Not quite what you're looking for, but in Andreas Malm's Fossil Capital he talks about the shift from concrete time - time attached to day/night cycles, seasonal cycles, weather patterns, etc. - to abstract time, which is fungible and standardized. If your mill runs on water power for example, you're beholden to the former. If you buy a fancy new coal steam engine, you can deal in abstract labour hours. You can run your mill at any time of day or any time of night, or even throw up another set of machines, pull in twice as many workers, and get twice as many labour hours out of a day.

One of the most frustrating things about the more professional jobs I've had is that they really are buying a discrete number of labour hours from me. It has nothing to do with the amount of work that needs to be done. When I was in the factory and the machines on our line would go down, they'd tell us to wipe them down. It doesn't take nearly a full shift (not to mention the last shift already pretended to wipe it down) but letting us go home, read a book, do anything productive or enjoyable, or even fucking sit down would be a lapse of their control over the abstract hours they bought from us. It's a similar story in my current tech job, with the only difference being they're just a lot less strict on white-collar machine operators.

Time is obviously a "real thing" in human terms (I don't care about the metaphysics right this second) but even though it's astronomically rigid and having precision in timekeeping opens up a lot of social and material technology, it is a very strange thing to be buying and selling it in slices. It's even stranger to rely on that to have to feed and shelter yourself.

I think there's a really great bit of :graeber: writing on this but I'm not sure where.