Soonish - This Is How You Win the Time War

This Is How You Win the Time War

11/04/21 • 51 min

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

But consider the system of standard time, first imposed by the railroad companies in the 1880s. It constrains people who live 1,000 miles apart—on opposite edges of their time zones—to get up and go to work or go to school at the same time, even though their local sunrise and sunset times may vary by an hour or more.

And it also consigns people like me who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

For over a century, we've been fiddling with standard time, adding complications such as Daylight Saving Time that are meant to give us a little more evening sunlight for at least part of the year. But what if these are just palliatives for a broken system? What if it's time to reset the clock and try something completely different?

* *

As I publish this, we’re just days away from the most discouraging, and the second most dangerous, day of the year. It's the day we return to Standard Time after eight months of Daylight Saving Time. (In 2021 that happens at 2:00 am on November 7.)

It's discouraging because twilight and sunset will arrive an hour earlier that day, erasing any lift we might have enjoyed from the theoretical extra hour of sleep the night before. It's dangerous because the shift throws off our biological clocks, just the same way a plane trip across time zones would. The only more dangerous day is the first day of Daylight Saving Time in mid-March, which always sees a wave of heart attacks and traffic accidents.

As someone who's lived at both the western and eastern extremes of my time zone, I've long been sensitive to the way differences in longitude can cut into available daylight. It's bad enough that for Bostonians like me, the sun sets long before it does for people in New York or Philadelphia or Detroit. But after the return to Standard Time, when the curtain of darkness descends yet earlier, it feels like we're living most of our lives in the dark.

Considering that all these problems are self-imposed—the by-products of a time-zone architecture introduced by scientists, government ministers, and corporate interests in the 1880s—it seems odd that we continue to tolerate them year after year. But it turns out that there are lots of people with creative ideas for changing our relationship with time. And for today's episode, I spoke with three of them: Tom Emswiler, Dick Henry, and Steve Hanke.

Should we make Daylight Saving Time permanent? Should we move the boundaries between time zones, or transplant whole regions, such as New England, into neighboring time zones? Should we consider abolishing time zones altogether and simply live according to the movements of the sun? All of these would be improvements, in my mind. Come with me on today's audio journey through the history and future of standard time, and I think you'll end up agreeing.

For show notes, links to more resources, and a full transcript, please go to soonishpodcast.org.

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Clock time is a human invention. So it shouldn’t be a box that confines us; it should be a tool that helps us accomplish the things we care about.

And it also consigns people like me who live on the eastern edges of their time zones to ludicrously early winter sunsets.

* *

For show notes, links to more resources, and a full transcript, please go to soonishpodcast.org.

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Previous Episode

Goodbye, Google

What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.

* *

Back in 2019, in the episode A Future Without Facebook, I explained why I had decided that it was time to delete my Facebook account. In short, I was tired of being part of a system that amplified hateful and polarizing messages in order to keep users engaged and drive more advertising revenue for Zuckerberg & Co.

I knew at the time that Google also engages in such practices at YouTube, and that the search giant's whole surveillance capitalism business model rests on tracking user's behavior and serving them targeted ads. But I continued as a customer of Google nonetheless, while keeping one eye on the company to see whether its tactics were growing more toxic, or less.

The moment when Google finally exhausted my patience came in December 2020, when the company fired a prominent Black computer scientist and AI ethicist named Timnit Gebru in a dispute over a scholarly paper she'd co-written. Gebru and her co-authors argued in the paper that without better protections, racial and gender bias might seep into Google's artificial intelligence systems in areas like natural language processing and face recognition. Google executives thought the paper was too harsh and forbade Gebru from publishing it; she objected; and things went downhill from there.

It was a complicated story, but it convinced me that at the upper echelons of Google, any remnant of a commitment to the company's sweeping motto—"Don't Be Evil"—had given way to bland and meaningless statements about "protecting users" and "expanding opportunity" and "including all voices." In fact, the company was doing the opposite of all of those things. It was time for me to opt out.

How I went about doing that—and how other consumers can too—is what this episode is all about. I explain the Gebru case and other problems at Google, and I also speak at length with guest Mark Hurst, a technology critic who runs the product design consultancy Creative Good and hosts the radio show and podcast Techtonic at WFMU. Mark publishes an important site called Good Reports, where consumers can find the best alternatives to the services offered by today's tech giants in areas like search, social media, and mobile technology.

Hurst emphasizes—and I agree—that leaving Google isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. The company is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's almost impossible to cut it out entirely. Instead, users can uncouple from Google step by step—first switching to a different search engine, then trying a browser other than Chrome, then switching from Gmail to some other email platform, and so forth.

"Setting a goal of getting ourselves 100 percent off of Google is is unrealistic," Mark says. "And it's I think it's a little bit of a harmful goal, because it's so hard that people are going to give up early on. But instead, let's let's have a goal of learning what's happening in the world and then making some choices for ourselves, some small choices at first, of how we want to do things differently. If enough of us make the decision to extricate ourselves from Google, we'll form a movement and other companies will see an opportunity to build less exploitative tools for us. You've got to start somewhere!"

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Next Episode

The Reinvention of Apple

This week, I've got something different for Soonish listeners. I'm sharing Part 1 of "The Persistent Innovators," a miniseries I'm currently guest-producing and guest-hosting for InnoLead's podcast Innovation Answered. The big question the series tackles is: "How do big companies become innovative—and stay innovative?" I'm looking at four long-lived global companies—Apple, Disney, LEGO, and Novartis—and asking how they've all stayed creative and curious long past the age when most companies stop innovating and decide to coast on profits from their existing businesses.

For this initial episode, I traced Apple's evolution from a renegade upstart in the early 1980s to near-bankruptcy in the late 1990s to its current status as world-conquering smartphone maker. It's based on interviews with people who worked alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and saw how leadership, culture, and technology came together to make Apple...Apple.

"What Makes Apple a Persistent Innovator" was first published by InnoLead's Innovation Answered podcast on January 18, 2022. Parts 2, 3, and 4 will be published by Innovation Leader on January 31, February 14, and February 28, 2022; you can hear them all at innovationleader.com or in your podcast player of choice.

Logo photo by Zhiyue Xu on Unsplash.