Time, Surveillance, and the Ideology of Seamlessness
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at. ”
We consult the Apple iWatch for its myriad utilities. Only one of them is, incidentally, telling time. These devices serve as miniature hubs whose functions extend ever further into the nooks and crannies of our lives. The tiny pixels on its screen—its gentle vibrations—communicate unadulterated ideology. It tells us to do things we were going to do anyway—stand up, breathe, take steps, sleep, wake up—but to do these tasks in increasingly mechanized patterns, submitting the internal systems of our bodies to the rubric of machinic optimization. It does this for our own good, of course, dressing self-maintenance rituals in the language of health and wellness. To “read” the iWatch, we might adopt the framework Michael S. Mahoney theorizes in “Reading a Machine” (1980), which asks us to treat technological objects not as neutral instruments but as cultural texts that encode the larger economic systems, moral anxieties, and social imaginaries that inform their designs. The Ford Model T, for instance, was more than a vehicle. It was a manifestation of the industrial logics of the early 20th century. Vanadium steel, assembly-line affordances, modular simplicity indexed new systems of production: A car designed to be built by machines and mass-produced in high volume (Mahoney 7). Similarly, the Apple iWatch is not simply a timepiece. It is the summation of 21st-century biopolitical capitalism, to borrow Foucault’s term, aligning bodily data with corporate ecosystems of control (Sexuality 139). By reading the iWatch as a text, we see how it expresses the contemporary priorities of optimization, the seamless integration of technology with biological processes, and surveillance capitalism. When we gaze into the machine, it truly gazes also into us.
Mahoney insists that we read inside and around the machine rather than blindly trusting literature written by its creators, for “the practice of science and the literature of science do not necessarily coincide” (1). His hermeneutic teaches us to trace the discrepancies between them by
determining what the artifact says about the people who designed it, the process of its design, the assumptions made about its purposes, the expectations held of its putative users, and the ways it could actually be used. Most interesting and revealing are the points at which these overlapping questions do not have coinciding answers. For it is there, rather than at the level of theory, that the dialectic of technology is carried out. (Mahoney 8)
Thus, this methodology turns the machine into a glyph, and us into its hierophants. The grammar of the machine consists of its materials, the labor practices that go into its construction, and the economic conditions into which it is received; its “syntax,” meanwhile, is the use-logic embedded in its design. Our task is to decode what the machine assumes about the world, asking questions such as, who is its ideal user? What kind of body or behavior does it assume its user has? What social system does it serve, challenge, or reproduce? The value of reading machines lies in tracing the feedback loop between human intention and material expression, exposing those processes by which societies build machines that in turn rebuild societies. To read a machine in 2025 is to awaken to the fact that their primary function is to read us, a function that is concealed behind an opaque and seamless exterior. The iWatch reproduces the logic of “surveillance capitalism,” which Shoshana Zuboff defines as “A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales” (2). This technology reflects and produces subjectivity in its users: It constructs subjects who are always wired, reachable, surveilled, and pressured to curate their own representation. To read the device critically is to see how it narrates a fairytale of modern life—one of convenience, human connection, creative expression—while concealing the darker forces that underwrite it.
Figure 1. “Tick-Tock to Success.” Apple iWatch Advertisement, The Higher Institute of Applied Arts 2021.
Since 2015, the iWatch has been positioned at the intersection of luxury branding, digital networking, and health culture. The tagline of the Series 7: “The Future of Health is on Your Wrist” (fig. 1). Its form combines the classic wristwatch—itself a symbol of discipline and precision in the industrial age—and the touch-screen interface of the smartphone. The iWatch, says Tara Brabazon, is a wearable computer that “offers simple and everyday interfaces to connect an analogue body to digital environments” (15). It promises a new kind of self-knowledge: Users monitor their heart rates, oxygen levels, sleep patterns, and productivity metrics in real time. These features link the user’s body to the cloud through continuous connectivity. The watch as a device has always been about control over time, a preoccupation that was central to industrial capitalism’s synchronization of labor. Consumers benefitted from the wristwatch, but the true beneficiaries of the technology were industrialists who could precisely coordinate worker schedules to maximize efficiency. The iWatch extends this logic into the body itself. In an article for Current Affairs, Ben Lee describes the creation of this niche: Such technologies create demand by suggesting that “the unoptimized life is not worth living.” Where the Model T organized workers around the assembly line, the iWatch organizes attention around an algorithmic schedule of notifications. Time discipline is thus internalized: The user is no longer merely on time but inside time, monitored by a wearable device that quantifies the rhythms of everyday life and syncs them with the rhythms of industry. “Just as capitalism promises the domination of nature,” says Lee, “surveillance capitalism promises the domination of human nature via our behavior.” Mahoney might see this trend as an extension of the historical logic he identified in Ford’s machine—the integration of human action into machine logic—only now rendered continuous, intimate, vaguely judgemental, seamlessly harmonized with the cadences of our personal habits.
Like the Model T, the material design of the iWatch expresses a veiled ideology. Its aesthetics and materials—smooth aluminum, rounded edges, quiet haptics—both conceal and reflect the industrial processes that spawned it: Coordinated global supply chains, the violence of rare-earth extraction, precision robotics and factories that treat human laborers like robots. Like many contemporary technologies, the device hides the messy, exploitative processes that go into its construction beneath a surface purity. The clean minimalism of its surface speaks the design language of streamlining: Nothing unnecessary, no evidence of its construction. Mahoney’s interpretive praxis would insist we attend to this surface as signification—the invisibility of labor becomes part of the machine’s message. The watch is seemingly sprung whole-cloth from the mind of geniuses, not the result of vast, oppressive networks of globalized neo-colonialism. Functionally, it converts the user’s body into a data interface. Heartbeat sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers translate motion and pulse into metrics—steps taken, calories burned, hours stood. These are not just mechanical operations but acts of writing: A phantom outline of the body reinscribed in machine language. The watch “reads” the wearer as an assemblage of data points, producing what Jean Baudrillard might define as a quantifiable, optimizable, and monetized self, a human form “produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere” (Baudrillard 2). In Lee’s more prosaic words: “to call this utility ‘convenience’ is to outright deny our autonomy and consent. The age-old tradeoff between privacy and convenience thus breaks down completely.” These data are also, significantly, a product. According to Zuboff,
Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as ‘machine intelligence,’ and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later.” (Zuboff 14)
Products like the iWatch create an inhuman mirror-world populated by human ghosts. Tirelessly, it translates our behavioral data (or maybe our souls) into commodities that profit corporate entities.
Symbolically, the iWatch de- and reconstructs time. The classic watch measured and universalized external time, dividing the day and regulating each division’s sanctioned activities, as Michel Foucault teaches in Discipline and Punish. At the height of the time-table, its “three great methods—establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycles of repetition—were soon to be found in schools, workshops, and hospitals” (Foucault, Discipline 149). The digital watch intensifies this process by measuring personalized time—quantifying our micro-temporalities of sleep, exercise, productivity. Its “stand up” alerts and “breathe” reminders construct an economy of health with distinctly moral overtones: To be sedentary is to fail; to obey is to seek redemption. This disciplinary function urges us to manage our lives through self-surveillance: It is the very apotheosis of panopticism. “In the correct use of the body, which makes possible a correct use of time,” says Foucault, “nothing must remain idle or useless: Everything must be called upon to form the support of the act required” (Discipline 152). Mahoney’s framework makes clear that such moral coding is not accidental: it is written into the machine’s code and its surface, a grammar of virtue expressed in imperatives, optimized metrics, the completion of color-coded rings. At the same time, the iWatch has another symbolic function. It is expensive and glossy, an object that communicates status and sophistication. It embodies technological refinement and participation in the Apple brand’s mythos of innovation, of sleek-and-streamlined good taste. This symbolism mirrors Mahoney’s reading of the Model T as both tool and cultural sign—an object that does a job and an object through which individuals enact belonging within the socio-economic order. The iWatch’s design encodes not only data but identity: To wear it is to inhabit a certain ideology of progress, refinement, prestige.
To read an iWatch is to interpret not only its function but also the layered systems of thought, labor, and ideology that its design encodes. It offers a moral rhetoric of frictionless efficiency—an ideology of seamlessness that hides the immense complexity beneath. Artifacts embody the logic of the systems that produce them. The iWatch’s seamless interface masks a deeply fractured production chain that spans Congolese cobalt mines, Chinese assembly lines, Silicon Valley design labs, and global data centers. Hidden, too, is what the device assumes. The iWatch assumes a world of constant network access, GPS coordination, and instantaneous feedback. Though its marketing claims human flourishing as its goal, acclimatizing citizens to ever more efficient habits and schedules seems closer to its actual ends. Its default temporal logic is one of acceleration, demanding continual attention and response. It must be tended and fretted over, which trains the body into rhythms of digital labor and micro-work. Each time we tap its face is a minute gesture within a vast choreography of data extraction. Where Ford’s machine embodied the logic of industrial efficiency, Apple’s embodies the logic of algorithmic proficiency. Both naturalize their systems of production by translating them into desirable forms. In the end, the iWatch tells a story about the convergence of time, capital, and the fully instrumentalized body. It makes visible—and wearable—the contemporary belief that technology can harmonize life through metrics, at the same time that it strips data from its users for profit. By reading the watch as a text, we glimpse the contradictions it conceals: A seamlessness that depends on invisible labor; a false autonomy built on surveillance; and a health ideology that commodifies human thriving.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. “The Precession of Simulacra.” Simulacra and Simulation, translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U. of Michigan P., 1994, pp. 1–42.
Brabazon, Tara. “Digital fitness: Self-Monitored Fitness and the Commodification of Movement.” Communication, Politics & Culture, vol. 48, issue 2, 2015 pp., 1-23.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage Books, Random House, 1995. Kindle Edition.
—. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1. Translated by Robert Hurley, Vintage Books, Random House, 1990. Kindle Edition.
Lee, Ben. “Putting the ‘Capitalism’ in ‘Surveillance Capitalism.’” Current Affairs: A Magazine of Technology and Culture, 15 May 2021.
Mahoney, Michael S. “Reading a Machine.” Class Handout, CMPM 201, Nathan Altice, Fall 2025, c. 1980, pp. 1-8.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. T. Y. Crowell & Company, 1899, Internet Archive, Accessed 2 Nov 2025, p. 53.
“Tick-Tock to Success.” Apple iWatch Advertisement, The Higher Institute of Applied Arts, Clios Ads of the World, 2021. Accessed Nov. 1, 2025.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Hatchet Book Group, 2019.