“The best way to make money is having people work without paying them for their time. The consumer is seen as a workforce that is plentiful, motivated, and free.”
Marie-Anne Dujarier, Sociologist, La Sorbonne, Paris
Having spotted the title ‘Time Thieves’ I was equally intrigued and skeptical. Having seen Cosima Dannoritzer’s Time Thieves, I am without skepticism.
Through interviews with experts and victims who describe in detail how our time is literally stolen, Dannoritzer makes a strong case for all us victims to take a look at our stolen time—and to reclaim that time for our pleasure, our health, our happiness, our dignity, and our society.
I especially appreciated the irony of one resource provided in the film with a winked eye—Spencer Greenberg’s attempt to address our stolen loss of time by offering customers the ‘Value of Your Time Collector.’ In case my sense of irony is not justified, here is his site.
This topic of lost time is dead serious—there have been countless suicides and early deaths of employees who feel hopeless in fulfilling their chosen work in a timely manner. Japan has a name for this tragedy: Karoshi. People who commit suicide due to mental stress are called karojisatsu.
Time Thieves is expertly produced, and definitely deserves our time—taken seriously, this film will save you a lot of time.
“What we’ve done is taken the most ambiguous, subjective, amorphous idea that one can think of—time—and we’ve translated it into the most objective, [and one of] the most tangible entities that I know, and that’s money.”
Robert Levine, Author of ‘A Geography of Time’
