A Minor History of / Time Without Clocks

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. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us “fatally

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In the past, our timekeeping systems were synchronized with the systems of the earth. The rhythms and seasons of nature help us orient and make sense of when we are. Digital media has warped our subjective sense of time and thrown us into a state of atemporal confusion. Aside from surface-level features like “dark mode,” digital temporality is blin... See more

With artificial light, we believe we defeat the sleep-wake cycle; with climate control, the seasonal cycle; with refrigeration, the agricultural cycle; and with high-tech medicine, the rest-recovery cycle. Triumphal linearism has shaped the very style of Western and (especially) American civilization. Before, when cyclical time reigned, people valu... See more