The Tyranny Of Time

Clocks are the deceptively simple product of an intricate political arrangement. I’d even go so far as to say that politics is the art and science of creating the time machines that we inhabit — the calendars that help us orient and coordinate as we journey from cradle to grave

With time, as with space, the locus of the “natural” is constantly shifting. Caught between two fictions — the rigidity of clock time, and the undifferentiated soup of internet time — people hoping to rediscover a “healthy” or rewarding relationship to time increasingly turn to the purest, most natural, and most objective timepiece of all: the body... See more

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed

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"Long ago, before the Great Clock, time was measured by changes in heavenly bodies: the slow sweep of stars across the night sky, the arc of the sun and variation in light, the waxing and waning of the moon, tides, seasons. Time was measured also by heartbeats, the rhythms of drowsiness and sleep, the recurrence of hunger, the menstrual cycles of w... See more

But clock time was not always viewed as being this organic. The accusation that is today leveled against the internet — that it distorts natural rhythmicity and turns the human body into a machine — was once leveled against clock time itself.

That linear time is a method of colonial control is perhaps the greatest lesson to be learned in the fight to undo the horrors of capitalism. Before imperialists descended on the United States, there were no clocks. No second hands tick tick ticking our lives away. These are constructions that whiteness created to ensure our lives were ruled by the... See more