the change from AD to CE feels really emblematic of how surface-level and meaningless the supposed secularization of the western world is
Common Era is definitely preferable over Anno Domini, if only because christ is no lord of mine, but it’s only less christianocentric in that it doesn’t overtly make reference to christ in its title. the benchmark is still the same. you’re still measuring when the common era began using the (supposed) birth of christ, separating history into “the period before jesus” and “the period after jesus”. this conception of history is no less defined by christianity than it was before, except that now it’s easier to ignore because you’ve draped it in a “secular”, “modern” veneer and done nothing to actually unpack the ways in which western society intrinsically centers christianity.
Okay now I need a point in history that could be a benchmark to start counting the years from, and would be a common point for most of the world
What year would it be today?
UTC
Coordinated Universal Time.
The system by which every computer in existence now keeps count of the passing seconds.
And I mean that literally. To a computer system "now" is a number that represents the total number ov seconds that have passed since midnight on the 1st of January, 1960.
1960/01/01 00:00:01 is literally the beginning of time as far as a computer is concerned.
This would be the year 66UTC
I like this idea but if we changed it now then next year would be the year 67 which would make a lot of people angry
