We want to be influenced by tradition, but not bound by it.
Digital watches, such as they are, really are a pretty neat idea. As we progress toward cloning and hydro-electric interactive bullriding, we have to consider the relevancy of an analog watch. As every PDA clipped to the waist of every rayon-shirted tech-head will attest, there is little room in our nano-tech future for gears that go roundy-round.
It seems a bit antiquated, a bit like the chug of a steam train, the dinging of a pinball machine, the slight hesitation of the secondaries opening up on a vacuum-actuated carburetor. Retro like that and other creaking notions of the past—Communism, Christmas, clean air—exist still solely to make us feel better.
But when our ears are bent toward and our hands lain over in twisted genuflection to our “cells,” while we listen to streams of cleverly decoded ones and zeroes, the audible “tick” seems a noticeable distraction. The intro to 60 Minutes uses an audible analog tick in just this way: its “otherness” draws the attention away from the hip-hop cacophony of the rest of TV, a dry old island in a wash of pop slop.
But it isn’t “timely” in any sense other than the archetypal. It works because the noise itself has become obsolescent; its obsolescence allows it to congeal into metaphor and from there, inevitably, into death.
So what will “mark time” for the next generation? The hum of the fans that keep PCs cool? Certainly, with our windowless, cubicled presents, our steel and drywall artificialities, we won’t again revert to the pale old sun. The seasons, of course, are right out, shifting as they are toward greenhouse-fed chaos.
Perhaps time won’t be important. Our serotonin is already modified by Prozac and Paxil and Zoloft and an endless array of “all natural” supplements as well. Sleep we’ve eschewed with caffeine and crank, X and electric lights long before. Perhaps “shifts” will be drawn off by work itself: time will be marked by hours on the job; non-billable hours will simply cease, and the adage “time is money” will reach its apotheosis.
But I’m not sure “24/7” connectivity is the better devil no less the new: at least when one punches the clock one’s boss does not yet follow her home. “The grind,” at least, is predictable; it is the devil we know because it is knowable. Its gears we can see turn and hear clank; we can smell their oil and smoke. And who but the possessor of the best scanner-tunneler has seen a bit jump its tiny electron gap?