This chapter seeks to link ideas about rhythm and time to issues of labour, social media and capital. In doing so, it draws insights from a large-scale research project under the title of Values ' Value. Using custom software to gather intersecting perspectives of temporal activity across participants’ use of Facebook and the wider internet, the Values & Value project explored how such platforms effect an attunement between different processes, from personal social interactions to speculative investments in advertising and the circulation of capital within financialisation. We consider attunement as a process through which different spheres of activity are brought into momentary alignment. These spheres of activity unfold in distinct and sometimes conflicting rhythms that cannot be easily coordinated. The relation between time, technicity and capital as attunement is analysed through concepts drawn from Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis and Ingold's notion of the taskscape, seeking to make more explicit the ways in which algorithms intervene in and constitute processes of the capture of value and circulation of capital. We argue that platforms such as Facebook seek to encourage and maximise the most profitable moments of attunement by monitoring and intervening in these different spheres of activity through various algorithmic processes that constantly evaluate and task the user in a way that both consumes and closes down time.

Data Points

Imagine we could follow one point of data. The exact moment of its creation would be resolutely precise, yet, caught in a stream of other data, isolating it and determining its specific significance and value would be hard. It could be born in the midst of a finger swiping a touch screen, clicking a button, tapping in a comment or snapping a photo that is instantly uploaded. It could be more passive, as someone moves from one cell mast area to another or one wifi fihotspot to another. It may be coincidental, as someone browses the web or checks a message feed. It may be covert, as a microphone is turned on and off for a few seconds capturing ambient audio. The moments within which such a point of data may be created are highly contingent and indeterminate, yet much of our current economic and political climate is shaped by investments in such data and in attributing specific significance and value to it (Zuboff 2019).