Clocks are Bourgeois

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First Anti-Glasses Gang.

Who will have the honor of becoming Anti-Clock Gang in the future?

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But the root cause of this was the inefficiency of their agriculture and I have to say that an inability to properly manage time isn't a small part of inefficiency–it isn't simply a technology question.

Btw it wasn't just "disaster" that caused the problems that I mention but also chronic poverty. You ever wonder why there were so many holidays in medieval times and why they worked fewer hours per day in comparison to modern times? If you think it all has to do with Christian spooks and closeness to the land then you're wrong.

They didn't put in long days because they weren't physically able. Robert C. Allen pointed out in his book on the British Industrial Revolution that in the 17th-18th centuries approximately 40% of the French population was too malnourished to do more than 3 hrs of light work a day. This also corresponds to the evidence we have concerning human height and health from the period.

But then if we look across the channel at England during the same time period we see that only 20% of the population is so malnourished they can't do more than 3 hours of work. Huh. Isn't it also fascinating that the obsession with work and long-working hours begins in Britain where a far larger portion of the population is physically able to sustain long-working hours at a fairly vigorous pace? This also matches with the fact that Britons, Americans, and Australians were some of the tallest people on earth during the 19th century.

So, what makes more sense, the crippling chronic poverty of the majority of the population only arose with the creation of mechanized time or that this was endemic to the feudal mode of production given that peasants in more primitive countries in Europe and around the world were worse off materially than proles in England?

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I don't think that's what Mumford or Thompson argued — I'm fairly sure they were aware pre-industrial workers were poor too. They didn't romanticize pre-capitalist societies, they wrote a genealogy of how clock-time came to be and how it was intertwined with bourgeois disciplining of European societies. I mean, claiming technology is not neutral is not the same as being a technophobe.

We must abolish the human race

yes it wasn't until clocks that people were able to manage time you've figured it out gg

Was Mumford a brainlet?

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Those didn't operate on what we call clock-time (standardized, abstract time). A sundial — which interestingly enough is reliant on the position of the sun, that is concrete time — may inform peasants that it is past midday, but it doesn't and can't express that as being say 01:30PM. Waterclocks and hourglasses were used to estimate time that passed (like a countdown) and calendars were usually based on seasonal cycles, so they did not involve clock-time. At least that is my understanding.

Standarized 24 hour divisions and 60 minute hours etc. were derived from those by the Mesopotamians, were they not?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minute#History
prior to mechanical clocks, I think the length of hours varied with the seasons

The first mechanical clocks came in the early 1200s when the verge escapement was invented by Benedictine monks as a means to synchronize time between monasteries. Thus, it ties heavily into Judeo-Christian philosophy. One God for all, one time system for all. A full hundred years before the breakdown of feudalism, and you see peasant accounts of reckoning the time with phrases like "o'clock" indicating how rapidly the mechanical clock and the town clock had diffused into these people's lives.

You may argue well that the invention of clock-time served the interest of the early burghers and merchant classes the most, and this was one of the factors that led to their rise over the 14th and 15th centuries and subsequent development of capitalism. But I don't think the observance of clock-time began with capitalism unto itself. It certainly well may have fed it, but there's clear evidence of how important clock-time was to medieval lives in documented record, and I don't believe it was a forced social imposition rather than something people willingly adopted for any number of reasons, be they astronomy or business. Many monastic inventions were later repurposed for utilitarian means. Nothing new under the sun.

Time standardized for big regions came about with the installation of rail networks. (I'm not making a counter hypothesis, I'm stating a fact.)

There's a good JG Ballard story about this: "Chronopolis." It's one of the few SF tales where you find yourself rooting for the totalitarian government.

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Astounding shitpost

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You know who else tried to control the measurements of time? The French Revolutionaries. You see where that got them.

Ah, the monastery definitely played a huge role in the development of clock-time, and IIRC Mumford acknowledge this. I don't think the clock or clock-time was born in the industrial revolution either, rather it was its crowning moment.

Nobody here supports "going back" to a time when there were no clocks, rather we want to analyze how clock-time came to be and what built-in limitations of that arrangement could be from a socially emancipatory point of view — because it is undeniable it came to be as a form of control.

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