Time sovereignty follows from a simple asymmetry: money can sometimes be replenished; time cannot. So a person with every material need met but no control over their time is missing a major support condition, and a society that consumes people’s hours — through administrative friction, compulsory activity, algorithmic stimulation, and constant responsiveness — is depleting something more giving them money cannot restore.
What it asks the model to measure
It turns into a concrete and startling metric: how much of a participant’s lifetime is consumed merely maintaining access to participation itself? — the hours lost to forms, commuting, proving eligibility, waiting, navigating bureaucracy, defending access, and repairing preventable failures. That is ecological depletion hiding in plain sight, and reducing it is as real a gain as any increase in output. Time sovereignty sits alongside the other fragile-but-renewable human conditions — rest, attention, and the body — that a renewable society has to protect rather than mine.