In this talk, I argue that one consequence of work-time relations today is the production of the scrap as a form of economic activity. The scrap is an attempt to capture both discarded time and discarded things, and reform them into productive services and objects. Both the lean firm and the ICT enabled cyborg worker/consumer condition the historical formation of the scrap. A related consequence of the scrap in post-industrial economies is a shift away from a collective struggle against the extension of the workday, to management of one’s labour time. For privileged workers this often represents the pursuit of work-life balance and so-called productivity hacks, for many others it is a process of exercising greater control and predictability in piecing together scraps of economic activity into a subsistence wage.

I argue that one response to this continuum of uncoordinated, irregular, and dis-synchronized work-time has been the formation of the ‘ledger’ as the project of public blockchain systems. The talk will conclude by situating the ledger as a recent manifestation of the work-time continuum of cyborg work.