A World Where Time Replaces Money as Currency
The movie I’m talking about is Andrew Niccol’s 2011 film, In Time, a dystopian science fiction allegory, set in 2169, projecting current conditions under capitalism into the future, but with a revealing science-fictional twist. Instead of capital, unevenly distributed among the populace, as it is today, we have time, just as unevenly distributed among people, in this way creating a schism between the social classes of the wealthy and the poor, based exclusively on the time they possess, and that possesses them.
If this sounds cryptic in the extreme, let me explain. The world (or a country) is divided into economic time zones, with the wealthy - those with the most time on their digital arm clocks, genetically engineered “into” them - living in New Greenwich, the time-domain of the wealthy (who are virtually immortal because of all the time they have accumulated), and the poor, or least well-endowed class, living in Dayton. As the name, Dayton, suggests, most of them have only a day to their name at any given time, and if they don’t slave away at something every day, literally to keep body and soul together, their digital clock would soon be down to zero, and they would die.