Opus 6: Temporality & The Evolution of Time
Along with Walking, Skills, Commencement, & Zimmerman
What day is it even?
It is the question we have all been asking and answering recently.
The virus, and its accompanying lockdown, have upended all pre-existing notions of time we have. Thankfully, the earth is still rotating, so we have our biological clocks to fall back on. Other than that, time’s tangibility has vanished. Our weekdays and weekends have no strict boundaries anymore. Venkatesh Rao accurately describes the different interactions with temporality everyone is having:
Even within a single apartment building, neighbors experience very different temporalities. In one unit we have a single extrovert experiencing the acute trauma of being forced to work alone from home. Next door we have parents suddenly juggling childcare responsibilities and work. At the end of the hallway is an immigrant tracking the fate of family members on the other side of the globe, suddenly rendered physically unreachable due to travel bans, via WhatsApp.
Arguably, even members of a single household experience Pandemic Time differently. For my wife, it is shaped by the rhythms of televised daily briefings by political leaders. For me, it is shaped by the latest focus of attention on Twitter. Whether news on Twitter or TV is “ahead” on any given day has been a running argument for us.
[…]
Each path of descent into the future, into the dark heart of Pandemic Time, was marked by a particular administrative approach to social distancing. If Pandemic Time has global time zones, each is marked by a shared pattern of containment and mitigation. Instead of your longitude east or west of Greenwich, your local experience of Pandemic Time is determined by the strength and effectiveness of the containment and mitigation model chosen by your local government.
Here in NYC, the relationship with Pandemic Time has been a sine wave of hope and dismay as new data is published each day and old entries updated. On the other hand, I have talked to people in Utah, Montana, & Idaho who, by many measures, are back to living somewhat normal lives.
Who is Venkatesh Rao?
With how much I quote and reference Venkatesh Rao, I thought it was time I more formally “introduce” who he is and why I think he is one of the great modern thinkers.
I am by no means the appropriate author of a Venkatesh Rao biography. Still, I have been reading his keystone blog, RibbonFarm, for many years now and he is a writer and thinker I have come to respect.
Venkatesh is an engineer by education - he did his PhD in aerospace engineering at Michigan - but melds his technical, quantifiable education and training with the softer, abstract studies of culture, management, hierarchies, and progress. His most well-known writing, The Gervais Principle, is required reading for everyone that is working in large organizations.
Switching to the context of this post, he introduced the idea of temporality to me with his books, Tempo and The Clockless Clock - the former a book I recommend and the latter a book that is being released in chapters right now - both of which I highly recommend.
One of Venkatesh’s hidden gems is his Off The Clock presentation at the Thinking Digital Conference back in 2018:
If you are uninterested in watching the 16min speech, I will provide a summary and personal reflection on it below.
We Invented Shared Time
As mentioned in the introduction, everyone has their temporal reality - your circadian rhythm. It is an actual biological process impacting your reactions, hormones, brain activity, etc.:
But, our increasingly flat world needed to have a coordinated timescale. The first organization of time happened at the firm level with the invention of the mechanical clocktower in the 15th century:
Mechanical clocks broadcast by bell towers provided a fair (lower trust costs) and fungible [7] (lower transfer costs) measure of time. Each hour rung on the bell tower could be trusted to be the same length as another hour.
Most workers in the modern economy earn money based on a time-rate, whether the time period is an hour, a day, a week or a month. This is possible only because we have a measure of time which both employer and employee agree upon. If you hire someone to pressure-wash your garage for an hour, you may argue with them over the quality of the work, but you can both easily agree whether they spent an hour in the garage.
Labor and capital could now trust one another with a fungible unit of account: mechanical tracking of time. But, the distribution radius - i.e., however far the sound could travel from the clocktower - was still limited. The town down the road could have a slightly different perception of time depending on the weights in their mechanical clock.
Time distribution drastically changed with the proliferation of rail throughout the world. Continental time was now possible with the wired connections running alongside the rail tracks to properly and safely schedule trains.
Cross continental time distribution was made possible by the adoption of LORAN, and, finally, in the 1980s, there was the introduction of GPS. In summary, it took us ~400 years to have a globally referenceable source of time.
Getting On the Clock, Getting Off the Clock
As mentioned above, most of our relationships with time revolve around the connection between labor and time. As shown, labor accountability was the reason mechanical, referenceable time was created. The strongest form of this relationship was the “40-hour workweek,” which was introduced by Henry Ford. Before Ford, many industrial employees were working 80-100 hour workweeks. Ford’s change to this practice was not humanitarian; instead, he noticed labor unit productivity plummeted after the 8-10 hour mark every day. The three-shift rotation was then born to get as much productivity out of every laborer possible.
Labor’s relationship with time reached its apex in the early 1990s as W2 workers as a percent of the total workforce reached its all-time high. While the 1099 form was created in 1918, it had to silently wait until the internet erased the frictions of employment.
Unsurprisingly, Venkatesh Rao provides an excellent term for this shift: the apogee of the corporation.
Today, more and more people are not working in relation to time. Upwork has strengthened the idea of project-based work. Companies are rethinking the rigidity of the workweek.
Chronos & Kairos: Absolute vs. Relative Time
Towards the end of his speech, Venkatesh provides a thesis that we are moving from being “on the clock” and sharing a global temporality towards a multi-temporal society just as we were before the clock:
The flow and novelty of information programs humans’ experience with time. When you drive to a new friend’s house, it seems to take far longer than returning home. Today, binge-watching Netflix changes your perception of time, and you exit the hypnosis hours after you expected to. We rarely “check the time” on our smartphone nowadays in comparison to the instant check after a notification sound alerting us of new information.
Pandemic Time has sped this multi-temporality evolution up 100x as daily death and infection rates have overtaken the clock as the reference point of time. The informational flow for essential workers has made the world fly by while the newly unemployed and WFH workers are surprised to hear the answer to the question asked at the beginning.
Pandemic Time has also changed our expectations of time as well. Lines are now longer to account for the finite space within stores that must meet social distancing protocols. The supply chain and logistics system have come to a crawl, and we now complain that overnight Prime deliveries are taking days.
Temporality has forever changed. Human behavior and habits take ~60-70 days to form, and we are 60 days out from the day we all hit pause. Thinking the world returns to the state it was before is naive at best and dangerous at worst.
Homework Reading
I am rereading this book for the third time, as we are all locked up in our cages … err, I mean homes. By many accounts, Colin Fletcher is the father of long-distancing backpacking. I credit him with my addiction (as he calls it in his book) to walking in the actual wild. I am opening up the book again now in anticipation of my August hike of the Uintas Highline Trail in Utah — a 100-mile thru-hike of the Uintas Mountain Range.
I find the book to be incredibly related to the writing above as well. Time is different when you are “out there” in the backcountry. On all my endeavors - the hundreds of miles canoed in the Wisconsin boundary waters and great lakes to the ~250 miles I have hiked so far in the backcountry of Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana - the time is far more tangible. I can remember down to the minute the linear progression of every day I have spent in the backcountry. I can rewalk the entirety of all my trips because my brain is far more attentive when walking in the woods.
I recommend everyone read the opening and closing passages of the book even if you aren’t a hiker or fan of the wild backcountry. My two favorite passages:
For me, the thing touched bottom when I was gently accused of escapism during a TV interview about a book I’d written on a length-of-California walk. Frankly, I fail to see how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains can be judged less real than spending six months working eight hours a day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile walk through deserts and mountains.
But if you judge safety to be the paramount consideration in life you should never, under any circumstances, go on long hikes alone. Don't take short hikes alone, either — or, for that matter, go anywhere alone. And avoid at all costs such foolhardy activities as driving, falling in love, or inhaling air that is almost certainly riddled with deadly germs. Wear wool next to the skin. Insure every good and chattel you possess against every conceivable contingency the future might bring, even if the premiums half-cripple the present. Never cross an intersection against a red light, even when you can see all roads are clear for miles. And never, of course, explore the guts of an idea that seems as if it might threaten one of your more cherished beliefs. In your wisdom, you will probably live to be a ripe old age. But you may discover, just before you die, that you have been dead for a long, long time.
A Commencement Address Too Honest to Deliver in Person
David Brooks throws another punch, hopefully, more than a glancing blow at the collegiate institution. A worthwhile read.
A few years ago, I was teaching students at a highly competitive college. Simultaneously, I was leading seminars for 30- and 40-somethings, many of whom had gone to that same college. I assigned the same essay to both groups, an essay on Tolstoy by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. The college students found it easy to read; it’s not that hard of an essay to grasp. The 30- and 40-somethings really struggled. Their reading-comprehension ability had declined in the decades since college, and so had their ability to play with ideas. The upper limit of their mind was lower than it used to be.
In college, you get assigned hard things. You’re taught to look at paintings and think about science in challenging ways. After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, journalism. Our maximum taste shrinks. Have you ever noticed that 70 percent of the people you know are more boring at 30 than they were at 20?
An older post from Slate Star Codex but an excellent read in light of everything happening right now with the renaissance of “essential workers” - the great mathematicians and scientists couldn’t work if their local grocery store wasn’t providing them with food.
I’m never going to be a great mathematician or Elon Musk. But if I pursue my comparative advantage, which right now is medicine, I can still make money. And if I feel like it, I can donate it to mathematics research. Or anti-aging research. Or the same people Elon Musk donates his money to. They will use it to hire smart people with important talents that I lack, and I will be at least partially responsible for those people’s successes.
If I had an IQ of 70, I think I would still want to pursue my comparative advantage – even if that was ditch-digging, or whatever, and donate that money to important causes. It might not be very much money, but it would be some.
Today’s Music
I thought it would be appropriate to share music that makes me think of time and its rigidity or lack of. Certain pieces have an underlying pace throughout them. These are pieces that do not need a metronome to keep time, rather their own melody is the best timekeeper.
While some may think it is corny to share a movie theme song, the Interstellar theme has been one of my favorite pieces since its release nearly five years ago. As Hans Zimmer, the composer, explains, “the piece has a human-like breathe that is pegged to time.”
The Encore
Chopin: Prelude in E Minor - Chopin’s funeral song is a reminder of the scarcity of time and it has a haunting metronome-like left-hand all throughout.
Gabriel Fauré: Après un rêve, Op 7, No 1
Hans Zimmer - Time - A bit literal, but I had to include it.