Philosophical essay on the historical evolution of time and industrial society

processing. They had lived this. Enabled it. Profited from it. If there was ever a group you might hope to take aside, pull into a quiet room and ask gently What are the really networks for, anyway? this would be it. The act of keeping time, of marking it, is embedded in the nature of any age. Our lives are, after all, dictated by timetables: School schedules, the seasons, rush hour, the burning candle of birth-love-marriage-death. Time, in the days before industry, was measured by nature’s schedule. How long it took a crop to mature. The solstices. A beehive filling with honey. It was marked by moving tides and shifting seasons, and it demanded a slowness, a personal presence on the shores, in the oceans, atop the fields over generations. “Summer afternoon,” the novelist Henry James remarked in a précis of a slower age he felt passing away in 1895. “To me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.” 18° Then, in the industrial revolution, time became money. Electric lights, for instance, undid the restful distinction between night and day - and made 24-hour life and manufacturing and economics possible and then, of course, inevitable. Movement from countryside to city established a really new sense of what the German critic Georg Simmel, writing in 1903, called tempo. “With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life,” he explained. “The technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule.”18! Punch cards. Bus schedules. The forty hour work week. Our education, our manufacturing, our markets and our lives all began to run on timetables. They had to, or the whole project of industry would collapse. “Summer Afternoon” became a time to work. Simmel worried, for instance, over the diffusion of pocket watches. To carry one was like looking at a constantly draining bank account. This sense of humans reduced to cogs - churned, run, disposed of on a schedule not their own - unnerved the residents of that first mechanical age. Cities had been the very first sorts of tight-packed networks; industrial cities ratcheted this further still. They succeeded and failed by the degree to which they geared themselves and their citizens to machine speed. When the Austrian novelist Robert Musil began The Man Without Qualities, his classic story of the era, with the flattening of a Viennese citizen by a speeding delivery truck, he meant to point out how urban speed and urban life (and urban death) had become inseparable. And also the mismatch between the weak breaks of the age and it’s acceleration. The book is alive with that pre-accident slipping sensation you may have had: You are pressing hard on the brakes of the car; you are going to hit something anyhow. “Cities can be recognized by their pace just as people can by their walk,” Musil wrote in a line that any modern New Yorker or 180 “Summer afternoon”: Edith Wharton, A Backwards Glance, (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1934) See chapter 10 for her tale of an afternoon with James. 181 “With each crossing”: Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) in Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002, p. 11 130 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018362