Project Vision 21

For some time now, I have begun to feel that I experience and live time differently than I used to. This shift, however, is not related to my age, habits, or country of residence. My hypothesis (which I cannot yet fully prove) is that algorithms have altered our perception of time.

For countless millennia, human beings perceived and measured time as something natural—that is, by following the movements of the sun, moon, and stars. People aligned their biological rhythms with these natural movements. Indeed, many (if not all) calendars in use today are based on tracking the paths of the sun and moon.

Everything changed in the 17th and 18th centuries with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which brought about the adoption of "mechanical time"—a system where every minute is identical to the one before and the one after, and where a machine (not the sun) determines the time in a given location.

The agreement reached by US and Canadian railway companies in the late 18th century to establish time zones (which we still use today) exemplifies this mechanization of time. It is a system that dictates we rise when the alarm clock rings (not when the sun comes up) and fall asleep only after watching that last short video right before our eyes finally close.

However, I believe that while these two ways of viewing and living time—natural cyclical time and mechanical linear time—have not disappeared (nor will they), they have receded into the background. They are now overshadowed by what might be termed "algorithmic time." By determining what we see and when we see it, algorithmic time reshapes our experience of time itself.

Natural time had its cycles, allowing us to decide when things should be done. Mechanical time—precisely because it was linear—was predictable, regular, and easy to share (as evidenced by the clock). Algorithmic time, by contrast, is personalized, adaptive, and opaque. It is not a form of time that seeks greater speed, but rather one that controls our experience of time.

In March 2026, Han Wang and his colleagues published an academic article (“Can AI Make Us Less Eco-Friendly? Insights from Four Experiments on Digital Speed, Time Perception, and Sustainable Consumption”) proposing that algorithmic time disrupts our connection to our future selves—and, consequently, to future consequences.

According to these authors, this emerging algorithmic time alters our temporal horizons, creating imbalances rooted in the “cognitive and affective side effects” of interacting with algorithms—effects that apparently destabilize our internal clocks.

In his classic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” (1967), E. P. Thompson argued that the clock did not merely measure time but created a new type of person governed by “clock time.” Today, we find ourselves compelled to live by algorithmic time, which allocates time to our attention.