<p>Gig work discourse constructs time as a site of control and efficiency, positioning workers between the rhetoric of flexibility and the reality of unpredictable mobility and unpaid waiting. This politicization of time underscores how platforms instrumentalize post-panoptic regimes, reinforcing public perceptions of gig labor as a natural extension of hustle culture. A new truth regime of algorithmic temporality emerges, where speed serves as both an instrument of discipline and a metric for extracting value from workers. Drawing on scholarly discussions of gig work platformization, temporal regulation, and the ideological function of image banks, this study employs a Semio-Lacanian lens to examine how visual representations of gig workers reveal broader questions of temporality, labor, and precarious subjectivities within postdigital capitalism. The notion of postdigital meantime serves as a key conceptual framework, providing an entry point for interpreting how temporality is dislocated and reconfigured in Getty Images’ visual representations of gig workers. By embedding Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse analysis within a postdigital epistemology, this methodology recognizes gig work photos as a site of hegemonic struggle, where labor precarity is erased through visual aestheticization and emptied positive signifiers. The findings reveal that workers’ waiting and mobility are synchronized with algorithmic control and visualized through silence tropes, such as non-interactive represented participants, disengaged readers, empty spaces, and the silence of nature. Ultimately, the study conceptualizes silence tropes as mediators of floating signifiers, antagonizing the gig economy’s ideological narratives of empowerment and flexibility.</p>