Thoughts on Time Wars

What a 38 year-old book made me see about the present

Feb 17, 2025

Summary: Jeremy Rifkin's 1987 book Time Wars examined timekeeping as a factor in social and political conflict. He argued that computers opened a new era in timekeeping, one in which time was seen more as malleable information than as a constant in our lives or as something with a moral quality. I argue that this tendency has been heightened by recent advances in AI but also by the ideologies that have emerged out of the technological moment. This gives us a slightly different perspective on the present range of crises.

There is an odd book from the late 1980s, Jeremy Rifkin's Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. The subtitle says it all. Comments from a couple of friends (made separately on different topics) led me back to some of its later chapters. At least for me, looking at these ideas from almost forty years on throws some light on the present.

I first came across the book three years ago while steeping myself in the history of clocks and watches. As I reread it now, I find that I focused then on technologies and effects on individuals. Today, I am better able to see the collective effects he describes.

While recounting the history timekeeping and thought about time, Rifkin argues that controlling the the management of time has been central to the struggle between different groups (and I would add with the living world), and therefore the technologies of timekeeping are critical components of human history. At least, that is how I would sum up the book. It goes to the very heart of today's events and polycrisis.

(I suppose a labor historian might think this obvious, but the penetration of timekeeping, and especially horology, into our lives goes beyond the mere regulation of work and leisure. A philosopher or sociologist of technology would surely see his arguments as built on those of Lewis Mumford.)

More specifically, he points out that digital technologies, both computers and digital timekeeping, broke the last links of human time to natural time. The decay of those links was a long process, one that began with calendars but was greatly accelerated by mechanical clocks about 700-750 years and more so by the changes of the last 70-80. As time became more arbitrary, it became less embodied and more arbitrary. In the first 600+ years, we slowly ceded sun time and our circadian rhythms to the dial of the clock. We reached a point in the nineteenth century when we gave up our sense of local time (local sun time) to make railroad travel safer and more efficient. Europeans and Americans used clock time both as a marker of civilization but also as a way of breaking the resistance of colonized communities. The restructuring of calendars and daily time proved an excellent way to restructure the space, culture, and identities of indigenous populations. In the throws of WWI, we further ceded sun time with the adoption of daylight savings to facilitate war production and save on fuel for lighting. In the same war, seconds began to count as a matter of life and death as officers learned to synchronize watches and lead their men forward at exactly the right time and pace to take advantage of creeping artillery barrages to advance safely through no man's land.

Science, business, armies, and navies also began the transformation of time into more abstract and actionable information. Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum notes that astronomers were involved with early clocks but less for time keeping than in modeling the heavens. It was centuries before clocks became accurate enough to be used for observations and experimental use. For the most part, it took until the invention of pendulum clocks in the seventeenth century and of chronometers in the eighteenth. The development of chronograph pocket watches from 1816 (initially for horse racing) made precise timing portable. Navigation and astronomy were probably the first professions to approach time as information, as a variable. Railroads and the telegraph began to convert time into information in new ways. Precision timekeeping was necessary for railroad safety as much as for efficiency. At the same time, telegraphy began to obliterate time while also requiring precise timing for more advanced instruments. By the end of the century, artillery observers began experimenting with watches with telemeter scales to determine how far away enemy batteries were (by precisely timing the difference between when a barrel flash was observed and when the shot was heard). Navies, in the decade before 1914, brought clocks into increasingly complex fire control directors that eventually (by WWII) automatically calculated the distance, deflection, and trajectory to fire on an enemy ship while sailing in a different direction. Aviators began to need accurate and legible wristwatches early on. The first aviator's watch was created for Alberto Santos-Dumont in 1904 - it went on sale in 1911. Again, this was the conversion of time into some other information (speed, endurance, etc.)

This progress towards treating time as information other than time is obviously more complex than this. It is also a vital change in Rifkin's estimation. He writes a lot about AI in a general way and is firmly grounded in cybernetics. This was long before today's generative models, and it is not always clear how much he distinguishes between advanced computing projects and AI. He also refers to what was emerging four decades as "the Simulation Age." This was before the Simulation Hypothesis was formulated, but he was clearly aware of its precursors in 1987.

He emphasizes the rise of the computer turning time into something infinitely malleable, but even just the appearance of the digital watch signaled to him a change of perspective - he mentions children learning to just read off the numbers instead of understanding the relationships between hands and markers on a rotary dial. (Curiously, it was well into the twentieth century before humans became sufficiently accustomed to watch dials that numerals, and then even markers, could be omitted.) Computers could speed up or slow down time at will for simulations. They could make monstrously precise time calculations that had no real meaning for humans.

In his final chapters, Rifkin suggests that the future of politics - the future we are now living - would be determined by our orientation towards time. On the one hand, an empathetic, holistic approach that allows things to play out at their own pace in time versus the demand for speed and efficiency in which time must be treated as a resource to be exploited like any other. He could not have foreseen our present situation.

Four decades on, our technology has tended more and more to speed, fractured attention, stress, exploitation, efficiency, and false productivity. Our technology has disconnected us even more from the social and natural worlds. The rise of GenAI which promises to analyze things for us, to summarize them, write and create for us, make decisions and carry out tasks for us is all about exploiting temporal resources as thoroughly as possible, but is also a denial of our attention to the world at its own pace, in time, a denial of reality, and ultimately a denial of consciousness. Interestingly, many of those involved in creating and promoting AI follow movements that seek to greatly extend human life or even achieve immortality. They are afraid of aging, of time expressed in the human body. Perhaps they are like Peter Pan and never want to face mortality, to really grow up. We have to keep in mind, too, that some of these ideologies operate on different time scales than the usual one. While some Transhumanists think of immortality, others (such as Longtermists) plot the next several thousand or millions of years of evolution. Accelerationists of all stamps seek to compress the time scale of technological and evolutionary development beyond what most of us would probably consider bearable.

The mess we find ourselves in is not just the political one. We have created the technological basis to save ourselves from dealing with mental processes that take time. We are trying to make our minds obsolete. My eyes grow tired, and my mind grows full. I will, I hope, have more to say about this in future posts, but that's all for now.

Contingent Thoughts

Discussion about this post