Everything is old now: A-temporal experiences of the digital in a rural farming co-operative

This article, drawn from an ethnography of a rural farming co-operative in the East of England, argues that the temporal experience of the digital is one of a-temporality rather than acceleration. In using the term a-temporality, the article is elaborating on a concept briefly discussed by Mark Fisher to denote an alienation from time, combining it with Natasha Dow Schull’s writings on casino capitalism. Schull suggests that Las Vegas capitalism has moved from streamlining time to deforming it, rendering it tensile and pliant. A similar temporal distortion is apparent in the community’s experience with digital devices. The article explores the relationships of coping the community members form with their devices, arguing that they utilize them to self-medicate emotional distress and in doing so open new ways of existing in time. In this way, the article makes sense of the fact that the group – environmentalists largely sceptical of other forms of technology – has adopted the digital so readily.