Technics and Civilization

Rather than understanding time’s passage in relationship with the natural world, the artificial measuring of time shifted our cultural allegiance to the disciplines and expectations of capitalism. Clock time was also mixed up with religious doctrine,

Birth is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. “Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,” Birth

miracles of technology cause us to live in a hectic, clockwork world that does violence to human biology, enabling us to do nothing but pursue the future faster and faster.

To take a later example: I have already alluded to the transformation of the mechanical clock in the fourteenth century from an instrument of religious observance to an instrument of commercial enterprise. That transformation is sometimes given a specific date—1370—when King Charles V ordered all citizens of Paris to regulate their private, commerc