Florian Lohse synthesizes three books on time's history—David Landes on clock evolution, Tony Jones on atomic timekeeping, and Wolmar and Stein's essay collection on 'hardwired temporality'—to argue that timekeeping has migrated deeper into technical infrastructure, culminating in an emerging 'micro time' regime operating below human perceptual thresholds. Drawing on his 2014 master's thesis on time-management devices, he contends this shift enables machine 'preemption' (decisions made before humans can react, as in VR eye-tracking), and that personal time-management practices are becoming either resistance or mere coping mechanisms as agency over time recedes into infrastructure.
0:12 All right. Uh you should see my screen now. Good. Okay, great. So, um yeah, I’m Florian. Uh thanks for having me. I will jump right in. Uh so my talk is about three books I read in the book club and they all focus about the topic of time to some degree. Um two of the books were from the contraptions book club reading list. Uh the one the first one is one we all read. It’s revolution in time by David Landers and this one is about um the history of clock making. Um the next book I read was uh splitting the second by Tony Jones. This one was in the uh side quest July month I think where we could all pick a book and for me this was like a good follow-up because this one is about the history of atomic clocks and how the second as a unit got defined and then I read a third book um which is an essay collection uh media infrastructures and the politics of digital time and this one um is basically about what happens when uh timekeeping increasingly becomes a part of our technical infrastructure and these three form a nice set together and I try to provide some useful synthesis here now um so uh before I do that just a quick context it’s not the first time I’m involved in time as like a theory topic because I also did a part of my master’s degree in industrial design on this topic in 2014 um that was a uh part theory, part practical work um where I yeah read a lot of books and so on and also built quite a few prototypes and some kind of product things. For example, this one you can also see it’s really 2014 because it’s a very old Samsung phone here. That’s a shelf that uh automatically turned your phone into airplane mode mode when you slided it over this wooden area there.
2:20 And um the interesting thing for this talk here is that um my master thesis was carried by this idea that it’s basically our devices and our habits that shape our experience of time. And that of course implies there’s also a lot of agency involved in thinking more deliberately about how we design these things. And I point it out here because this will become important uh for the talk later. Um so next I want to look into the first book David Landers the revolution of time. Um, this book is if if you condense it really hard, it’s basically about how you get from a big fancy expensive tower clock uh clock tower clock like this one to a uh wrist watch, a quartz based digital watch like this trifiber watch on the right. Both watches are featured in the book. That’s why I showed these here. Um, and the watch on the right was special because it was the first watch that had some kind of robot voice to tell the time when you press a button. The one on the left is interesting because it’s an example for um, at some point in history uh, timekeeping being an element of power because you had to be able to afford building a clock tower. And this one was built by King Charles V to basically take ownership on the definition of time. So he wanted to draw the attention to this clock and not to all the uh watch towers or clock towers uh from the churches in Paris. And um on this movement from left to right uh a lot of things happened. Obviously clocks became much cheaper. they became much more precise and the distribution increased heavily because on the left you had few clock towers in Paris in the 14th century and um yeah on the right in the 1980s already of course everyone had wristwatches and um one big development that happened here is that um time obedience uh basically turned into time discipline.
4:42 So uh time increasingly became something we had to care for individually. So we could say it internalized to some degree. Um that’s also what Davis Lenders David Lenders here points out. Um so um with this in mind I I would like to call this a development of the front end of timekeeping because it’s basically about the interface uh of [snorts] uh time. So the the point where we can actually access it but there was another movement happening on the back end of timekeeping and that’s what I learned from uh the book splitting the second by Tony Jones um which is basically about the question how you can arrive at a shared definition for time uh which boils down to how can we arrive at a stable reliable and convenient definition of uh the second as the base unit of time. And um again contend condensing this quite heavily of course uh this describes another movement where in the beginning in ancient times you had uh people looking to the skies um referring to the sun and uh then yeah if you figure out how long basically how long one rotation of the earth takes then you can divide this by 86,400 or something and you arrive at the duration of a second and Um, at some point this wasn’t precise enough anymore, especially uh navigators of ships needed very precise uh like a very precise reference for their time because they needed it to find their position in the ocean. And so um pure observation more and more got replaced by calculation of time. There still was some observation happening in the back but it was combined with much more sophisticated systems of reference charts that got gathered across centuries and so on. They also switched from just considering the rotation of the earth because this one is actually very unstable and started to also reference all other celestial objects because they are moving more stable and this became a very precise system. In the end it was called FM time and that was actually used uh until into right into the 1960s but it also had a big disadvantage because it was very slow uh to read. So one reading of time in this way basically took an expert uh at least several days if not several weeks. And so in the 20th century in parallel we had uh atomic clocks emerging uh as a result of the technological progress in second world war and atomic clocks then shifted the point of reference from the sky to the observation of atoms because an atomic clock it’s a cesium clock in the beginning usually um observes specific uh transition frequencies when atoms change state and then the clock tunes it internal uh system, its internal rhythm to this very stable transition frequency.
7:59 And uh this basically made the back end of timekeeping move much deeper into the technology stack because on the left uh looking for the sun at the sky if you think of like the Vikings or something was quite a low tech uh activity and in the end you ended up with a super sophisticated system. Today you have like 30 atomic clocks around the globe and they average against each other and so on. Uh so it has become a very uh elaborate system. Um so that brings us to the third book I read uh which is this essay collection of Walmer and Stein and they coined this interesting term hardwired temporality which is where I think the development of the uh time back end with atomic clocks is a good example of this hard wiring. um and they defined a like a four layer uh framework to describe this and I want to make it a bit more specific with um some example um an example for like a shift change in a factory. Um so they describe the highest level as level as the practice level. So you have social rules um like some some contracts between people so there everybody knows what to do when you have a shift change. It works quite nicely.
9:31 But at the same time, you also have objects associated with it. And these objects also shape this temporal process. So you could have a digital punch clock like this one. And below these objects, you have structures that are usually not visible to the average worker. So you could have a shift schedule, um a time tracking system, and so on. And below you have an infrastructure level where on an even lower level um machine operations will happen based on everything that happens above. And um the case of Wulmar and Stein here is that um temporality increasingly happens on all these layers simultaneously and the deeper it gets embedded towards infrastructure the less impact we have as humans on changing how time actually behaves for us. To make it a bit more specific, let’s imagine a worker is 5 minute late. Then on the practice level, it’s not a big issue because his colleagues will maybe wait.
10:37 Um, on the object level, you can assume that when the late worker will check in, he will probably still be 5 minutes late. And you will see it in the system.
10:50 the uh scheduling plan behind it will still assume maybe that the shift begins at 6:00 and it will allocate the working time accordingly. And if you have a very smart factory, then maybe the planned 6 uh:00 shift change will also trigger events like u changing uh maybe the access rights to a certain machine or something independent from whatever the workers negotiated on the top level. And um the interesting case of Volmar and Stein here is and I think this plays really nicely with the world machine framework that uh venates has put up for the framework is that the more organized materiality becomes. So the more structured there is the more structured also time becomes and there is it’s like a double effect they influence each other. um they have an interesting way to historicize this. So they it’s not something that comes out of thin air but they put this into four layers. Um they call this four layers. They they are like chronological but also sitting on top of each other. I tried to visualize this here somehow. Um so the earliest layer is calendar time where um everything ran on ritualization. Then we have clock time where um people started to become much more punctual. Um we have capitalist time where time became a resource that people optimized for and people exploited. And eventually we arrive at the time regime of micro time which describes that time moved so deep into the technology stack that a average human in average everyday life will not have much contact with these time processes anymore.
12:50 And uh we can also see this in the devices that are involved here. So if you look here from the left to the right you see that also the main devices involved move deeper into this technology stack and on the left you have very simple devices that are absolutely made to be interacted with as a human and on the right side you have um basically machine components that are meant to talk to other machines and not to humans. uh the point of reference changes. Um calendar time was referencing the sun mostly and in the end on micro time you may have something like a PTP master clock that uh syncs like a bunch of cameras on a film set for example. And of course the resolution increased more and more. So time become became much more precise and in micro time it got so precise uh that we are moving on a scale that we can hardly comprehend as humans and because micro time is the time regime they uh considered as the emerging regime which also I think has an interesting overlap with the divergence machine and the likeness machine in the theory of our book club. Um I want to zoom in a little bit on micro time now. Um so here you see some typical durations of these four time machines. And obviously you see that on micro time a lot of stuff happens below the threshold where we as humans can reasonably interact or react.
14:25 Um now why is this important? Uh let’s consider an example like um the eye tracking in VR headsets like the Oculus or an Apple Vision Pro. You probably know there’s lots of cameras tracking the position of the eye all of the time. Um so every tiny unconscious movement of our retinas gets tracked and becomes a signal and this signal then gets processed by the back end of these VR headsets and they can use the signal to take actions. For example, the typical thing is that like in the center of your attention, you have a higher resolution and on the sides of your view, uh the resolution gets a bit lower. But it could also be all kinds of different uh actions a system might take to reorganize your surrounding based on uh movements of your eye you don’t even recognize. And of course, this in the long term also creates kind of a trace. So there’s a behavioral history attached here. And this trace can also become a leverage because then your behavioral history could be compared to other users. You could be identified or maybe it’s also just that the system is starting to make even more um decisions and assumptions about you based on all this uh data it gathered in a both a volume and a speed uh that is completely beyond what we can recognize. And um an example from the book is uh of course the idea of advertisement.
16:01 Imagine that uh advertisement really reacts to our gaze. Uh this could at least uh become uh quite frustrating I guess. Um so the thing that happens here I think is interesting in a larger context because um as I just mentioned in when machines operate in this micro time scale uh they are able to do a lot of actions and they are able to make a lot of decisions um before we can even notice it. And um to visualize this bit more specifically, you probably know this future cone thing here. Um so you’re on the left is like the current moment and then you have a widening range of not yet realized futures, the possible and the plausible within it and so on. But um in this micro time regime you can assume that in many cases there was a much bigger previous p uh possibility field available but it already got squeezed down when you even arrive at the point to think about the future and that’s uh what they call preeemption here and um citing lumen I think that’s a a good quote is uh that there is a decision before the decision and this I think matters the most. Um it’s also um I had to think about this great essay of Sachin Benny from the protocol institute as well about the pre-commodification of ideas with large language models where I think he wrote um that the liveness of the world diminishes when everything becomes uh everything arrives preconfigured and in his essay this was in the context of large language models and like sense making but I I think with this micro time idea, you can also imagine this could expand to a much wider range of topics and issues. And so I want to point out that this narrowing of possibility before we even can notice it I think is probably the biggest or most interesting issue about micro time.
18:19 Um every time regime has created a way of living. Um there was ritualization of course. Uh clock time triggered punctuality with a lot of practices and rituals around it. And uh capitalist time triggered time management. And this also made me realize where my master thesis from 2014 I think now falls a bit short because I was really focused on time management in the context of capitalist time. But I didn’t have this book back then and uh this whole idea of micro time was not really on my radar back then. But nowadays I think this is probably the more interesting angle. Um the interesting issue about these ways of living or these uh temporal practices so to say is I think they are all a bit ambiguous because they are at the one hand they can help you navigate the time regime you are in but they also can just be a way of coping. So I think it’s always especially with time management uh it’s always a question how much does it really help you to do a lot of meditation now? Does it really give you more agency or is it just a way to keep you functioning while you maybe should have a breakdown and start some real resistance to it. And I think this ambiguity is uh what I think is most interesting interesting about these practices.
19:53 Um and that’s also where I want to close because of course could go on much longer here but um I think micro time is the emerging time regime. Um, that’s a good idea to dive deeper into. And the temporal practice of micro time is not really there yet, but it’s probably a mixture of resistance and coping. And uh, we will now have the yeah, the necessity to figure it out, I think. Um, yeah, that’s about it. Um here’s the stuff we write. It’s my substack. And also I want to point out this really cool oracle that uh Bangladesh and Anish have built. Um there’s uh so it’s on worldmachines.org and uh you can ask questions there and it has read a lot of the notes we have made during the reading and during the writing of our essays and I think it’s a really cool tool to dive deeper into all these things.
21:01 Yeah. Uh, thank you. I hope I’m still in time.
21:16 Yeah. Yeah. The the current oracle is all in. Yeah, that’s right.
Amber Case presents the Calm Technology Institute's 81-point certification framework, arguing that human attention operates like a law of nature—distinguishing prefrontal-cortex-demanding 'center' attention from pass-through 'peripheral' attention—and that products (from car buttons to AI interfaces) should be designed and governed accordingly. She traces the framework's lineage to Mark Weiser's 1995 calm technology principles and discusses the legitimacy problem of building certification authority without statutory power, comparing CTI to Underwriter Laboratories and the Good Housekeeping Seal. The session closes with audience discussion, including Venkatesh Rao connecting the talk to Kairos/Chronos time and AI's 'staircase' temporality.
Aneesh Sathe presents an infrastructure field report on 'World Machines Theory,' a framework for reading history as the interaction of long-cycle civilizational 'machines' (Modernity, Divergence, Liveness), and demonstrates the two systems built to operationalize it: the Oracle, a multi-agent RAG pipeline over a shared knowledge lake that generates oracular 'prophecies,' and the Prime Radiant, a typed knowledge graph of ~500 historical 'machine cards' that can be simulated forward to project future institutional ecologies. He frames this as an Asimov-inspired but decentralized, commons-based reimagining of psychohistory, contrasting it with Seldon's mathematical, control-oriented original. The talk opens with context from the Contraptions Book Club, introduced by its host.
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