Published 3/23/26
The Unholy City
Part II
VI. The Chronocide Institute
Now we come to the Chronocide Institute, where the City develops its mechanisms for killing time. The Internet was originally thought to be a way of saving time. (I have often used time-saving devices, methods, and facilities, saving lots of time. But I notice that at the end of the day, it’s all gone!) Time saving is a mere chimera. True, certain processes are a lot quicker: it is far faster and easier to order goods online than to go out shopping for them. Email is far more convenient than playing phone-tag or writing a letter and placing it in the mail. Texting is even faster and more convenient. Alas, books are so easy to buy that my discretionary income is constantly in danger and my shelves are overflowing. Click and get delivery the same day, or perhaps just hours. In fact, the whole secret to the success of the Internet has been instant satisfaction, instant gratification, instant affirmation, and instant entertainment. And the path to those things is shorter and quicker than ever.
The trouble is that the satisfaction is often trivial, gratification fleeting, affirmation gratuitous, and entertainment superficial. It leaves one hungry for more. Thanks to the curated feed, one can simply scroll on to the next selection, endlessly. So, an impulse to locate and purchase something desired online, requiring only a few seconds (time saved!), often results in surfing for a far longer time. The psychology is quite compelling. Having found and ordered the item sought, the system now presents something else that catches one’s eye, followed by another and another, all well-aligned with past searches and previously detected interests. It is so easy to follow the City’s lead down the rabbit hole—where an hour becomes three, where you forget what you came for, where the real world recedes and the virtual world becomes all-consuming.
Engagement = advertising opportunity = money. That is the City’s primal imperative in all its institutions.
The enticements are new products, games, quizzes, puzzles, short videos, news features, short stories on interesting topics. The list of clickbait and mind-candy is constantly growing. None of them lasts more than a minute or two. But stack them up, and they amount to hours, many hours a week, whole days or more out of the year (just check your phone usage report).
Many people find they cannot stay away from this entertainment machine. Others find it far preferable to human companionship or need to escape into its imaginary world. Some turn to it to relax, only to grow more anxious because of the programming they are sampling. Many simply prefer idleness immersed in the City’s offerings to bestirring themselves in some more profitable enterprise. Many are simply careless about their time usage. The arithmetic is relentless.
Among the most efficient time-killing mechanisms are games. Mankind has always been fascinated by games. The computer is the greatest game machine ever. Since 1975’s Atari Pong, games have advanced enormously in response to huge popularity. While many staples of the pre-computer game culture have migrated to the computer and the Internet, modern games offer immersion in virtual worlds of combat, commerce, fantasy, and strategy, employing striking visuals, fast-moving scenarios, competition, collaboration, consuming puzzles, and many other types of engagement. Games are chronocide in concentrated form—all the mechanisms of nudging, affirmation, and engagement compressed into the most addictive possible package. The excesses of game engagement have been the object of study and reporting. The ubiquity of games certainly raises disturbing questions:
- are we making a mistake by allowing children to train their developing brains on Internet games?
- with computer games, are we learning to think like a machine rather than a person?
- are the structures of games becoming more significant components of the players’ ideation than the structures of the natural world, socialization, and traditional intellectual engagement?
- what are the consequences of these trends?
But any concerns that have been raised have been responded to by the game industry by making games even more attractive, immersive, and addicting.
Time is the price.
I have advanced to an age when time is of ever-increasing significance. All that anyone truly possesses is time, and it is limited. It is a gift, of which we are stewards. To waste it is a youthful indulgence, a middle-age luxury, and an elderly sin. Eventually, the end of one’s time will claim all one has, all one knows, and all one aspires to. From the limited pool of moments in life, the City steals an ever-increasing number of moments for the sake of selling the user something he does not need, probably does not want, or is even aware of.
Because the financial rewards are so great, the advertisers spend enormous sums to employ psychologists, sociologists, statisticians, and other high-powered experts to devise their tricks and traps. The result is a system that blends hypnotizing content with such well-concealed but compelling messaging that the viewer is both disarmed and persuaded.
Critical examination of advertising claims reveals their falsity. They consist largely of facts and features distorted to appear in the most favorable possible light, accompanied by visions of exaggerated personal exaltation and advancement—in other words, deliberate but agreeable falsehood. But the City rarely leaves us the space to engage our critical faculty, because the next feature follows quickly on the heels of the last.
The success of this strategy is witnessed by the enormous investment in infrastructure and manufacturing it justifies. What the City seeks is our attention. It obtains this by leveraging what it knows about our appetites, our ambitions, our needs, and our illusions. These are the City’s true fuel, not the machines or even the money. For, all the money in the world would not succeed in selling us something we instantly dislike. The attention economy rests on appetite and ambition, needs and illusions about self, all animated by the City’s attractive offerings.
For us, the captives in this system—trapped by our appetites and our emotional attachment to ease, comfort, and luxury—time has been effectively and efficiently killed. And with it, the opportunity has passed to become who we were meant to be, to love whom we were meant to love, and to know the God who gave us the gift of time—every moment.
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.—Ephesians 5:15-16 (NIV)
The Unholy City is licensed in its entirety under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
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