ABSTRACT
This chapter continues the book’s general critique of coding systems that are autonomous to their surroundings. In extending this criticism to mechanical tools, it focuses mainly on the influence of clocks, showing how their design and use in the 21st century is strange, anachronistic and ecologically damaging. It does so by showing how the arguments relating to alphabetical writing can also be used to challenge common assumptions about the use of numbers. In contrast to the temporality of organic systems, clocks invoke a mechanical and unidirectional model of change. This condition has evolved over the last 600 years to introduce a tyrannical mode of industrialisation. In exploring the use of clock-time, and its current role in the more dystopian aspects of living, this chapter asks whether languages such as mathematics are really helpful within a possible ‘micro-utopian’ context. Many experts on eco-design have expressed concern about the acceleration of modern lifestyles, and suggested that we find ways to slow down (for example Fuad-Luke, 2002). This critique of industrial ‘speed’ is not new. In the 1840s, the flâneurs (literally ‘strollers’) are said to have walked around with pet turtles as pacesetters, and Marx (1988) saw the clock as the main exemplar for industrial capitalism. Later writers such as Benjamin (1992) and Mumford (1934) reflected in more detail on subsequent developments, such as the ‘atomising’ of clock time into discrete hours, minutes and seconds. The clock has played a key role in speeding up the pace of life in the industrialised world. In more recent times the Slow Food movement (founded 1986 in Italy) found popularity in many cities around the world and remains as a positive and beneficial influence.
