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Paper short abstract

This paper asks how Turkish university students use cryptocurrency, savings accounts, and online gambling to construct alternative relationships to time and the future under chronic inflation, drawing on STS scholarship on temporal infrastructure.

Paper long abstract

In Turkey, where chronic inflation has persisted for over two decades, the conventional temporal infrastructure of higher education has become increasingly unreliable. This paper asks how university students construct alternative temporal infrastructures through digital financial practices, and what these constructions reveal about the relationship between technology, time, and economic survival under conditions of monetary instability. Drawing on STS scholarship that understands technologies as "time machines" capable of composing temporal orders (Stine and Volmar 2021), we examine three practices widespread among Turkish college students: cryptocurrency trading, high-interest savings accounts and online gambling. Each practice embeds its participants in a distinct temporal arrangement but how exactly do they mediate the sense of duration, obligation and the future? What kinds of temporal subjects do they produce? And how do the material features of platforms (notifications, interfaces, feedback loops) participate in organizing not only economic calculation but moral and affective orientations toward time? Building on work that situates technology and self-formation as co-constituted (Amrute 2010), we are particularly interested in the ways these financial practices blur the boundary between the technical and the devotional. Based on interviews and digital ethnography with university students, this paper explores how inflation operates as a temporal crisis, and how the digital infrastructures through which students engage with it reshape the moral dimensions of inhabiting time under late capitalism.