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Temporal Enclosures in the Age of Cruel Optimization

Sandy Di Yu



Notes

1 Philosopher Edmund Husserl, the founding father of phenomenology (or the study of subjective, conscious experience), understood time as lived time which unifies past, present, and future into one as continuous flow. This differs from the cold, objective and measured time of the mechanical clock.
2 In Sarah Ahmed’s “What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use”, the history of usefulness is outlined, where imperial justification of violence, eugenics, social hierarchy, racial capitalism, and necropolitics, amongst less extreme matters, are all part of the political and ethical dimensions of use (Ahmed, 2019). Use also demonstrates a strange temporality, future-oriented to at once determine what can be used of an already existing body (ibid: 115), and to coerce bodies into usefulness with the promise of a reward (ibid: 120). 

3 Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s concept of the “slow cancellation of the future”, for example, relates financial capitalism to the influx of digital technologies that are often built for the purpose of risk aversion. Antoinette Rouvroy also discusses this in relation to algorithmic governmentality, a thread picked up by Bernard Stiegler who speaks about a collapse of a common horizon.

4 In “Platform Capitalism”, Nick Srnicek traces the rise of internet platforms through the loosening of monetary policies after both the dot com bubble and bust, and the 2008 financial crisis (Srnicek, 2017). 


Works Cited

Afif, H. (2026). Securly - Slop is that deep. [online] Icon. Available at: https://icon.ink/articles/slop-is-that-deep/.

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the use?: On the uses of use. Durham: Duke University Press.

Anders, G. (2019). Apocalypse without Kingdom - Journal #97. [online] E-flux.com. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/97/251199/apocalypse-without-kingdom.

Berlant, L. (2011). INTRODUCTION: AFFECT IN THE PRESENT. In Cruel Optimism (pp. 1–22). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1220p4w.4

Halpern, O., Jagoda, P. Kirkwood, J. W., and Weatherby, L. (2022). “Surplus Data: An Introduction.” Critical Inquiry 48 (2): 197–210. doi: 10.1086/717320.

Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Bodies. New York: New York University Press.

Hui, Yuk. On the Existence of Digital Objects. University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Hui, Y. (2020). COSMOTECHNICS. Angelaki, 25(4), 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2020.1790828

James, I. (2010). Bernard Stiegler and the Time of Technics. Cultural Politics: an International Journal, 6(2), pp.207–227. doi:https://doi.org/10.2752/175174310x12672016548360.

Portanova, S. (2022). Whose Time Is It? Sternberg Press.

Srnicek, Nick. 2017. Platform Capitalism. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:101:1-2018070406050013707515.

Steyerl, H. (2023). Mean Images. New Left Review, [online] (140/141), pp.82–97. Available at: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images.

Hito Steyerl (2025). Medium Hot. Verso Books.

Stiegler, Bernard. The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism. Cambridge, UK; Medford, Ma: Polity Press, 2019.




Do you feel tired all the time? Like you never have enough hours in the day to get stuff done? Does it seem like everything is accelerating and yet not really moving? Do you feel a bit starved for time, for energy? And each day buries you under more things to care about, to consider, to disavow or boycott or take up or integrate or download or read or share or like or repost or send an email to your MP about or simply give more time to? 

If this sounds like you, maybe you should give up! Try giving up today, and you’ll find yourself in no better a position, because actually you’re caught in a loop where you can’t give up or opt out. Oops! Tough luck, they made you care just enough to not look away, but not enough to actually make change happen. And it’s not like you know how to get things to change; that page is not found. Try a hard refresh, cmd+shift+r? Maybe cmd+q and restart? Maybe disassociate long enough for the system to finally shut up and shut off, or at least go to sleep?

~~~

Do you feel this way, like I do? I felt this way acutely back in 2022, when I first wrote about temporal enclosures. With this neologism, I was trying to articulate the effects of privatisation on the internet, where the websites that raised me, for better or worse, suddenly promised shareholder value. Expanding in ways that seemed to parallel the enclosures of land in pre-capitalist Europe, the attention economy took over what once felt like a common internet. Time wasn’t ours to own anymore, nor was it shared amongst community, but was instead apportioned at the whims of companies whose only economic model was dependent on our little addictions to their little dopamine hits. I felt tired, behind, probably a bit winded physically from the effects of getting ill with COVID-19 about four or five times.

I still feel this acutely, and I still think it’s a cute analogy, but I’ve since come to realise that either something is missing in this formulation, or something has changed such that my original thesis on temporal enclosures cannot fully capture the fragmented, oozy reality of the digital as we experience it today. There was a moment in time, between lockdowns and travel restrictions, when Big Tech attempted to bring about the dawn of the metaverse, a replica of the real, but better. It was during this time when mass layoffs were tempered with new industries and technologies. In the pandemic’s aftermath, we’re left with back-to-the-office mandates and a $77 billion rebrand of a company that ultimately scrapped almost everything metaverse-related except the name. But as with previous global recessions, money found new surfaces on which to agitate and bubble.

My previous argument began with the enclosures of land in medieval Europe during the transition period between feudalism and capitalism. Common land, which was a rich resource for peasants who subsisted on the generosity of nature, became privatized. Those who once lived off the land alongside their agrarian duties were forced into waged industrial labour as factories started cropping up. Revolts took place, blood was shed, but ultimately capitalism gained its foothold as the new, dominant economic system. Marx described this enclosure of common land as primitive accumulation, where land was the first thing to go private.

Primitive accumulation of land still feels like a useful lens through which to understand the enclosure of the internet commons: instead of physical space privatized, time in the form of attention is extracted from web users as companies compete for our every moment.  But time, as we experience it, doesn’t fit neatly into this configuration. The very human experience of time, as Husserlian phenomenology, as the uneasy knowing of immanence and of our finitude, as duration, or as affective futurity, imposes a different set of rules from something as tangible as space. Finitude, especially, poses a neat contradiction in the post-internet age, where everything threatens to live on in perpetuity—even as the digital dark age poses the threat of us never being able to recover our digital selves once file formats and the hardware on which they subsist become obsolete.

Finitude presents another contradiction, premised on what I would argue is the underlying logic of the digital society, which is that of optimization. The logic of optimization pervades every instance of the post-internet era, which is also an era of the post-digital, where everything percolates from the reticular infrastructure of networked computation. Optimization means to make the best use of something, oriented towards a future and a goal, without ever specifying what that future or goal will be. Particular to the digital, optimization is premised jointly on infrastructure built to cater to machine-readability and an alignment with the growth models that fund technological innovation. Optimization exceeds the scope of efficiency (Halpern, 2022), which exists solely on the calculus of more-for-less, and instead occupies a new mode of processual logic.

Politically inclined with its component definition of “best” and “use”, this logic mimics that of improvement, which recalls land improvements during the time of enclosures. Land improvements, following Locke’s theory of property, involves both the initial changing of wild landscape into arable land and the enclosure and privatisation of land through physical labour. It intermingles with the philosophy of progress, a colonial sentiment justifying the violence perpetrated by settlers across the last millennium and well into today. It contains the kernel of scientific management and all the labour abuses that come with it.

A few years ago, the term “optimization” appeared here and there in texts about digital technologies or marketing and less frequently as a term in everyday language. Today, the word appears in the most innocuous places: a TikTok video explains how a woman optimized her boyfriend of ten years. Wellness influencers speak on how to optimize protein intake. Neologisms around looksmaxxing, sleepmaxxing, fibermaxxing, or anything-maxxing demonstrate how optimization has become memeified and ubiquitous. If optimization was once a technology-specific term, it is now as prevalent as the technologies from whence it sprung.

The logic of optimization is everywhere, and it belies the reality of our mortality, for this logic promises perpetuity: a directional orientation with no end in sight. Hidden between best and use is a motion towards the ineffable, a goal that is undefined and unformalized. Implied in this motion is the possibility of betterment: that somehow, by making the best use of web interfaces, nutrition hacks, algorithmic processes, or societal expectations, you’ll find yourself a step closer to your desired end. Yet the end goal exists only beyond the horizon of our immanence, unachievable in actuality, taunting and teasing with its implication. Optimization is cruel by nature, a recomposition of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s cruel optimism for the post-digital age. 

For Berlant, all attachment is optimistic, but in the author’s own words, “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011:1). Cruel optimism, like all measures of attachment, is inherently related to phenomenological time, as it structures events and historicity through the contours of affective life. It may be understood as the future-facing hope and anticipation that comes into disrepair by the very means that allowed one to be hopeful in the first place.

Through the prism of the post-digital, futurity may reflect back on Husserlian phenomenology. Here I am reminded of Yuk Hui’s tertiary protention, a term that refers to how anticipation or imagination of the future (protentions) are filtered through the technological (Yuk Hui, 2016: 221). This contrasts with tertiary retentions, a term coined by the late great theorist Bernard Stiegler, famous for having robbed four banks in his youth before being caught and sent to prison for five years. He also wrote a lot about time and “technics”, or the condition under which tools, technology, and skill inform the human condition. Stiegler explains retentions as follows: “Primary and secondary retentions are psychic realities—the first belonging to the present time of perception and the second to the past time of memory. Tertiary retentions are artificial retentions, not psychic but technical, such as archives, recordings and technical reproductions in general” (Stiegler, 2019: 22).

If we accept that optimism is cruel when attachment to that which offers a sense of possibility is actually the very act that makes its attainment impossible, then all attachment under the logic of optimization, which runs our digital society, may be understood as cruel. This cruelty is no longer about the function of hope in events of attachment, nor the immediate anticipation or imaginings of the future based on memory, as with secondary or primary retentions. Instead, we are faced with the directional logic that perforates all instances of digital viability. We must understand cruel optimization as it relates to goal-driven, forward-oriented attachments, and as a component of the digital society that is in constant flux, moving however it can towards ever-progressing yet never-to-be-achieved goals. What, after all, is the maximum in looksmaxxing?

It’s commonly said by cultural theorists that predictive technologies foreclose the future, and the inherent cruelty of it is that such tech promises to make a better future when, in reality, it simply extends the present. As Stamatia Portanova writes, “preemption and prediction do not create a real future but only an insistence ‘on’ and ‘of’ the data of the present” (Portanova, 2022: 13). When applied to our current reliance on predictive technologies that have inundated our everyday lives in the form of media conglomerates, finance markets, military surveillance, and so on, we might determine that the real cruelty of optimization is its preclusion of an open future.

With tertiary protention, or an artificially instigated anticipation, the experience of time is fundamentally altered. It relies on both the ability to recall information via exteriorized retention (think archives, books, anything that contains memory outside the body) and the immediacy of output through the incredible speeds of external processing. Time is thus enclosed through the perpetuity of the present that disallows other futures, and through time’s negligibility, where the next moment is always already here. It is not merely free time that becomes privatised and extracted for shareholder value, but the entire semblance of futurity that collapses under the dominion of cruel optimization. 

This phenomenon is amplified by the current onslaught of AI, propped up by speculative investments that promise a payoff, that promise the bubble won’t burst, promise that there’s no worry or dread about this sexy new tech, as if the market hasn’t pumped its organs full of beta blockers to keep those anxieties at bay. If the future is more of the same, what’s there to be worried about? The future is not real, so YOLO for real, for eternal return is no longer your problem.

On the flip side, the future is perhaps too real: in the configuration under cruel optimization, this future becomes more real than the actually existing present. As Hito Steyerl explains, “hedging future risk creates present-day trouble. In other words, the more one tries to pre-empt the future, the more the present gets out of hand” (Steyerl, 2025: 2). This brings to mind the “middle-class logic of reproductive temporality” (Halberstam, 2005: 5), where the child who may or may not be in existence but is nonetheless a representation of the future, is pandered to at the cost of those already in existence. Care is future-focused, so you give up a little of the now for a lot of what’s to come. 

Whilst not actively predicting the future, the pre-empting that comes with this AI boom isn’t far off. Risk-averse logics coupled with the predictive mechanisms that inform everything from a cute text message to where to direct autonomous weapons rely on this same logic. The future could be so, so good. Just don’t live for the moment.

We’re living within a means-to-ends field of logic, except we’re in a perpetual state of means, and the ends can never quite be reached. This perpetual state of means is also a state of means in a different sense, the sense of the average, like with Steyerl’s mean images, or machine-rendered imagery that “bakes moral, statistical, financial and aesthetic values as well as common and lower-class positions into one dimly compressed setting” (Steyerl, 2023: 84). To be middling is to be chosen as representative, the hyperreal in its purest form. Yet even in the mean, there exists the sleek underbelly of optimization, where the mean itself is what these predictive algorithms optimize towards. Mean optimization is a limb of cruel optimization, oriented towards a future promise that is perpetual sameness, where the goalpost is ever-present as a dot in the distance, at the middle of the horizon. Cruel, mean optimization keeps us in check to never go too far out of bounds or from the average, and always on a forward-oriented trajectory.

Both the logic and aesthetic of optimization pervade internet spaces, especially when it comes to web platforms. Platforms were once the perfect subject to be analogized as enclosures: riding on the wave of loose monetary policies, they acted as benign, almost “natural” developments within networked ecosystems. They like to play pretend. They bring people together. They’re not at fault for the mean and cruel ways labor rights have eroded under the gig economy. How could they be, when they’re not actually employers? They just facilitate and empower. If you’re a hustler, you wouldn’t complain about all the opportunities afforded to you to make some extra tips. If you were a better person more generally, more optimized in your body and mind, you wouldn’t have been habituated into your bedrot doomscroll tendencies. Nothing is ever the platform’s fault, for a platform is flat and neutral, just existing peacefully amongst the nodes of the internet.

We’re now in a strange new phase of media, where the inundation of mean images, the sloppy seconds churned out of gargantuan databases, has altered the logics of the platforms. As Hadi Afif references in his deep dive into slop, cultural researcher Al Hassan Elwan explains how the attention economy has given way to the distraction economy. The latter scales better, costs less, and is perfectly poised for optimization (Afif, 2026). Do platforms still enclose, when temporality is less durational and more scattered across cyberspace? In the age of cruel optimization, the temporal enclosures that mimicked the hedging of common land no longer merely enclose by privatization, but also through hedging risk and futurity, turning phenomena into derivatives. The present is all surface and no depth, and the future continues to be a cruel, empty promise. 

How do we burrow our way out of these temporal enclosures? Afif’s article centers on Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung’s 2025 film “Welcome to Jankspace, Babes”, a meditation on the optimization culture that links our oversaturated image feeds with the bodily optimization made possible by pharmacological commerce. I thought I saw a glimmer of an answer in this work. About halfway into the film, a 3D version of entrepreneur Bryan Johnson is introduced. Johnson became famous in the past few years for spending millions to subject himself to tests and procedures in an attempt to halt aging. Portrayed as a young child in the film, baby boy Johnson explains how he is attempting to reach age escape velocity, and how great his biomarkers are. The narrator of the film, it-girl and perpetual muse Julia Fox, replies: “Babes, you're getting a bit Patrick Bateman on us here. Maybe you should sit down, take a deep breath and have a matcha? Like you do realise that rather than being scientific, any claims about the totality, optimization, and perfect ability of the body is, like, fundamentally theological, right?”

Optimization is fundamentally theological. I think this is part of the problem, or at least it’s what needs to be addressed before any attempts at designing another system under which another logic may dominate, and one that doesn’t promote this paradoxical feeling of perpetual standstill, coupled with constantly running out of time. Optimization operates on the same temporal logic as the Christian eschatology that permeates the Western psyche. It’s the idea that somewhere out there, in the distance, we will encounter that which we are fated to, something that represents the end. 

When right-wing political theorist Francis Fukuyama spoke about the triumph of free-market capitalism as the end of history, it was so readily believable because it was a secularization of this eschatology (James, 2010). For someone like Günther Anders, one of the biggest challenges we’re faced with is figuring out how to break from this logic without skidding into incurable nihilism. We need to conceive of a “naked apocalypse without kingdom”, so to speak, such that the end can truly spring a revolution anew, rather than a mere hauntological reverie of the old. Under Christian eschatology, “the present and the future were always intertwined. The kingdom always arrived, because it was always already there. And it was always there because it arrived continually” (Anders, 2019). Optimization, in the same way, is endlessly there, cruel and taunting in its purported presence. With the collapse of the future and the present into a single flat dimension, the present itself becomes ceaseless.

Cruel optimization erodes our ability to build and connect, to imagine with a full array of future possibilities, to create an open future not pre-empted by means and database slop. It makes you tired to the point of hopelessness, then gives you a tiny dribble of hope, enough to exhaust whatever you have left. I can’t truthfully say that I know exactly how to wriggle our way out of this. I have an inkling or two of possible solutions to be explored, but I suspect they need to grow into something more substantial first. Lauren Berlant doesn’t offer a solution to cruel optimism, but cruel optimism isn’t a default condition of affective life. Cruel optimization, on the other hand, seems to be inescapable due to the extent to which our reality is enmeshed with the dictates of algorithmic governmentality.

I don’t want to offer an easy solution, because I don’t believe there are any. When faced with our seemingly doomed reality, there is the tendency to suggest a “return to the collective” or to “create new imaginaries”, as called out by Dan Rosen in his poignant-if-uncomfortably-close-to-home video. Less flimsy suggestions include calls for decomputing or degrowth, both of which take on infrastructural issues beyond the technological. But these are still grand overarching ideals rather than instructions on practical steps to take. What can actually be done on the scale of the individual human, other than to wait for the existing systems to decay? Decompose, decompute, or degrow, all options forward seem to be a return to some base level which existed before the bloom of telecommunications that currently holds us captive. Is it possible to simply reject optimization, even if we’re caught in this reality that subsists on the datafication of everything? Is it possible to escape these cruel, mean, temporal enclosures where we’re held? Maybe the antithesis to the cruelty that envelops us in forlorn hope is not bleak blackpilled nihilism, but an exercise of patient repose that wills us to outlive the current state of things. Maybe this cruel optimization will decompose and dissipate before we do. Maybe we’re simply meant to touch grass.