The Greeks distinguished two kinds of time: chronos (χρόνος), chronological or clock time, and kairos (καιρός), the right or opportune moment. In Bucher’s account, algorithmic media have shifted from chronos to kairos: our feeds are no longer ordered chronologically but arranged so that each item of information surfaces “at the right moment” – where “right” means whatever the system judges most relevant to each user. The making of these individualised feeds of kairos is, as with the zones of the gambling hall, co-produced by machine and – largely unwittingly – by human. The machine’s part is the algorithms that filter, sort, and rank what reaches us. The human’s part is personal data and behaviour: hours of presence, browsing history, search terms. Together they fabricate kairos – a right-time engineered to hold the user as long as possible.
Techno-Oligarchy and the Theft of Tomorrowhttps://shekhovtsov.substack.com/p/techno-oligarchy-and-the-theft-of