kill the clock in ur head
all clocks are bastards
no clocks no masters
“Walter Benjamin quotes reports that during the Paris Commune, in all corners of the city of Paris there were people shooting at the clocks on the towers of the churches, palaces and so on, thereby consciously or half-consciously expressing the need that somehow time has to be arrested; that at least the prevailing, the established time continuum has to be arrested, and that a new time has to begin – a very strong emphasis on the qualitative difference and on the totality of the rupture between the new society and the old.” Liberation from the Affluent Society, Herbert Marcuse (1967)
“This is SATAN’S HANDCUFF.” - Rev. Ivan Stang, immediately before smashing a wristwatch with a sledgehammer at an early SubGenius Devival.
“The clock – not money – emerged as the key technology for measuring the value of work. This distinction is crucial because it’s easy to think that working for wages is capitalism’s signature. It’s not: in thirteenth-century England a third of the economically active population depended on wages for survival. That wages became a decisive way of structuring life, space, and nature owes everything to a new model of time.
By the early fourteenth century, the new temporal model was shaping industrial activity. In textile-manufacturing towns like Ypres, in what is now Belgium, workers found themselves regulated not by the flow of activity or the seasons but by a new kind of time – abstract, linear, repetitive. In Ypres, that work time was measured by the town’s bells, which rang at the beginning and end of each work shift. By the sixteenth century, time was measured in steady ticks of minutes and seconds. This abstract time came to shape everything – work and play, sleep and waking, credit and money, agriculture and industry, even prayer. By the end of the sixteenth century, most of England’s parishes had mechanical clocks. In the twentieth century, as assembly lines in Detroit churned out Henry Ford’s Model T, ‘scientific managers’ were measuring units of work called therbligs (an anagram of their developers’ last name, Gilbreth): each one a mere one-thousandth of a second.
Policing time was [and is] central to capitalism’s ecology.”
Raj Patel and Jason W Moore
“The ultimate and perhaps most significant conversion of reality into numbers is the measurement of time. Clocks do to time what name and number do to the material world: they reduce it, make it finite. And what is time, but life itself? Time is experience, process, the flow of being. By measuring time, by converting it into numbers, we rob it of its infinitude and uniqueness in precisely the same way that nouns and numbers reduce the physical world. Time measurement turns a succession of unique moments into just so many seconds, minutes, and hours, and denies the particularity of each person’s subjective experience of them.
…In effect, clocks turn time into another standardized, interchangeable part of the World Machine, facilitating the engineering of the world. Only time thus devalued is a conceivable object of commerce. Otherwise, who would sell their moments, each infinitely precious, for a wage? Who would reduce time, i.e. life, to mere money? Leibnitz’ merciless phrase, ‘Time is money,’ encapsulates a profound reduction of the world and enslavement of the spirit.
It is not surprising that the revolutionaries of Paris’s 1830 July Revolution went around the city smashing its clocks. The fundamental purpose of clocks is not to measure time, it is to coordinate human activity. Aside from that it is a fiction, a pretense: as Thoreau said, ‘Time measures nothing but itself.’ Smashing the clocks represents a refusal to sell one’s time, a refusal to schedule one’s life or to bring it into conformity with the needs of specialized mass society. Further, it represents a declaration that ‘I will live my own life,’ establishing the ascendancy of now.”
Charles Eisenstein
“The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men.”
George Woodcock, The Tyranny of the Clock
(I highly recommend reading that one.)
