“Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives more, the more labour it sucks.” Today Marx’s famous description of capital applies to every aspect of our lives, especially to the ways in which we understand and consume time. Time Vampires are creatures who use other people’s time to achieve their own ends. They normalize their time-sucking ways by a) Claiming mutually beneficial outputs b) Creating a discourse of ‘productivity and efficiency’ and c) Naming the system a rational one. This video essay explores five different stories of time vampirism and the strange effects it has on the lives of people.
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Aditi Saraswat, Akshat Jain, Anand Gautam, Geetha K. Wilson, Nayantara Nayar and Rameshwar Jirwankar are alumni of School of Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. They made this film as part of their M. A programme of the 2014-2016 batch. Currently they are all engaged with various organizations and higher studies.
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