This essay draws from the upcoming manuscript “The Enclosure of Time: Velocity, Value, and the Age of Acceleration” by Sabino Marquez (available December 2025).
The contemporary firm lives inside an illusion so familiar it no longer registers as absurdity: the permanent IT project. Every organization, from the smallest municipal office to the largest multinational, exists on a treadmill of migrations, reconfigurations, and mandatory upgrades. The rationale is always identical: technology advances, security demands modern architecture, and compatibility requires continuous refresh. The cadence has hardened into natural law, but it is decidedly not natural; it is governance disguised as progress. The forced motion of enterprise technology is a symptom of an ontology that defines motion itself as virtue.
The cycle began as efficiency, matured into metabolism, and functions today as theology where the firm worships its own ability to remain in flight. Every new operating system, productivity suite, or cloud interface carries the promise of arrival, yet each arrival reopens the cycle anew. Hardware refreshes to match new drivers, policies adapt to new configurations, staff retrain to navigate new interfaces, and procurement renegotiates new licensing models; the ritual never ends because it is not designed to end. The enclosure of time within the cadence of a software vendor’s market cycle became the operational rhythm of entire industries. The cost of this rhythm has long exceeded its value, yet it continues because it serves a metaphysics that equates velocity with existence.
To understand this logic, it helps to see the enterprise as a temporal organism. Its performance is governed not only by cash and labor but by the clocks that regulate perception and response. When those clocks are owned externally, operational sovereignty collapses. The modern operating system is not a neutral platform; it is a temporal instrument that dictates cadence and sequence. Every scheduled patch, forced migration, and end-of-support notice translates the software vendor’s financial quarter into the customer’s operational burden. The software customer becomes a derivative of the vendor’s time value.
In the early digital period, this dependence felt benign. Software releases coincided with visible improvement. After all, the migration from DOS to graphical interfaces, and then from stand-alone machines to networked clients, offered tangible productivity gains. The cost of adjustment was justified by new capability. Except, that era ended two decades ago; since the late 2000s the desktop has been functionally complete: stable, networked, secure, sufficient. The cycle nevertheless accelerated. Releases shortened, interfaces multiplied, telemetry expanded, and integration demands deepened. Each iteration introduced friction masquerading as innovation. The net result was rising complexity rather than rising value.
Why, then, do intelligent institutions persist in this pattern? The answer is ontological: the enterprise has been trained to confuse motion with progress. In a market where velocity is the grammar of legitimacy, stability reads as decay. The firm that slows its refresh cycle appears obsolete; the one that upgrades on schedule appears alive. The vendor’s cadence becomes the customer’s proof of modernity. This is an ontological capture: the absorption of meaning into a system that defines value through the continuation of its own motion.
In this regime, every IT decision is a moral decision disguised as a technical one. To accept the next mandatory upgrade is to reaffirm the metaphysics of velocity. To decline it would require a different ontology, one in which time is governed rather than consumed. Few organizations possess the conceptual instruments to make that choice. They see the IT treadmill as destiny, rationalizing that this is “just how IT is”. The engineers who question the logic are silenced by compliance requirements, and the managers who suspect exploitation cannot translate intuition into metrics because no dashboard measures captivity. No quarterly report expresses the cost of dependence or the upside of operational sovereignty.
The persistence of these choices at scale cannot be understood without observing the quiet purge of the professions that once could have opposed them. The technical class (CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, and other system stewards) were stripped of jurisdiction when velocity became the dominant credential. Governance migrated upward to financial operators fluent in cadence, while those fluent in continuity were recast as service personnel. Their authority was de-professionalized, their discretion replaced with procurement procedures. They no longer design the clock; they order parts for it. Strategy is defined for them through the vendor’s roadmap, and their success is measured by how quickly they can implement what they did not choose. In this architecture, the very people who understand the cost of dependence are structurally excluded from the table where dependence is decided. Leadership reproduces operational drag because it has institutionalized the absence of those who could prevent it.
The empirical consequences are visible across the entire corporate landscape. Budgets swell under the weight of perpetual integration, productivity gains flatten, and institutional memory erodes as tools replace tools faster than human comprehension can adapt. The workforce internalizes churn as professionalism. To remain employable is to remain current, which functionally means to remain operationally unstable. The organization’s nervous system is permanently rewired for change. At that point, command yields to cadence.
Every Board asserts the desire for stability, and every audit committee requests continuity above all else. Yet the systems they fund structurally forbid it. The contradiction is no longer noticed because there is no language for ontological capture inside managerial education; the MBA curriculum teaches adaptation as survival and disruption as virtue. Nowhere does it teach the discipline of refusal, nowhere is strategic sovereignty priced. As a result, executives can describe the symptoms (project fatigue, vendor lock-in, security exposure) but cannot articulate the cause. They experience captivity as modernization.
The problem is not only epistemic; it is financial. A firm whose operating rhythm depends on a vendor’s release cycle cannot align its temporal governance with its cash-flow governance. Every vendor-enforced migration diverts capital from productive investment to defensive maintenance. The vendor captures that capital by converting necessity into service; what appears as a cost of doing business is in fact a recurring tax on sovereignty. The vendor’s balance sheet grows in proportion to the customer’s lost optionality.
The absence of a price for operational sovereignty does not imply that such sovereignty lacks value. Instead, it reflects the logic of velocity-bound markets which cannot price what they cannot consume. Sovereignty resists acceleration. It cannot be monetized through churn or leveraged through debt; its value lies precisely in its refusal to move. In financial terms, it functions as negative beta: an asset that retains stability when the rest of the market convulses. Yet, because markets treat motion as proof of life, the sovereign actor appears inert until volatility exposes the difference.
When dependence becomes the norm, independence looks inefficient to velocity ontologies. The CIO who standardizes on open systems, governs updates locally, and controls identity internally appears slow compared to peers outsourcing every last data function to cloud vendors. Conversely, the tempo of the sovereign firm is measured in continuity of service, not cadence of change. Its returns compound through reduced rework, lower exposure to vendor-induced failure, and higher retention of organizational knowledge. These returns accrue silently, without spectacle, which is why they remain invisible to markets addicted to visible motion, as if motion itself was the entirety of the value equation.
The IT treadmill persists because it satisfies the moral economy of velocity. Each new system justifies its predecessor’s obsolescence. Each migration renews the faith that modernization equals movement. When something breaks, the failure is attributed to insufficient modernization rather than to the ontology of velocity-as-modernization itself. The enterprise behaves like a patient who takes more of the medicine that caused the illness. The cure for instability is always greater acceleration.
The deeper pathology lies in the way the modern firm conceives time. Acceleration has replaced duration as the primary measure of competence. Projects are judged by speed of delivery, not by longevity of effect. Managers perform responsiveness rather than stewardship. The operating system industry embodies this inversion perfectly: its products are engineered to expire. Planned obsolescence is a metaphysical tactic, the intentional degradation of continuity to sustain velocity.
Once this logic enters the organization, it reconfigures every other system around it. Procurement structures contracts around refresh cycles. HR calibrates skills to vendor-provided certifications. Finance amortizes software over shorter horizons. Governance codifies compliance around vendor support policies. The entire firm’s apparatus reorganizes itself to conform to externally controlled time. What was once a discretionary input (technology) became the metronome of enterprise behavior. This is the final stage of ontological capture: when the instrument of operation becomes an operator of the firm.
But to describe the condition is not to moralize it. The treadmill persists because it produces reliable short-term signals. Investors reward activity they can measure. A major migration project generates invoices, headcount, and marketable narrative. The firm appears dynamic, but the cost of lost continuity appears nowhere on the ledger. When downtime decreases but turnover increases, the metrics report success; the illusion is perfect because it is quantifiable.
Empirically, this illusion can be tested. Track the total cost of ownership across three cycles of operating-system refresh in any mid-sized enterprise. Include re-architecture, retraining, testing, integration, and audit. Then measure the net functional change. The delta approaches zero. The enterprise spends to remain in the same place. The treadmill converts cash into motion without altering capacity. In economic terms, it is negative productivity disguised as modernization. Yet it persists because it generates visibility, and visibility, in a velocity economy, substitutes for value.
What the enterprise has lost here is not money but time. Every forced migration consumes interval: the space in which reflection, repair, and re-design occur. The more frequent the update, the less time remains for understanding. Organizations become perfectly reactive, incapable of deliberate governance. This is the true cost of ontological capture: the surrender of temporal agency. When time is owned, paced, and governed externally, stewardship itself collapses into compliance.
A different ontology would treat time as the primary governed resource. The enterprise would set its own cadence, extending support for as long as continuity proves cheaper than change. It would price readiness, not replacement. Its IT architecture would evolve only when function or security demanded it, not when a vendor’s roadmap decreed it. The same discipline would translate naturally into finance: cash-flow predictability, lower variance, higher compounding of competence. The firm would begin to experience patience as a financial asset.
Such organizations already exist, though they are rare. Their distinguishing feature is temporal autonomy; they govern their own infrastructure lifecycles, maintain internal expertise, and decouple performance metrics from vendor calendars. They are often smaller, less glamorous, and less visible to capital markets, yet their survivorship curves exceed those of their peers. In the ontology of velocity, they appear slow; in empirical reality, they are the only actors still in control of their own motion. The IT treadmill therefore serves as the clearest empirical demonstration of how ontology becomes economics. The belief that modernization requires perpetual motion sustains an entire industry of managed dependence. The software vendor’s quarter becomes the customer’s project plan. The rhetoric of innovation conceals the transfer of sovereignty. The more the enterprise accelerates, the less it governs.
Recognizing the capture of temporal governance requires only the reintroduction of interval into analysis. Ask a simple question of any proposed migration: what is the verifiable gain in capability relative to the cost of lost continuity? In most cases, the answer is negative. Yet, the project proceeds because its cancellation would signal stasis, and stasis is taboo in a civilization that equates movement with meaning. The way out begins with disobedience to cadence; a board that funds verification before replacement, that budgets for continuity rather than refresh cycles, begins to reclaim time as a governed asset. When evidence replaces reflex, velocity reverts to its proper role as a costed input to value, not its definition. The IT department resumes its original purpose as infrastructure for work. The shift is empirical and can be observed in reduced volatility, higher uptime, lower cognitive load, and predictable expense curves.
Operational sovereignty in this sense is understood as disciplined pacing. It allows the enterprise to participate in markets without surrendering its internal clock. It converts patience into leverage. In a field where every competitor moves at the same externally imposed tempo, the actor that governs its own speed acquires strategic asymmetry. It can absorb shocks, plan long, and deploy capital when others are forced into reactive expenditure. The market will not recognize this advantage immediately because it lacks instruments to measure what does not move. But when instability returns (as it always does), the sovereign operator will remain intact while the velocity-bound firms fragment.
This describes an empirical condition already visible to those who watch capital destruction through software churn. The rational firm will reassert control over its temporal governance. The tools are secondary; the clock is primary. The enterprise that understands this will treat every external dependency as a potential claim on its future time and will price it accordingly. The cost of dependence is the forfeited interval of comprehension.
In the end, observing the IT treadmill reveals a broader civilizational truth. We have built systems that can only remain upright by moving faster. The proprietary desktop operating system is merely the most legible mechanism of that dependence. Its perpetual renewal mirrors the larger structure of financialized life: a world in which survival depends on continuation rather than coherence. The firm that reclaims its own timing steps outside that logic. It ceases to perform acceleration and begins to practice duration.
That is the first empirical act of temporal sovereignty. When markets eventually reprice time, the advantage will belong to those who never sold theirs.