Real Time in Rearview

This article explores what “real time” means to market actors by focusing on the traders, market designers, and engineers acting in the electricity markets of the United States. For these experts, real time is the time interval in which they cannot intervene using the instruments available to them. The advocates of real-time exchange attempt to insert more checkpoints into time previously left unaccounted for with the help of superior accounting methods and sensing technologies. In electricity markets, many drag the markets in the direction of real-time arrangements, where the trade interval skews ever closer to continuous; others, however, think that this trend is detrimental to the quality of both electricity production and market competition. I show that these divergences in opinion stem from the diversity of the technological worlds from which market actors come. I argue that experts’ economic imaginations and designs emerge in the thick of technological work, as afforded and constrained by the devices at their disposal, from electricity meters to digital spreadsheets to phase conductors. This article advances an agenda to think of contemporary capitalism from within the exigencies, affordances, and constraints provided by technological work cultures—from within a field I call techno-economics.