of decisive moments, rapidly moving between employees who are then forced to immediately drop whatever they are doing to meet urgent managerial requests.89 Thus, as in the interminable progress meetings in Ullman's The Bug, bosses repeatedly frustrate their employees by pulling them out of the focused, anti-social time required for flow. Often, Perlow suggests, this results in a cascading series of emergencies in which some employees are forced to allow their own work timelines to slip while they help others deal with even more pressing problems until everyone finds themselves in a crunch.90 Even within management science, many recognize the fundamental contradiction between geek and managerial temporalities.Still, though geeks often resent their bosses, it would go too far to paint them as somehow spontaneously anti-capitalist. It is precisely because of tech geeks' all-consuming fascination with their craft that they tend to run afoul of their bosses. Unlike geeks, business firms are not first and foremost interested in achieving the most elegant, interesting, or sophisticated solutions to their technical problems.91 Instead, their highest priority is always for their projects to be completed on time and under budget. This is in stark contrast to geeks who, if freed from the shackles of management, would keep on perfecting their work forever. By its very nature, the flow state serves as an end unto itself, refusing any external justification.92 Often, therefore, geeks ignore managerial directives, choosing instead to steal a little time away from their employers by focusing on demonstrating their technological proficiency in gratuitous and aestheticized displays of virtuosity.93 Like the rest of the professional-managerial class, tech workers are trapped in the tense position of serving capital while still trying to maintain the autonomy required to perform their jobs well.94

However, as one anonymous web developer suggests in "Sleep Workers' Enquiry," when tech workers resist management they actually provide a "sanity check" on capital, grounding it in realities that must be recognized to produce use values.95 Because coders and other experts function as an irritating conscience, reminding capital of what is technically feasible, they actually help save their companies from capital's self-destructive tendency to struggle to sever itself from the constraints of concrete materiality in the pursuit of profit.96 When management foolishly tries to rush a disastrous product to market, the technical staff's reputation as "pedants" and "sticklers" turns out to be not a bug but a feature.97

Geeks' contradictory class position has led some to realize that the balancing act between management and technical experts is ultimately impossible — technology will only reach its full potential when it is no longer constrained by private ownership. As with everything about geek time, though, geek unpunctuality remains politically ambiguous. While some geeks turn to Linux and other open-source software projects that are ever updating and never completed, others dream of the freedom from short-term time tables offered by the megascale enterprises proposed by anti-democratic cyberlibertarians such as Thiel and Musk.98 With the rise of the alt-right, trainspotters look for a dictator willing to ensure that the trains run on time.

This desire finds its ideological expression in the understudied ur-text of geek fascism, Democracy — The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, written by the heterodox Austrian economist by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Drawing heavily on a racist discourse that associates whiteness with rational planning and forethought, Hoppe argues that capitalist "civilization" requires a "low time preference" — that is to say, the ability to delay gratification to pursue long-term projects.99 Hoppe and his followers maintain that the collective capacity to focus on the future is under threat from welfare recipients and other racialized subjects unable to save for productive investments.100 These kinds of prejudices have prompted some geeky internet subcultures to call for the restoration of a monarchical ruler willing to reintroduce segregation and strengthen immigration controls while shielding free trade from popular interference.101 After slipping with Hoppe through the libertarian to fascist pipeline, some geeks produced memes crowning Donald Trump as the God-Emperor of Mankind, the beloved despot of Warhammer 40,000, a miniature war game in which genetically pure soldiers fight subhuman alien hordes in centuries-long campaigns that require worlds-spanning engineering marvels and countless lifetimes of unwavering commitment to win. A small but increasingly violent group of white, male fans seek for more geek time in a thousand-year Reich.Obviously not all geeks take this path. If Ethan's own solution to the geek impasse is to accelerate the labor process — working himself to death as a form of protest — Russian Doll provides a more hopeful way of imagining an escape from these fatal recursions. Whereas Ethan falls into his own private black hole, Nadia and Alan synchronize together over their idiosyncratic obsessions. They are temporal aliens, estranged from the linear timelines playing out around them, but they are not alone. Just as importantly, their shared rhythms form an imagined community that extends beyond the culture of gamers and coders to take in other strangers to chrononormativity ejected by capitalist progress.102 As New York Times critic Jason Zinoman points out in an excellent Twitter thread analyzing the season finale, the final shot of Russian Doll places the protagonists within a parade of homeless revelers decked out in Bread and Puppet Theater costumes so as to evoke the Tompkins Square Riots of 1988.103 During this uprising, the anarchists, activists, artists, and indigents of the Lower East Side flew a banner reading "Gentrification is Class War" before being brutally attacked by police.104 This is an especially strange and suspect image given the tech industry's prominent role in gentrifying urban neighborhoods from the Bay Area to Brooklyn, but it points to Russian Doll's utopian sense of contingency, one that allows the show to imagine an alternate history playing out. In this multiverse scenario, the geek desire to dwell on what others deem outmoded or untimely might resonate with subcultures that refused to move on or move along in the face of capitalist state repression. Although geek temporalities have often worked in concert with capitalism, fantastic narratives provide us with glimpses into other timestreams in which they may be put to more radical uses.105

Perhaps, though, this conclusion is too optimistic. Instead, we might read the final scene of Russian Doll as an allegory for the massification of geek temporality with all of its potentials and problems. As Nadia and Alan merge into a crowd filled with doppelgangers from their other timelines, we see the always-on, just-in-time ethos of the geek expanding to ever-larger and ever-poorer segments of the population. As the capitalist class speeds around the world, mass-cultural genres reconcile workers to their own economic immobility, transforming monotonous regularity into a pleasurable experience. Meanwhile, the work-life imbalances of affluent software engineers dedicated to their devices now plague Uber drivers whose changing daily schedules are dictated by apps.

Ullman predicted our present moment when she argued that service and domestic laborers would be increasingly forced to bend their own lives to fit geek time.106 Sociologist Sarah Sharma describes the construction of a "temporal architecture of time maintenance" which includes taxi drivers, flight attendants, hotel staff, yoga instructors, and other underpaid employees who help well-remunerated professionals such as software developers keep pace with their demanding work schedules by handling tasks for them ranging from logistics to restorative rest.107 The time needed to geek out proves to be unequally distributed in ways that reproduce raced, classed, and gendered hierarchies. Geek temporalities also rely upon a great deal of unpaid domestic labor. Historically, this has long been the case: Fred Turner notes that the countercultural communes that fed into early cyberculture relegated women to traditional support roles in which they performed the routine care labor necessary for men's self-directed activities.108 Even today, anti-feminist gamers dismiss women by asking them to go make them a sandwich. While these incidents point up how subversive it can be when marginalized and oppressed subjects claim geek time for themselves, it still remains true that the figure of the geek could only have emerged from a hothouse environment made possible by social inequality.We must therefore abandon our unreserved romance with the geek. Given that we live in a moment when Musk — an extremely online superfan — now tops the list as the highest paid C.E.O. in the U.S., we cannot keep thinking of the geek as purely marginal or oppositional.109 Ullman's novel may point a way forward when it depicts the women in Ethan's life scoffing at his obsessions: Joanna derides his artificial life program as "the key to all mythologies," while Berta discovers that the seemingly spooky or science fictional Jester bug with its almost willful behavior is nothing more than a little defect in the graphical user interface.110 Nadia's cynicism toward geek culture serves a similar function, allowing her to help Alan shake himself out of his own self-destructive rut by showing him the futility of approaching life like a winnable game. While it remains important to recuperate geek practices of resistance, I also think it is critical that we disenchant the wonder and rituals that bind geeks to the spirit of capital.

Jordan S. Carroll is a Professor of Instruction at the University of Tampa. His work has appeared in American Literature, Twentieth-Century Literature, and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

References

This essay benefited from my involvement with the University of California Davis ModLab and the IMMERSe Research Network for Video Game Immersion, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.