Over 60 years ago, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) implemented a radical transformation of temporal experience during the Great Leap Forward that fundamentally altered how people related to time. In an effort to accelerate socialist transformation, the CCP enforced a strict time regime on citizens by cultivating "time-consciousness" within them. Under this regime, citizens were supposed to have at least six hours of sleep per day, but many brigades bragged about working for four to five days with little to no sleep.

Revolutionary time consciousness pervaded China during the period. Today, the Great Leap Forward is looked upon as a failure in the modern era. It largely failed to achieve its goals, and the new constructions of time imposed by the state led to widespread famine and the deaths of millions.

Digital capitalism embodies a similar logic. The constructions of the "influencer," "hustle culture," and the enduring motif of sleep deprivation as a badge of honour are pervasive. While revolutionary time consciousness during the Great Leap Forward alienated people from agricultural and seasonal rhythms, digital capitalism alienates us from biological realities: our circadian rhythms remain perpetually out of sync with our sleep schedules, TikTok has destroyed our attention spans, and we have little patience for physical reality.

The CCP tried to engender revolutionary time consciousness through coercive measures to maximise production. Anyone familiar with Karl Marx might see the issue immediately. Under digital capitalism, platforms are designed to maximise engagement and extract the most value from users possible. Both systems understand extremely negative effects on the body as virtuous, both seek constant acceleration, and both impose temporal compression on individuals.

What makes digital capitalism more insidious is that at least revolutionary time consciousness required state violence. Chinese citizens did not willingly subject themselves to the new constructions of time imposed on them. Digital capitalism deputises us to become our own brigade leaders. We brag about our eighteen-hour workdays, our 4 am productivity routines, and our ability to function on minimal sleep. Not out of coercion, but because the algorithms reward constant presence and our culture valorises exhaustion.

The Great Leap Forward left China scarred. An entire generation was deprived of education, regions remain economically depressed today, and profound psychological trauma created a culture of fear, silence, and widespread distrust of authority. It was justified at the time as "progress." People may have been dying of famine, but what mattered was that China make up for lost time. The individual was tertiary to their labour, much like in America today.

We don't yet know what our digital Great Leap Forward will cost us. But the early signs aren't promising: rising rates of depression and anxiety, collapsing attention spans, and an entire generation medicated with amphetamines to treat their inability to focus. Physical reality itself recedes.

The age of information promised us utopia: that the internet would one day connect the entire world. Perhaps we are more connected. But Sora-generated content isn't the utopia we were promised.

The Great Leap Forward promised industrial parity with the West. At least that was a concrete goal. What is our digital Great Leap Forward racing toward? More content? More engagement? More optimisation of the self as product?

We are accelerating toward nothing, and calling it progress.