"On March 1, 2050, the last clock rolled off the assembly line. There was no announcement and no ceremony. It was simply the final unit in a long lineage of devices that had shaped human life for centuries. The workers who boxed it up were finishing a shift, not closing an era, yet that quiet moment marked the end of the instrument that once defined how people organized their days.
Clocks had been with us for centuries. They shaped our mornings and carved our days into pieces. They structured our work, our meals, our meetings, and our milestones. They hung on walls and sat on wrists and glowed from screens that illuminated every room we lived in. They were so familiar that their authority felt natural. People rarely questioned the arrangement. It seemed normal to live inside their system.
Time is a river. Clocks turned it into a map. Time flowed with no regard for efficiency or lateness. It did not judge. It did not measure. Clocks changed this. They overlaid the river with boundaries and markers. They translated the day into early, late, ahead, and behind. They imposed ideas like productivity and wasted time. They created obligation where nature offered none.
For centuries, clocks were the most successful instrument of behavioral control ever invented. They overruled the signals that guided humans for hundreds of thousands of years. A hunter gatherer slept when tired, woke when rested, ate when hungry, and moved when the body leaned forward. The clock replaced those instincts with commands. Wake now. Eat now. Work now. Stop now. It told people to sit when their bodies wanted movement and to concentrate when their attention had already faded. It cut deep work into fragments and asked the mind to restart again and again.
(...)
This is one side of the story. But there is another. Clocks not only disciplined individuals. They also enlarged what groups could accomplish."
https://x.com/brucewarila/status/1994386975562895454
#Time #Clocks #Productivity #Automation #SciFi #ASI #Futurism #Utopia
