Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (11 page)

Of course, humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. The passage of time was not recorded or measured, but rather experienced in its various cycles. Older, wiser people and tribes became aware not just of the cycles of day and night, but of the moon and even the seasons. Since farming hadn’t yet been invented, however, seasons were not to be anticipated or exploited. Beyond gathering a few nuts as it got colder, there was little we could do to shift or store time; the changes around us were simply enjoyed or endured.

Many religions and mythologies look back longingly on this prehistoric timelessness as a golden age, or Eden. Humanity is seen as a fetus in the womb, at one with Mother Nature.
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False notions of a prehistoric noble savage aside, there is at least some truth to the idea that people lacked the capacity to distinguish themselves from nature, animals, and one another. While living so completely at the mercy of nature was fraught with pain and peril, this existence was also characterized by a holism many media and cultural theorists consider to be lost to us today in a world of dualism, preferences, and hierarchies. As media theorist and Catholic priest Walter Ong put it, “Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. . . . For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center.”
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People living in this oral, timeless civilization saw God, or the gods, in everything around them. While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.

Everything changed, finally, in the Axial Age with the invention of text. The word-pictures of hieroglyphic writing were replaced with the more discrete symbols of an alphabet. The progenitor of a more digital style of storage, letters were precise and abstract.Combined together, they gave people a way to represent the mouth noises of oral culture in a lasting artifact. Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay. The simple twenty-two-letter alphabet popularized and democratized writing, giving people a way to record promises, debts, thoughts, and events. The things written down one day could be read and retrieved the next.

Once a line could truly be drawn in something other than sand, the notion of history as a progression became possible. With the invention of text came the ability to draft contracts, which were some of the first documents ever written, and described agreements that endured over time. With contracts came accountability, and some ability to control what lay ahead. The notion of a future was born. Religion, in the oral tradition, came from the mouth of a leader or pharaoh, himself a stand-in for God. Text transformed this passive relationship to God or nature with a contract, or, more precisely, a covenant between people and God. What God demands was no longer a matter of a tyrant’s whim or the randomness of nature, but a set of written commandments. Do this and you will get that.

This resonated well with people who were learning agriculture and developing a “reap what you sow” approach to their world. Seeds planted and tended now yield a crop in the future. Scriptural laws obeyed now earn God’s good graces in the future. The world was no longer just an endless churn of cycles, but a place with a past and a future. Time didn’t merely come around; it flowed more like a river, forming a history of all that went before. In the new historical sense of time, one year came after the other. Human beings had a story that could be told—and it was, in the Torah and other written creation myths. Pagan holidays that once celebrated only the cycle of the seasons now celebrated moments in history. The spring equinox and fertility rites became the celebration of the Israelite exodus from Egypt; the solstice became the Hanukkah reclamation of the Temple and, later, the birth of Jesus. Periods in the cycle of nature became moments in the flow of history.
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The new metaphor for time was the calendar. A people was defined and its activities organized by its calendar, its holidays, and its memorials. Calendars tell a culture what matters both secularly and religiously. The time for sacred days was held apart, while time for productivity could be scheduled and even enforced. The calendar carried the double-duty of representing the cyclical nature of the lunar months and solar year while also keeping track of historical time with the passing of each numbered year. There was now a before and an after—a civilization that could measure its progress, compare its bounties from one year to the next, and, most important, try to do
better
. The great leaning forward had begun. We progressed from what social theorist Jeremy Rifkin called “the Earth’s universe” to “God’s universe,”
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conceiving ourselves as participants in a greater plan and subject to a higher law and an external gauge of our success over time.

Some of the most devout members of this religious universe were responsible for breaking time down even further. For their new Islamic faith, Muslims were required to pray at regular intervals. Their methodical call to prayer sequence used the height of the sun and measurement of shadows to break the day into six sections. In Europe, it was Benedictine monks who organized not just the calendar year but every day into precisely defined segments for prayer, work, meals, and hygiene. Handheld bells coordinated all this activity, making sure the monks performed their tasks and said their prayers at the same time. Surrendering to this early form of schedule constituted a spiritual surrender for the medieval monks, for whom personal time and autonomy were anathema to their new collective identity. Although their schedule might look simple compared with that of an average junior high student today, the monks were exercising radically strict temporal discipline for the time.

As they became more concerned (some may argue obsessed) with synchronizing all their daily routines, the monks eventually developed the first mechanical timepieces. The Benedictine clocks were celebrated for their escapement technology—basically, the ability to control the descent of a weight (or expansion of a spring) by breaking its fall slowly and sequentially with a little ticking gear. The real leap, however, had less to do with escapement than with ticking and tocking itself. What the monks had discovered was that the way to measure time was to break it down into little beats. Just as ancient Buddhist water clocks could mark four hours by storing the combined volume of hundreds of relatively regularly falling drops, the Benedictine clocks broke down the slow, continuous descent of weights into the regular beats of a pendulum. Tick-tock, before-after, yes-no, 1/0. Time was necessarily digital in character,
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always oscillating, always dividing. As an extension of the new culture of science (a word that originally meant to separate one thing from another, to split, divide, dissect), the clock turned time into something that divides, and, like any technology, created more preferences, judgments, and choices.

Even though the Chinese had accurate water clocks for centuries before the Benedictines, clocks and timing did not come to spread and dominate Asian culture the same way they did in Europe. Westerners believed this was because the Chinese didn’t know quite what to do with all this precision. But it may have had less to do with a lack than with a bounty. The Chinese already had a strong sense of culture and purpose, as well as a different relationship to work and progress over time. The introduction of timepieces capable of breaking down time didn’t have quite the same impact on a people who looked at time—for better and for worse—as belonging to someone else, anyway.

Arriving on church bell towers at the dawn of the Industrial Age, the clock was decidedly more interesting to those looking for ways to increase the efficiency of the new working classes. Ironically, perhaps, an invention designed to affirm the primacy and ubiquity of the sacred ended up becoming a tool for the expansion of the secular economy. Trade had been expanding for a century or two already, and keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule.

The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market were all punctuated by the ringing of bells. In line with other highly centralizing Renaissance inventions such as currency and the corporation, bells were controlled by central authorities. This gave rise to distrust, as workers were never sure if their employers were measuring time fairly. The emergence of the clock tower gave everyone access to the same time, allowing for verification while also amplifying time’s authority.

Thanks to the clock tower, the rhythms of daily life were now dictated by a machine. Over time, people conformed to ever more precisely scheduled routines. Where the priority of the calendar-driven civilization was God, the priorities of the clockwork universe would be speed and efficiency. Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Time was money. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word “speed” (spelled
spede
) enter the English vocabulary, or did “punctual”—which used to refer to a stickler for details—come to mean a person who arrived on time.
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The metaphor for the human being became the clock, with the heartbeat emulating the ticks of the escapement, counting off the seconds passing. Management of people meant management of time (the word “management” itself deriving from putting a horse through its paces, or
manege
). People were to perform with the precision and regularity of the machines they drove—and, in some senses, were becoming. By the 1800s, workers punched clocks to register their hours. A mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor applied his skill with machines to human beings, inventing a new field called scientific management. He and his assistants would spread out through a company armed with stopwatches and clipboards to measure and maximize the efficiency of every aspect of the work cycle. The time it took to open a file drawer was recorded down to the hundredth of a second, in order to determine the standard time required to complete any job. Once that was known, the efficiency of any particular worker could be measured against it. The efficiency movement was born, for which glowing accounts of increased productivity over time were published and promoted, while evidence of worker dissent was actively suppressed.
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Now that human beings were being tuned up like machines, the needs of humans and machines became almost indistinguishable. The entirety of the clockwork universe may as well have been a machine, with new innovations emerging primarily to assist technology or the businesses on which those technologies depended. Thanks in part to the legal arguments of a railroad industry lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, for example, the rights of local municipalities were subordinated to those of corporations that needed thoroughfare for their trains and cargo. Time and timing began to mean more than place. Transcontinental commerce required synchronized activity over great distances, leading to “standard time” and the drawing of time zones across the map. (Greenwich Mean Time’s placement in the United Kingdom represented the British Empire’s lingering domination of the globe.) Likewise, the telegraph emerged primarily as a communication system through which train crashes could be minimized. Directing the motion of trains with red lights and green lights was eventually applied to cars and ultimately to people navigating the crosswalks—all timed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and speed. In the clockwork universe, all human activity—from shift work to lunch breaks to TV viewing to blind dates—involved getting bodies to the right place at the right time, in accordance with the motions of the clock. We were as clocks ourselves, with arms that moved and hearts that counted and alarms that warned us and bells that went off in our heads. Just wind me up in the morning.

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don’t compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped. In nature, our activities were regulated by the turning of the Earth. While the central clock tower may have coordinated human activity from above, in a digital network this control is distributed—or at least it seems that way. We each have our own computer or device onto which we install our choice of software (if we’re lucky), and then use or respond to it individually. The extent to which our devices are conforming to external direction and synchronization for the most part remains a mystery to us, and the effect feels less like top-down coordination than personalized, decentralized programs.

The analog clock imitated the circularity of the day, but digital timekeeping has no arms, no circles, no moving parts. It is a number, stationary in time. It just is. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.

I remember when I was just ten years old, how I used to stare at my first digital clock. It had no LED, but rather worked a bit like a train terminal’s board, with a new number flipping down into place every minute. I would wait and count, trying and failing to anticipate the click of the next number flipping down—each time being surprised by its suddenness in a micromoment of present shock. My dad’s old alarm clock required him to wind it up each night, and then to twirl a second winder for the alarm. Over the course of the day, the potential energy he wound into the device slowly expressed itself in the kinetic energy of the motion of the arms and bell hammer. My digital clock just sat there, interrupting itself each minute only to sit there again. Its entire account of the minute 7:43 was the same. Maybe that’s why, to this day, digital watches have not replaced their analog counterparts—though wristwatches are primarily ornamental for most wearers, who now read the time on a smart phone.