The barista at Bocca Coffee in Amsterdam shouts "Flat white for Sarah!" into a sea of downturned faces. No response. She tries again, louder. The coffee sits on the counter as Sarah scrolls through her fucking Instagram feed, probably for the tenth time this morning, trapped in that peculiar digital limbo where minutes stretch into hours while simultaneously vanishing altogether. Around her, sixteen other customers stand frozen in the same algorithmic trance. This scene repeats daily across thousands of cafes, each one a testament to social media's violent disruption of human temporal experience. It reminds me a bit of Miller’s planet in the movie Interstellar, where time moves slowly for those on-planet, while the rest just keep on living in regular time, your IG feed being the planet and time flying by while you’re on it, in case you didn’t get the analogy.

The platforms have engineered, a new relationship with time itself, one that fragments consciousness into easily monetizable units. Watch any teenager navigate Instagram: their thumb flicks through stories at such an inhuman speed you’d think they’re trying to make it squirt. Their brain processes these micro-moments in ways that would have been incomprehensible a decade ago. Videos auto-play, feeds refresh endlessly, and forty minutes fucking evaporate in what feels like milliseconds. This time manipulation forms the core feature of social platforms. Silicon Valley nerds have discovered that fiddling with how we perceive time creates perfect conditions for what they casually term "engagement."

French philosopher Henri Bergson's concept of "durée" - pure duration - described time as a continuous flow of experience, distinct from the mechanical ticking of clocks. Social media shatters this continuity. Each notification, each scroll, each auto-playing video creates a micro-interruption in our temporal consciousness. These platforms splice our experience into discrete, consumable fragments and then scramble them through algorithmic sorting. A friend's breakfast appears next to last week's concert, followed by an ad based on yesterday's search history. The natural flow of time dissolves into a chaos of eternal present moments. If there’s a multiverse, this is it.

TikTok exemplifies this temporal fragmentation with scary precision. The platform operates as a time-warping machine, designed to trap users in what neurologists term "flow state." But unlike the flow state artists or athletes experience - where deep focus creates a meaningful suspension of time - TikTok induces a shallow, addictive trance. Users report starting a scroll session at sunset and emerging, dazed, in the early hours of the morning, having absorbed hundreds of micro-videos without forming any coherent memories of their content, in my case, the day I downloaded TikTok, I started scrolling around 10 pm, and suddenly it was 2 am, by the time I managed to gather some willpower I felt so disgusted with my lack of self-control that I closed the app and deleted it from my phone.

Consider how platforms colonize memory formation itself. At a recent New Order show, I watched as thousands of phones rose in unison during the opening notes of Age of Consent. The crowd experienced the performance through their screens, already formatting the moment for social media while it unfolded. The present moment splits: part lived, part curated, neither fully real, the brain already anticipating the number of likes. Holidays, meals, celebrations - all now exist simultaneously as experiences and as future content, their reality diluted by the compulsion to document it.

Meta's "Memories" feature reveals another dimension of this temporal manipulation. The platform archives our past, then serves it back algorithmically, triggering nostalgia at precisely calculated intervals. That photo from ten years ago doesn't resurface by chance - it appears when engagement metrics suggest you're most likely to respond emotionally, to share, to remain on the platform longer. Our personal histories become ammunition in the attention economy, “oh look!, how stupid I looked without a beard..”

The pandemic years accelerated this warped relationship with time. As physical spaces closed, social platforms became our primary interface with the world. Days blurred together in an endless scroll of sourdough starters and Zoom screenshots. Platform engagement metrics exploded - Meta reported a 70% increase in time spent across their apps in the initial lockdown months. This temporal distortion grew so severe that psychologists coined terms like "temporal disintegration" and "pandemic time perception disorder" to describe the phenomenon. Try to think back to the pandemic days, for me, they were just one big chunk of time I can’t really quantify.

More disturbing still: emerging research suggests these platforms permanently alter developing brains. A 2023 Stanford study found significant changes in temporal processing among teenagers who spend more than six hours daily on social media. Their attention spans fragment to match the platforms' rapid-fire content delivery. They struggle with linear narratives, preferring the scattered, algorithmic storytelling of their feeds. Traditional temporal concepts - sustained focus, delayed gratification, linear progression - become increasingly foreign. some people might say this will make us more productive and smarter. but that’s not what life’s about. Why even live if you don’t experience anything fully?.

Platform designers understand these mechanisms with clinical precision. They employ teams of neuroscientists and behavioral psychologists to maximize what internal documents call "time on device." I’m sure they compartmentalize what they do, as we all do, but every feature, from infinite scroll to algorithmic sorting, serves to disrupt natural temporal rhythms. The goal? Keep you suspended in a diluted multi-timeline endless present, always engaged, never quite satisfied, constantly seeking the next hit of novelty.

This manipulation represents a fundamental shift in human consciousness. Throughout history, we marked time through natural cycles - sunrise and sunset, seasons, harvests. Industrial capitalism imposed mechanical time through factory whistles and punch cards. Now we've entered the era of algorithmic time, where our temporal experience splinters into discontinuous fragments, each one optimized for maximum engagement and profit extraction.

The platforms have become time machines of sorts, but far more insidious than anything H.G. Wells imagined. Rather than transporting us through time, they've made time itself malleable, fragmentary, and commodified. Our consciousness increasingly synchronizes to algorithmic rhythms rather than circadian ones. Each scroll, each notification, TikTok pulls us further from natural temporal experience into an artificial always-on, engineered for consumption rather than lived experience.