Abstract:
In the digital wave, time manifests three forms of alienation: acceleration, simulation, and symbolization. This gives rise to “time-lag anxiety” at the level of social existence, “synchronization anxiety” at the level of inner morality, and “deadline anxiety” at the level of self-relationship. The reason lies in the fact that technology decodes the extended experience of life into programmable, storable, and tradable data entities, dismantling the metaphysical foundations of traditional time and reconfiguring its ontological properties through the interaction of humans, devices, and networks. On one hand, the new immutable capital system centered on data compresses the space for variable capital and surplus value production, causing a fundamental rupture between the law of value measured by labor time and its material foundation. On the other hand, the creative agency of the subject, which should be liberated by technology, is instead disciplined by the logic of technological time, internalized as a self-driven yet self-condemning “time syndrome.” The intertwining of excessive subject investment and the reification of digital time constitutes the ontological root of temporal anxiety. Therefore, transcending this anxiety requires dismantling the hegemonic logic of data capital at the political-economic level, while constructing an open, symbiotic human-machine ethical framework at the epistemological and ethical levels. Only by freely integrating technological logic with the rhythms of life to cultivate a new temporal rationality can humanity achieve genuine free development and advance in tandem with the era within the digital civilization process.