ADHD and Machine-Time

Frederic Jameson: “Clock time is the time of the machine itself.”

The future does not strictly speaking exist and yet whole sectors of our psychical apparatus are devoted to the intangible dream of tomorrow. My tomorrows are typically more productive than my todays ever are; (the dream of productivity falls apart in the now); I blame my ADHD and its weird mutation of time. That most of our life falls under the dominion of machine-time means likewise that the future has already been colonized by the machine; the temporal authority of our iPhones dominates even what has not happened yet. This machine-time is driven by the next, a founding myth of modernity; sequential, automatic, logical, irrevocable and doomed to end; the inertia of “next” is the apocalypse. Stimulants such as caffeine1, Adderall, Ritalin and cocaine are alike in that they integrate the psyche into this train-inertia: the next essay, the next email, the next drink. My own ADHD is weird in that it is both a hyperactivity, jumping next next next, and also a vortex of focus (on the wrong thing) that, I think, is an attempt to stop time; a defense by which I retain a very old sense of non-sequential time in the midst of the constant demand of the next; it’s like a counterspell my unconscious is casting against the forces of consumption. There is the chronophage demon that devours time—the machine driving our attention (twitter)—producing hyperactivity; and there is a symptom of time-dilation that defends the human against this consumption. I experience this dilation not as deficit but as a surplus of attention; the intensity of attention can warp clock-time to the point of failure; the next becomes irrelevant in the streaming now; I just don’t get much work done, let alone finish what I started. Our AI dystopia is not that the machines think like a human, but rather that humans think like a machine. ADHD is probably a form of resistance to this machine-think.