Here some "gems":<p>>That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.<p>>During an era in which social constructs like race, gender and sexuality are being challenged and dismantled, the true nature of clock time has somehow escaped the attention of wider society. Much like has happened with money, the clock has come to be seen as the thing it was only supposed to represent: The clock has become time itself.<p>>Standardized time became vital for seafarers and irresistible to corporate interests, such was the ease it could offer trade, transport and electric communication. But it took longer to colonize the minds of the general public.<p>>In reality, this process had already been taking place throughout the 1800s as a result of European colonialism, imperialism and oppression. Colonialism was not just a conquest of land, and therefore space, but also a conquest of time. From South Asia to Africa to Oceania, imperialists assaulted alternative forms of timekeeping. They saw any region without European-style clocks, watches and church bells as a land without time.<p>>The Western separation of clock time from the rhythms of nature helped imperialists establish superiority over other cultures.<p>>Even the most natural of processes now must be expressed in clock time in order for them to be validated<p>>Women in particular often find themselves at the wrong end of this arbitrary metric. Unpaid labor such as housework and childcare — which still disproportionately burdens women — seems to slip between the measurements of the clock, whereas the experience of pregnancy is very much under the scrutiny of clock time. Adam quotes a woman’s account of her birth-giving experience: “The woman in labor, forced by the intensity of the contractions to turn all her attention to them, loses her ordinary, intimate contact with clock time.” But in the hospital environment, where the natural process of childbirth has been evaluated and standardized in clock-time units, a woman is pressured to follow what Alys Einion-Waller, a professor of midwifery at Swansea University, has called a “medicalized birth script.”<p>>Clock time may have colonized the planet, but it did not completely destroy alternative traditions of timekeeping. Certain religions maintain a connection to time that is rooted in nature, like salat in Islam and zmanim in Judaism, in which prayer times are defined by natural phenomena like dawn, dusk and the positioning of stars. The timing of these events may be converted into clock time, but they are not determined by clocks.<p>This is such a mess, the writer is constantly mixing up the concepts of clock, clock time, standardized time, geological time, earth rotating, circadian time... which he does not bother to differentiate making it easy to come to his programmatically set conclusions of oppressor and oppressed.<p>The cultural aspect of timekeeping going back to humans wondering about the regularities in sun movmement at day and about the "other suns" and objects at night is quite fascinating and probably as "astronomy" the oldest preform of science in reproducibility and predictive power (astrology aside :D); to butcher it up in such a manner, imho a very poor choice.<p>For anyone interested in appreciating the art of keeping track of time I would suggest looking up the two millennia old "astrolabe"[0]<p>[0]<a href="https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yioZhHe1i5M" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yioZhHe1i5M</a>