The Mechanical Abstraction of Life
Time once flowed with nature's rhythms—days divided into unequal hours that expanded and contracted with the seasons. The sundial's shadow traced this organic cadence, honouring our place within the cosmos.
With mechanical clocks came an artificial constancy—uniform hours divorced from sunrise and sunset. We abandoned nature's variable time for the steady tick of gears and springs. While sundials spoke the language of our planet's dance with the sun, clocks imposed their own abstract logic.
This was not merely a technological shift but a profound philosophical reordering. We ceased adapting our tools to nature and instead adapted ourselves to our tools. Time became fungible—something that could be precisely measured, divided and exchanged. This transformation enabled wage labour, industrial production and ultimately capitalism itself.
In surrendering to mechanical time, we gained unprecedented social coordination and technological power, yet sacrificed our embedded relationship with natural cycles. The clock did not simply measure our world—it fundamentally altered how we exist within it, replacing the rhythm of existence with the rhythm of production.