The Tyranny of Time | NOEMA

Clock time is not what most people think it is. It was created, and it is frequently altered and adjusted to fit social and political purposes.

One of the most affecting myths of clock time is that we all experience time at the same steady pace. We don’t. “The future is already here,” the science-fiction author William Gibson famously said in 2003, “it’s just not very evenly distributed.” And framing the climate crisis as a ticking clock with only a certain amount of time “to avoid disaste

“The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.”

The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.

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

The clock does not measure time; it produces it.

“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” wrote the literary critic Fredric Jameson. One of the hardest elements to imagine is what capitalism has done to our perception of time via clocks. It now seems embedded into our very psychology to view time as a commodity that can be spent or wasted.