Temporal Seizure Registration Regimes, Digital Castes, and the Ontology of Stolen Futures

Contemporary debates on digital inequality predominantly frame power in terms of access, surveillance, or data ownership. This article argues that such approaches overlook a more fundamental transformation: the seizure of time itself. Drawing on Registration Regimes Theory (RRT), the study proposes the concept of Temporal Seizure to describe how modern registration technologies—algorithms, predictive scoring systems, and interoperable ledgers—convert open futures into administratively closed horizons. The article introduces a novel ontological distinction between class and caste, not as economic or cultural formations, but as competing temporal regimes. While class operates through updateable records and probabilistic futures, caste emerges when registration becomes irreversible, totalizing, and pre-emptive—fixing individuals to their recorded pasts. Through this temporal fixation, digital systems increasingly reproduce caste-like structures under the appearance of neutrality and efficiency. By reframing power as control over temporal possibility rather than spatial position or material resources, the article advances a new political ontology of digital governance. It concludes that contemporary data-driven systems do not merely exploit labor or extract value, but systematically confiscate the capacity to become otherwise—producing what may be understood as a global architecture of digital caste.