Technics and Civilization
Mumford discusses the emergence and impact of the mechanical clock, originating in monasteries, on society's perception of time, organization, and industrialization.
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crucial deviation happened with the development of Christian canonical hours,
Jenny Odell • Saving Time
Mumford, who was an expert on cities and architecture, publishing the monumental The City in History in 1961, had a unique insight into the way that technics operated in an urban environment. His essay is concerned with how technical systems, from ancient times to today, have the propensity to enable or resist authoritarianism. As he writes:
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But while nature may mete out time’s passage in these horological devices, it takes human observation of the heavens to set them. Even the most precise atomic clock must be periodically tweaked to account for variations in the earth’s rotation. Some clocks, however, are tuned more directly to nature.