The clock does not measure time; it produces it
noemamag.com
noemamag.com
The gods confound the man who first found out
how to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
who in this place set up a sundial,
to cut and hack my days so wretchedly
into small portions! When I was a boy,
my belly was my sundial — one surer,
truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when ’twas proper time
to go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can’t fall-to unless the sun gives leave.
The town’s so full of these confounded dials
the greatest part of the inhabitants,
shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.
We hate our 9-5's but we're also annoyed when the plumber gives us an 8 hour window to show up (and misses the window).
Like many rules, timetables can be an inconvenience when imposed on ourselves but very convenient when imposed on others.
That being said, consider a meeting that happens "on the second Tuesday of each month". The number of days between each meeting is so haphazard and ridiculous... if you rebooted human society, that definition would not survive unchanged. There's a clear example of the spandrels in our time keeping system reaching out and affecting the actions we take.
1: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Keats (search for text "prism")
2: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184384-i-have-a-friend-who-...
When you mainly interacted with a few dozen people all in the same village, how to coordinate your activities and synchronize with each other was not much of an issue. Everyone lived in close proximity and pretty much had the same culture and did the same things. If you wanted to talk with the chief, you could easily see when he had a bit of downtime and jump in.
However, once you are spread out, this becomes much harder. Imagine if the only way to coordinate a meeting with a teammate was to constantly poll them, asking if they are available. “Are you free, now? Are you free, now?” That basically tie up your whole day waiting for them to be free.
Clocks enable asynchrony. You two can quickly agree on a time, and then you can get on with your other stuff until the agreed upon time.
Yes you need a "clock", but not necessarily one that reads like "2:23am". Perfectly fine to say "meet on the dueling grounds at dawn."
It's kind of like watching an action movie from the 1980s with a modern teenager and trying to explain why the hero/victim didn't simply use their mobile phone to text or call for help. Those with the facility can literally not fathom life without it, except as some kind of vague thought experiment.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieva...
I have tried it - it's like having TWO mornings in one day. It's kind of amazing, but it's completely incompatible with modern life (although less so with the new regime of more work/life balance flexibility).
That which moves in sync with the constituent parts of a clock is itself a piece of the clock. I've always found it a (mildly) disturbing notion that many clockwork pieces come in human shapes.
Step 1: Make a claim about time/clock
Step 2: Throw a bunch of random facts that are true and conceptually related to time but really don't prove at all the claim made previously.
Step 3: Repeat
Also, clocks absolutelly do measure time and not produce it. Time was a thing before clocks came to be
Deconstruction is often employed in intellectually dishonest (or lazy) ways to discredit concepts by creating/employing tenuous links between a concept and its socio-cultural associations and refusing to actually elaborate on why they matter. This is often done in order to attack a concept for political reasons (as opposed to strictly intellectual ones), and people who do this are committing a tactical error. Giving legitimacy to these intellectually vacuous attacks as a tactic ensures that they'll be used against currently popular ideas in the future when they fall out of vogue.
But you can't coordinate larger activities with these natural phenomena, which are regional and also variable. So instead we invent a system of trigger events that are not tied the natural world. We call the event the second, and it happens whenever this device says it does. The clock, and the second-events it produces, are our invention. That's what I got, anyway :)
Not quite, all measurement is tied to the natural world, we've just been moving away from less stable and predictible events to more deterministic.
Yes we have made up units of measurements that maybe arbitrary, but still tied to the physical world and dependent on natural properties.
Nevertheless, it felt like the article was trying to prove there is something inherently evil with clocks that has been under our radar for ages, which is silly. And even if that was true (clocks being strictly tied to constructs of power)... this still doesn't mean that "clocks produce time". Maybe the title is just wrong?
We have leap years and seconds to keep our time synchronized with the universe (because of small round-off errors, if I may call it like that).
> Not quite, all measurement is tied to the natural world, we've just been moving away from less stable and predictible events to more deterministic.
That is very true, but measurements are not natural world. Just to take an example from software world, ability to solve leetcode questions is tied to general software engineering ability, but it would be a mistake to say that it is the ability. Leetcode style questions do not sit at the root of software engineering ability, its at best an important branch of the tree.
Note that the problem here is not with a good measure or a bad measure of software engineering ability. The question is more about what it means to be a good software engineer, and thats not an objective question, thats a moral question and we will all disagree on an answer.
Note that if time was just part of natural sciences like Physics, then we could come up with one theory and test it out. But time is not just a laboratory thing, its also a tool that humans use. And that makes it more than a natural science question, its also a humanities question, just like leetcode and iq tests are.
> Nevertheless, it felt like the article was trying to prove there is something inherently evil with clocks that has been under our radar for ages, which is silly. And even if that was true (clocks being strictly tied to constructs of power)... this still doesn't mean that "clocks produce time". Maybe the title is just wrong?
Every technology has an ideological bias to it, but technologies will try to convince you that they are neutral. A very good example would be how you say "inherently" evil. Actually, clock has both inherent evils and inherent goods. You're already aware of the goods and the article pointed out the evils. This has not been hidden and such technological criticism can even be found in Plato's works. More accurately, for clocks specifically, Lewis Mumford gave the thesis the book expands upon in 1930s and he lists out references in his work about folks who have pointed out these things even earlier.
Same. I got halfway through and gave up because it didn’t say anything meaningful.
I was hoping there was something interesting in there but no. At least not unless it was hidden in the last half of the drivel.
Of course these medical interventions have greatly reduced the number of women who die in childbirth.
If rules relating to time exist to help women not die during childbirth, that's inconvenient for the article's chosen single perspective ("The Narrative") and must therefore be omitted.
If actions taken on a timetable are a difficult trade-off, it becomes much harder to simply characterize them as oppression.
Time-based medical interventions include, for example, inducing labor if the doctor doesn’t think it is starting fast enough. Those are associated with complications, although usually not fatal ones.
On the other hand, the hubris shown by doctors (and generally speaking only MDs, not DOs or nursing staff) is incredible. MDs have a tendency to assume that they alone are able to fix things, and the attitude seems to be that patient rights just get in the way.
We see this pattern over and over: doctors tend to not believe in a medical effect until they personally experience it. The treatment of pregnancy and childbirth is one prime example; the history of post-viral syndrome being another good one.
> The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age... the clock, moreover, is a piece of power-machinery whose "product" is seconds and minutes: by it essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences: the special world of science.
The concept of time-binding predates Rifkin by a few decades.
For a start, S I Hayakawa writes about Time-Binding Theory in this 1950 article “THE AIMS AND TASKS OF GENERAL SEMANTICS: Implications of the Time-Binding Theory (Part I)”
https://www.jstor.org/stable/42578071
For those old enough, yes, that S I Hayakawa who was a former US Senator representing the great State of California. Some California politicians go/are Hollywood, some write best-selling books about the nature of words, rhetoric and the psychology of humans. It’s quite a big state.
And Hayakawa is just expounding on the idea developed by Korzybski in the 1920s/1930s and discussed in the foundational text for General Semantics, Science and Sanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski
[General Semantics, which is still around, is perhaps the most mild-mannered populist intellectual movement produced by the 20th Century. If you’ve heard the phrase “the map is not the territory”, that’s General Semantics. If you wish to dig further, there is basically no emotional/financial/intellectual/psychological/social downside risk to pursuing General Semantics. There is no “ism” associated with it. It’s pretty close to an Absolute Good. Read Hayakawa’s books first.]
They want to work from home because the lack of commute makes for a more relaxing morning and evening. Why is it more relaxing? Because we have more time to work with. It’s more flexible.
Working from home also offers greater flexibility in other aspects of time. You can do domestic chores when it makes sense and not just in the hours outside office time (which are indirectly dictated by the office schedule).
Do you like lots of meetings? As scheduled blocks of time they are direct manifestations of the shared clock. Or do you prefer to have large blocks of unscheduled time that you can organize yourself?
Devs often sneer at the idea of being forced to sit at a desk for a fixed and regular set of hours every work day. “Measure my work by my output, not a time sheet”—sound familiar?
Knowledge work is less dependent on universal clock time than other industries like manufacturing, retail, transportation, etc. Measuring time is super important for things like how fast a web page loads, or recovering from an outage. But when it comes to developing the business itself, time is more relative. “Time to market” is not a fixed set of hours, but a relative sense of beating competitors.
A universal way of measuring time is obviously a useful tool, and has been critical to many advances in human society. But there is a difference between looking at a clock for your own purposes (e.g. timing your runs to measure your fitness), and looking at a clock because you are trying to satisfy someone else’s expectations. Especially when there is a power dynamic, like with employers.
If anything, clocks liberate hours from employers. I’m pretty sure that absent clocks (and legal restrictions to the contrary), employers would demand work from sunrise to sunset because that’s what they could measure.
> Folks on HN talk about resisting the clock all the time without realizing it.
This is a really stretched metaphor. This is like saying clocks kill is because “time catches up with us all”.
Resisting the waste of valuable time? Sure. Resisting the clock? I'd say it's the exact opposite. We are eyeing the clock every moment and realizing how much time we're wasting on idiotic things.
While I do not agree with a lot of specifics in the article, I do sympathize with the overarching theme that we are being driven by our clocks and calendars today. If every day looks exactly same as the day before, did time pass?
If the amount of daylight in higher latitudes didn't change so dramatically throughout the year, clocks wouldn't be needed to ensure every day is the same duration.
It is a book called Einstein's Dreams. Thank me later.
So, skip the article, which mentions something good while being bad, and read the good thing. A suggestion only.
1. Pick a random concept
2. Talk about how the concept doesn't always apply, isn't always useful, and that it contains arbitrary elements (e.g. the 7 day week)
3. Point out how the concept influences language, and assert or imply that language has an enourmous influence on how people behave ("Contemporary society is obsessed with time — it is the most used noun in the English language")
4. Talk about how the concept is viewed differently in different cultures, making sure to imply that this means it's arbitrary
5. Assert that the concept is rooted in colonialism, imperialism, racism, whiteness, and patriarchy.
6. Conclude that this means the concept is completely arbitrary, and was created by those in power for the sole purpose of oppressing others.
7. Pat yourself on the back, and feel proud that your genius-level intellect allows you to see how things really are.
>That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.
>During an era in which social constructs like race, gender and sexuality are being challenged and dismantled, the true nature of clock time has somehow escaped the attention of wider society. Much like has happened with money, the clock has come to be seen as the thing it was only supposed to represent: The clock has become time itself.
>Standardized time became vital for seafarers and irresistible to corporate interests, such was the ease it could offer trade, transport and electric communication. But it took longer to colonize the minds of the general public.
>In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. From South Asia to Africa to Oceania, imperialists assaulted alternative forms of timekeeping. They saw any region without European-style clocks, watches and church bells as a land without time.
>The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures.
>Even the most natural of processes now must be expressed in clock time in order for them to be validated
>Women in particular often find themselves at the wrong end of this arbitrary metric. Unpaid labor such as housework and childcare — which still disproportionately burdens women — seems to slip between the measurements of the clock, whereas the experience of pregnancy is very much under the scrutiny of clock time. Adam quotes a woman’s account of her birth-giving experience: “The woman in labor, forced by the intensity of the contractions to turn all her attention to them, loses her ordinary, intimate contact with clock time.” But in the hospital environment, where the natural process of childbirth has been evaluated and standardized in clock-time units, a woman is pressured to follow what Alys Einion-Waller, a professor of midwifery at Swansea University, has called a “medicalized birth script.”
>Clock time may have colonized the planet, but it did not completely destroy alternative traditions of timekeeping. Certain religions maintain a connection to time that is rooted in nature, like salat in Islam and zmanim in Judaism, in which prayer times are defined by natural phenomena like dawn, dusk and the positioning of stars. The timing of these events may be converted into clock time, but they are not determined by clocks.
This is such a mess, the writer is constantly mixing up the concepts of clock, clock time, standardized time, geological time, earth rotating, circadian time... which he does not bother to differentiate making it easy to come to his programmatically set conclusions of oppressor and oppressed.
The cultural aspect of timekeeping going back to humans wondering about the regularities in sun movmement at day and about the "other suns" and objects at night is quite fascinating and probably as "astronomy" the oldest preform of science in reproducibility and predictive power (astrology aside :D); to butcher it up in such a manner, imho a very poor choice.
For anyone interested in appreciating the art of keeping track of time I would suggest looking up the two millennia old "astrolabe"[0]
Well then you are doing it wrong. If you do stupid things don't blame the clock for it. :D
Quenching fake hunger with a glass of water and eating more healthy will break this cycle.
I wanted to refute that eating when hungry is ideal, it lead me to eating more often every day, eventually I was eating huge portions every 2 hours which resulted in insulin resistance.
And you did refute that. It's not something the comment you responded to stated or implied but it's better to be clear about it.
Sorry to hear about your health troubles and I hope that you are on the path to recovery.
Many people don’t have much of a choice, at least during their work week. Employees in hourly shifts usually cannot eat on the clock, so it’s breakfast before you leave, lunch on your midday break, and dinner when you get home.
The clock is just a convenient way to get a group of people to agree what “eating time” is. They would do the same without.
Which doesn't necessarily happen at the same time every hunt. There's no post-hunt retro at 1300 every day.
You're agreeing with the article that until very recently, event times were flexible and determined by processes that aren't the vibration of a piece of quartz.
I don’t think it’s accurate to say I agree with the article. Certainly clocks are a relatively recent invention. That doesn’t mean I agree with its central thesis, which I think is essentially unsupported by the various anecdotes and historical tidbits the article contains.
>> Well then you are doing it wrong.
Yes, it is fun to be single and eat prepared foods. But some of us eat a particular time because that is when the food is ready, a decision made much earlier in the day and without consulting everyone who will be around the table. Some of us also have bosses in different time zones, or who at least don't care much for our preferred lunch break times.
And some of us have jobs where our shift times are not under our control. Or have kids. Or have an aircraft to fly to Seattle come morning. Being able to set one's work schedule, and therefore one's sleep times, isn't a health choice. It is a lifestyle privilege.
Please: time is a necessary convention for virtually any complex society, and this drive or imposition to coordinate and predict events accurately goes back to any large culture, including most larger ancient civilizations; west, east, north, south.
Time control (aka, coordination of activity) has always bern critical in warfare, navigation, feasts, and fun social interactions.
What has changed is the precision and accuracy and near-synchrony that can now be achieved at a global scale.
The parent article adds much too much “Strum und Drang” about bad modern trends that divorce us from our pristine noble primitive and organic state. Right ;-)
It wasn't that people in the "unclocked" regime have no precision or scale in their use of time and synchrony, it was that the very nature of the (subjective) world changes when you change your (subjective) structure and orientation in time. Psychological models of time vary between cultures and individuals and have a deep and pervasive effect.
For example, some people organize their past and future along a line going left-right out in front of them (the past goes to the left, the future goes to the right, the present is in front) while other people have their past behind them and the future spreads out in front of them.
That simple difference, having your past and future in front in a line vs. being "inline" on your past-future timeline, has a profound effect on psychology and culture.
These are just two common styles, there is a vast diversity on how people organize their subjective structure of temporal events.
Out of all things, the author picked time to pick on. Time is one of the few physical things that are objective and real and still can be quite directly experienced by all humans regardless of cultural context or biases.
Nonsense article.
IDK if people derive some prestige from outdoing one another in this regard.
"In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. "
Just poetry.
Don't look too closely at it, as things can get squirrelly the deeper you dig:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Order_of_Time_(book)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli
Edit: For those downvoting, you may wish to look up the question "Does time exist?":
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-...
* https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1888683587729
Calling it "objective and real" is… debatable. Certainly the "objective" part, as Einstein theorized and empirical observation has shown.
Rovelli has much to say about the Second Law and entropy:
In relativity, time is a variable that is different for each observer, but it is still objective. It's not a matter of opinion for each observer. There are formulas that determine how all the variables change, and any observer can know what the other observers' variables are by watching how they move through space and using the formulas.
While some naive Newtonian concepts such as a single universal time metric stop working, there's no wiggle room for observer A and B to be inconsistent with one another based on their personal opinions. There is one objective reality and one objective way to quantify it mathematically.
Time isn't a single universal quantity in relativity, but it's still objective. Einstein didn't turn physics into cultural anthropology.
> a variable that is different for each observer
This is literally what "subjective" means - different dependent on the subject.
subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.
- Something being a subject, narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious experiences, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires.
- Something being a subject, broadly meaning an entity that has agency, meaning that it acts upon or wields power over some other entity (an object).
- Some information, idea, situation, or physical thing considered true only from the perspective of a subject or subjects.
The third being the only obvious applicable one.
It's also hypocritical to demand an adherence to an anti-common-sense physics-based formal definition of "time" while refusing the same courtesy towards formal definitions of "subjective."
"Objective" doesn't mean "experienced from all perspectives in the same way". Two different observers of a cube will get two different perspectives of the cube. The cube is still a single, objective, observer-independent reality. The same applies to relativistic time. It's a single reality (part of the spacetime manifold) that is measured differently in different reference frames. The different measurements must be consistent with one another according to a system of formulas. Just as different perspectives of a cube must be consistent with one another based on (1) the cube's objective existence in space and (2) the formulas of optics which determine the perspective each observer will receive.
It may be helpful to think about a more mundane example. Google search results for a given search term depend on who searches, which makes them relative. But they don't depend on the feelings of the searcher and hence are not subjective.
It may be helpful to think about a more mundane example. The results Google returns for a given search term depend on who searches, which makes them relative. But they don't depend on the feelings of the searcher and hence are objective, not subjective.
I just read a review of his "Noble Savages" book in the NYT and it's one of the worst things I've ever read. The author said almost nothing about the book and spent the entire time gossiping about the author, occasionally backing the gossip with tiny snippets of the authors' writing.
This one was somewhat better; https://www.npr.org/2013/02/16/171918973/noble-savages-a-jou...
For example, is is known that teenagers would have health benefits from later school start time but it's almost impossible to implement that due to rigid clocks of everybody else. In fact, everyone would benefit from a good sleep.
When you go to a store, do you expect to know if it's open beforehand or getting there and finding it closed at random is ok?
Schools still need clocks to coordinate regardless of what time they start.
It runs through all aspects of society.
Once when I was in Munich I needed medicine on a Sunday. Despite the pharmacy's posted hours stating it would be closed, I was somehow able to raise the pharmacist and get the medicine I needed. I was very grateful that day to have a human in the loop.
I hardly think store opening hours are a good argument for the "absolute necessity" of supreme rule of the wall clock.
It absolutely has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with people essentially not believing that it actually matters. And to some extent due to convenience for parents who drive their kids to school.
My local school system does have high school students starting late relative to elementary schools.
Our school district did that this year. You know what happened? Teenagers stayed up later, either by choice or obligations, and got the same hours of sleep before, only now some of them can't hold afterschool jobs because they get out of school too late to fit homework and employment in.
Everyone is looking forward to reverting the change next year.
Even in computation, where time is ideally measured very precisely, event based applications are extremely common, far more so than absolute or even exact relative time applications.
Time is computationally and culturally important because of the need to synchronize. But cross cultural synchronization of meetings is hard even at the basic level because prevailing attitudes of “On time” are different in, say, Germany, Spain, and China.
Richard Lewis has written about these cultural differences of time. Here’s a sample of some of his observations. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-different-cultures-under...
I think you are conflating time itself and measuring it (clocks).
edit: My cat died. Now, I can say that I moved house after my cat died, that I got my car before my cat died, or that I met Bill around the time my cat died. Dead pets create time.
You might as well say that time does everything, but that's mistaking the way you keep track of a thing with the thing itself. Time typed this comment.
In Buddhism there is no birth, no death. Both are illusions.
How's life in 1904?
Timezones and DST are especially politically sensitive. See: https://blog.poormansmath.net/the-time-it-takes-to-change-th...
Same for the ideas around what is a reasonable time to sleep, eat, work. There are all sort of biases for/against early risers and owls across different societies.
Sounds like you and the other commenters might have an axe to grind here.
Time exists regardless of measurement, just like mass, volume, voltage, etc.
If time did not exist outside of measurement we would have no reason to measure it. We created clocks (and other devices) to measure the passage of time, but we were well aware of its passage before we measured it.
I feel like this is headed toward a low-value philosophical discussion about how nothing really means anything without an observer or something like that.
That is about as simple as I can make it. It is probably just as useful as saying a spinor is a square root of a vector. While simple, it doesn't do much to illustrate the point. A background in constructionism can however be had at the expense of reading 189 pages.
On the other hand, the notion of assigning a particular label (e.g. "9 o'clock" to some moment of time) is arbitrary and determined by social consensus or political aspects, physical reality plays little role in that.
Depending on a where a driver is on their route, taking a piss might be 2-minute pop into a fast food bathroom, or a 20-minute diversion to find a bathroom. This is a good example of how important and basic human experiences don’t conform to the idea of universal and repeatable time increments that can be bolted together to make schedules.
Instead of the schedule accommodating the person, the person must accommodate the schedule. This is what the author means when they say the clock creates time.
One of the ways we measure power in society is the ability to resist this. The Amazon driver has to pee in a bottle to keep their job. But everyone has to wait for the CEO if they need the bathroom between meetings.
Plenty of soldiers, laborers and miners shit their pants on duty because of the controls placed upon them. That has nothing to do with time or clocks.
The Mayans were very gifted astronomers, and built their temples such that the sun would shine exactly through a small portal at the top of the temple on the equinoxes. Christian basilicas and Jewish temples had similar timekeeping functions.
The Greek and Roman pagans saw time as turbulent and cyclical, subject to the caprice of the gods.
The pre-modern, Christian worldview saw time as a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but also as a vertically-structured fractal of cycles within cycles, and our orientation within was ascending upwards to an eternity outside time and space.
The Protestant fathers saw the linear progression of time forwards towards salvation as the true content of the gospel — that our orientation is forwards, towards the future.
Some Maori saw our orientation in time as backwards, that we walk with our back towards the impenetrable future, with the past visible in front of us.
None of these, however, saw time as an infinitely critiqueable, totally relative social construct with no given reality outside of humanly mutable, intersubjective power relations. This makes the author of the article, in my sincere opinion, the “whitest” of them all.