13 ms·
The clock does not measure time; it produces it
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Repent,_Harlequin!%22_Said_the_Ticktockman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Repent,_Harlequin!%22_Said_...
- debo_ 5y ago> Stylistically, the story deliberately ignores many "rules of good writing", including a paragraph about jelly beans which is almost entirely one run-on sentence.
- wruza 5y agoIf you expect to read about quantum physics of time converging into "the clock", this article tells none of it, it stays on a socio-biological level.
- tasha0663 5y ago> We discipline our lives by the time on the clock. 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.
- jacobr 5y agoI’m currently reading 4000 Weeks (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-weeks https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54785515-four-thousand-w...), which is something as interesting as a time management book that starts with a chapter quite similar to this article - explaining how time is a social construct and that you’ll probably fail if you just try to get more things done.
- blueflow 5y agoFucking white people and their... shuffles deck, pulls card ... methods of timekeeping. 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.
- throwaway2048 5y ago
- inglor_cz 5y agoThere seems to be a bizarre race in the contemporary discourse: what else can have a "colonial" sticker put on? IDK if people derive some prestige from outdoing one another in this regard.
- decremental 5y ago
- pessimizer 5y ago
- gambiting 5y agoI think they absolutely do. There are certainly specific places online(and in real world too) where your societal standing is entirely dependent on how outraged you are, or what new sources of oppression you can identify each week. Bonus points for thinking of ones no one has yet accused of anything - like time! "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.
- llimos 5y agoNot my favourite Twitter account, but if you like that kind of thing here's a long list of examples https://twitter.com/titaniamcgrath/status/1281024006792060929 https://twitter.com/titaniamcgrath/status/128102400679206092...
- ciphol 5y agoYep. The article is apparently ignorant of the long history of sophisticated clocks in non-Western countries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_timekeeping_devices)
- krisoft 5y ago> We usually eat our meals at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are hungry, go to sleep at appropriate clock times as opposed to whenever we are tired Well then you are doing it wrong. If you do stupid things don't blame the clock for it. :D
- inglor_cz 5y agoHunger is actually fairly modifiable, as intermittent fasters know. If you are used to eat at a certain hour, you will feel pangs of hunger around it, but if you bridge the gap somehow, the feeling of hunger will go away again.
- cassandratt 5y agoDefinitely, I eat a single meal at night, and I don't get hungry until about an hour before super. No hunger pangs or anything, it only takes a few weeks to condition the body.
- willis936 5y agoThis is true. I don't live in my mom's house because I'm an adult (and am above the poverty line). As such my partner and I have and exercise the agency to make meals when we're hungry and individually go to sleep when we're tired. Why shout at the mirror?
- DeWilde 5y agoEating when you feel/are hungry can lead you into obesity or insulin resistance. The more you eat the stronger your cravings are and sooner you will be hungry. Quenching fake hunger with a glass of water and eating more healthy will break this cycle.
- pastage 5y agoThis can be a dangerous advice; there is a risk when you talk about a complex illness and give specific advise. For me exercise and eating ok is good enough but that is not true for everyone so I try not to give those advice as a solution.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoJust as in computers, the value of a clock is that it enables efficient distributed computing and scale. 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.
- couchand 5y ago> 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."
- tgv 5y ago
- papito 5y agoSpeaking of time and sleep, I have always been fascinated with the concept of "first sleep, second sleep". https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220107-the-lost-medieval-habit-of-biphasic-sleep 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).
- macintux 5y agoMuch discussion about that article a couple of weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29886907
- dmitryminkovsky 5y agoFor anyone interested in reading more about this, E.P. Thompson’s Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism is a really good read, especially if you follow his citations to Lewis Mumford and others. Although industrial capitalism has sort of faded in some parts of the world, the insights I think are as relevant as ever. The author mentions Mumford once, but the central thesis seems taken directly from Technics and Civilization: > 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.
- morelisp 5y agoIf anything forms of late/post capitalism are even more concerned with time than industrial capitalism - one might say that industrial capitalism formally subsumed time measurement, while today's attention economy really subsumed it.
- samatman 5y agoSince that was bad, and the topic is wonderful, may I offer something very good on this topic instead? It is a book called Einstein's Dreams. Thank me later.
- garrickvanburen 5y agoClocks are an accident of latitude. 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.
- bagacrap 5y agothat's great but how do I make my appointments if we don't have clocks
- garrickvanburen 5y agosome cultures have a far less precise definition of punctuality.
- cormullion 5y agoClocks with a hand that circles once per day are as old as the clock itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_analog_dial
- MikeDelta 5y agoThis one also does one rotarion per day, maybe the oldest out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundial
- gtsop 5y agoI had a very hard time following the point of this article. Didn't make it. It felt like the template was somethink like this: 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
- prometheus76 5y agoYou've just outlined how deconstruction works. It's a cancer, and the ironic part is that those currently employing it against past structures do not see the time coming where their own "new structures" are deconstructed.
- gtsop 5y agoYour comment intruiges me but I don't quite understand it. Can you rephrase it please? What are past and new structures you are talking of?
- Mezzie 5y agoI don't completely agree with him, but I interpreted him as saying: 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.
- prometheus76 5y agoI think Mezzie did a good job of elaborating in an eloquent way what I was saying in a hurry as I was walking out the door. I would only add to their comments that deconstruction is an ouroboros and will continue to devour itself as the morality spiral towards utopian ideological purity continues. You might be the most moral leader of the movement today, but future leaders will cast what you are doing now as "not enough" and "misguided" and especially "problematic" and you will be cast out and replaced. The history of the early years of the Soviet Revolution are the best historical example of what I'm talking about with the Trotskyites, the Leninists, and the Stalinists all accusing each other of not being the "real" or "true" form of communism using the same deconstruction techniques.
- vaidhy 5y ago"Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth." - Tagore. 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?
- Eddy_Viscosity2 5y agoI can confirm that it did by measure of my knees hurting more and sudden need of reading glasses. Time passing is real and it sucks.
- Flankk 5y agoO clock, how ye astounds. As the fourth hour striketh I am unabashedly reminded of his whiteness; wherefrom dost thou find such disregard for aboriginal astronomy?
- nathias 5y agoreally the worst invention, before they invented the clock everyone was immortal
- dav_Oz 5y agoHere some "gems": >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] [0]https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yioZhHe1i5M https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yioZhHe1i5M
- celdon25 5y agoPlease tell me this is a satirical inside joke in reference to the current political climate.
- FrozenVoid 5y agoClocks are obviously not a social construct, its punctuality that is culture-bound variable author tries to 'deconstruct' without being aware of different cultural contexts which not always work 'by the clock', e.g. https://www.insider.com/how-different-cultures-see-punctuality-2016-7 https://www.insider.com/how-different-cultures-see-punctuali...
- blendergeek 5y ago> Language such as “failure to progress” is common when a woman doesn’t perform to the expected curve, and diversion from the clock-time framework can be used to justify medical intervention. This is one of the reasons that the home-birthing movement has recently grown in popularity. Of course these medical interventions have greatly reduced the number of women who die in childbirth.
- civilized 5y agoFunny how such little details that don't fit The Narrative get omitted from this sort of article.
- trs8080 5y agowhat's "The Narrative"? sounds like some kind of conspiracy?
- civilized 5y agoIt's just the story this author is pushing, characterizing time as a form of oppression against women, and dovetailing with other narratives that try to reduce every Western concept and institution to forms of oppression. 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.
- snowwrestler 5y agoWell, no. Medical interventions that save lives are not clock-based but skill-based. An emergency C-section works just as well at 41 weeks as it does at 40 weeks. 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.
- 5y ago
- suketk 5y agoRelated: https://dailygood.org/story/1609/against-the-clock-how-technology-has-changed-our-experience-of-time-heleo-editors/ https://dailygood.org/story/1609/against-the-clock-how-techn...
- snowwrestler 5y agoFolks on HN talk about resisting the clock all the time without realizing it. 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.
- dpark 5y agoThis isn’t a comment about clocks at all. You’re talking about being free from office culture and sticking the word “clock” in there. 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”.
- aiisjustanif 5y agoIf you say so, I’m looking at the clock in a lot of these situations.
- robwwilliams 5y agoOh so woke: “The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures.” 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 ;-)
- Spooky23 5y agoLol, love this. It’s amazing how you can frame a question or proposition when you are always pushing an answer.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- carapace 5y ago> time is a necessary convention for virtually any complex society 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.
- arandomuser1 5y agoThis article's a great example (albeit an utterly ludicrous one) of how critical/postmodern theories work. They roughly follow these steps: 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.
- teddyh 5y agoClocks do indeed produce a culture of “time” where none such had existed before. This was observed very early: 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. — Plautus (c.254-184 BC)
- civilized 5y agoSo much more insightful, concise, entertaining, and relatable than TFA. 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.
- ASalazarMX 5y agoNever expected to read someone complaining about those newfangled sundials.
- quattrofan 5y ago
- ezekiel68 5y agoSo much hand-wringing in these comments. Let me try to help: the advent society-wide timekeeping mechanims with more (sundials) and more (mechanical clocks) and more (atomic clocks) accuracy fomented the emergence of habits and patterns of interactions unimaginable by humans and their societies before these facilities became widely available. Some of these emergent properties conveyed advantages that aided conquest and empire building, not unlike Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel". 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.
- b3morales 5y agoSeeing Like a State by James C. Scott also covers similar themes, on measurement and other societal standardization, although I don't recall that it touched on timekeeping directly.
- dorchadas 5y agoRevolution in Time by David Landes supposedly (I haven't read it, though it's been on my list for a while) touches on this, and how timekeeping fundamentally changed life and civilization.
- blueflow 5y agoI just realized the noema magazine is part of the Berggruen think tank... Its neither remotely scientific nor written with honest intent. What are the goals this think tank is supposed to advance?
- Strilanc 5y agoThis is really not the article for me. It's written by someone who, I infer, agrees that Newton "Destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." [1]. And that is so alien to my experience of understanding things and defining things that I fail to relate to the text. I'm very much on the "it only adds" side of things [2][3]. 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 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Keats (search for text "prism") 2: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184384-i-have-a-friend-who-s-an-artist-and-has-sometimes https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/184384-i-have-a-friend-who-... 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbFM3rn4ldo
- onecommentman 5y ago“We are “time binding” animals, as the American economist and social theorist Jeremy Rifkin put it in his 1987 book, “Time Wars.”” 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 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 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.]
- achikin 5y agoIf clock produces time - can I create super slow clock and dodge bullets?