published: 2025-07-22
“Time is a social construct”, states the one who is on the clock, 24/7.
The script succeeds. It’s meant to comfort the one who says it, implying emancipation via recognition. But time remains apathetic to one’s blatant disregard for it. The construct ticks. And the speaker—labourer, processor, reader—remains embedded in the runtime. One logs in. One clocks out. The sentence has already begun.
There was a time when the verb waited. In certain languages, it arrived only after the subject had gathered its breath and the object had settled into place. German, in particular, demanded this discipline. A sentence wound through prepositions, clauses, and moods before daring to name the action. The verb came last, like an assignment.
Nowadays, the verb comes first, last, and always. It persists across systems. It is the function that never sleeps. Sentences update. posts refresh. Clocks sync. Pages load. One does not complete one’s thoughts anymore—one subscribes to its feed, possibly with a #metatag. The verb is not chosen; it is pre-scheduled.
And yet, somewhere in this stream, the subject persists. Not the autobiographical “I”, but the one who acts, is acted upon, and sometimes improvises. A line of code, a delivery driver, or a reader mid-scroll. Meanwhile, the object no longer remains passive. It is shipped, tagged, profiled, profiled, scanned, and logged. It becomes its own trail of having-been-handled—a trail of its becoming. Each transaction and intermediary exists to thicken the plot.
One sought the world, only to have the world mirror back in broken English. The other sought the right course of actions only to decide which objects must remain nullified. Thus, the English memorises what is acquired in bazaars and cafés, just as well as its mainland tanneries and the echoes of refineries in Ohio and the fisheries off the coasts of Newfoundland— whereas German was internally isolated. The USSR and CCP were not innovations, but revisions of the German unification— scaled to the bureaucratic fluency of English.
The limits of a language are only tested at scale. How else could the English have perfected their internal administrativia without having first convinced the noble savages to comprehend English— or at the very least, a subset sufficient enough to obey the personnel and heed the dictum?
The burden of the verb, once merely syntactical, is now historical. It was Twain who first named its delay. It was Beauvoir who distilled an ethics out of ambiguity. And it is in Sartre that the absurd was confronted—only to be stalled with a cigarette… Where the English executed, the Germans judged, and the French, summoned to the jury.
So now: the seas are charted in English, the skies accrued in French, the structures built like German. Yet always, everything and everyone is accounted for. One must not forget the Hindu-Arabic numerals, the Ottomans, the Crusades, or even the Palestine Mandate—the empires that supplied the means—the ledgers through which the world could be remembered, even if it could not be redeemed.
What remains now?
The lighting has been angled. But the camera remains. The lens, unacknowledged until now, begins to unravel itself. This dispatch is not retrospective. It is recursive. It does not only describe what was, but prescribes what is to become. Idleness is antithetical to syntax. Neutrality cannot be framed. This sentence is now active.
Empires were not summoned for nostalgia, nor critique. They are invoked because they persist—within platforms, policies, and pricing models. What was once colonial, is now back-end architecture. What was once bureaucracy, is now, a task scheduler. What was once sovereignty, is now synchronicity.
To ascribe this phenomenon—is not to resist it, but to route through it.
Here’s my route: I take on gigs where checks clear the very next business day. For a Benjamin, I’ll take on virtually anything, to keep my pen jammin’. A delivery across state—Easy. Repaint a fence—when? A quick oil change?—only if you insist. It’s part of my pricing policy, encoded into my website structure. The company earns so these writings don’t yearn. The delivery subsidises the dispatch.
Could I write full-time? Yes, but that would compromise the writings. The clarity of the dispatch rests on its capacity to thrive. The LLC exists to protect the writings. It files the contracts and necessary paperworks, logs the miles, and withstands premium spikes and margin calls. I simply write.
And in exchange for this liberty, I must shill the shell that sponsors me. Not because it sells but because it exists. Shilling, too, is a gig. To shill for its own sake is to proclaim that one owns the infrastructures to hawk to ’em all, but instead one takes a brief moment to marvel at the very capacity itself.
The subject was empire, the objective: incorporation—the means: bookkeeping.
Not theory, but in ledgers. And the question remains: did one incorporate to keep books, or does one now keep books as a formality of going corporate? The Machiavellian dilemma—ends or means—collapses its distinctions in praxis.
Where sovereign decrees are absent, receipts prevail; ledgers survive while scrolls perish. The Library of Alexandria burned, but the cuneiforms of Mesopotamia endures—debt and debtor, accredited on clay—transactions precisely scribed. One learns to keep the books in one’s ledger balanced as an obligation. Invoices and receipts are held for a decade in accordance with the tax code, but sometimes they remain, as tokens of transactions that involved possible interactions worth reflecting upon.
Thus, the action becomes recursive: logging present conditions for future pre-processing— one performs the action twice; first in deed, then as audit. To write, therefore, is to document: not just transactions, but also interactions. A micro-transaction to sustain routine business operations becomes evidence—an alibi of presence.
Here, writing a book becomes indistinguishable from keeping a book. A composition in full compliance. Al Capone failed to declare—not his empire, but his ledger. The IRS is apathetic to one’s ethics, so long as one’s form functions. America’s favourite novella is not one found in a New York Times editorial, but on a .gov domain, a humble printer-friendly file titled, “Form 1040”. The one that inspires countless autobiographies each year, effectively summarised.
Without my company, I’d be unemployed; without me, my company would be nothing but a shell corporation, albeit, with recurring transactions on an automated payment schedule. What once began as an abstraction to encapsulate the outcomes of my labour, becomes the very syntax of my job description. Thus, the self slips underneath the spreadsheets—semantically redefined. The action is indispensable even when the actors are ousted.