The Tyranny of Time | NOEMA

You make it (somewhat) arbitrary. Divide the world into 24 time zones, and  slowly force people  — often through colonial might — to abide by one, standard time for an entire wedge. Do it in the name of commerce, of travel, of ease of communication, of  ease . Fast-forward a century and a half, and this rational/irrational time

Time has always been an imaginary concept, and it matters who imagines it. For most of history, time has been governed by our relationship to the more-than-human world: the rising of the sun and the turning of the seasons. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, time was separated from the earth, and suborned by industry for its own e

But outsourcing authority to the mechanical clock has severed time from all connection to the body or the season by breaking life into a series of discrete units—the effect of which, writes Mumford, “helped [to] create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”