





          
          IN HOCK TO THE CLOCK
          
          A Call for "Slow Is Beautiful"
          
          
          by Jonathan Rowe
          
          
          
          
          Americans may not be so good at saving money. But they are world
          beaters when it comes to trying to save time.
          
          From microwave ovens to stay-pressed pants, you'd think we'd have
          more time than we knew what to do with. Yet the more we try to
          save time, the less we seem to have.
          
          "Those who have the most time- and labor-saving technologies feel
          they have the least time of anybody," says author Jeremy Rifkin.
          
          Where does it all go? Is it possible that, trying so resolutely
          to save time, Americans simply bring the "future" upon themselves
          more rapidly, like those video games in which the road rushes in
          upon the driver at ever-increasing speeds?
          
          Rifkin thinks so. In his new book, "Time Wars," he predicts that
          the resulting unease will soon find expression in the political
          arena. Until now, people have experienced loss of time as a vague
          personal discontent, for which they have blamed their own
          inability to cope. A large industry has arisen, offering
          everything from executive time-management seminars to Valium.
          "Stress" is rivaling fat as the pet affliction of the supermarket
          tabloids.
          
          But Rifkin says he thinks the computer is going to force the
          issue out in the open, and that the result will be a new politics
          of time. In the 1960s and '70s, he observes, politics revolved
          largely around issues of spatial scale. The right called for less
          central government, the left for less corporate economic power.
          "Small Is Beautiful," the book by British economist E. F.
          Schumacher, captured the imagination of the times.
          
          The 1990s, Rifkin says, will have a new banner: "Slow Is Humane,"
          as Ivan Illich, the social critic, put it.
          
          Rifkin is best known as the man who has almost single-handedly
          slowed the pace of genetic engineering and kindred forms of
          biological manipulation in the United States, working out of his
          tiny Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington. He is a canny
          publicist with a gift for the pungent phrase. Some scientists
          accuse him of shooting from the lip. His defenders applaud him
          for raising ethical questions many researchers would ignore.



          Time Wars                                                    2
          
          
          
          
          Rifkin's basic point in "Time Wars" is that time isn't a thing
          but a concept, and that this concept has always been a mirror of
          the political and economic arrangements of the day.
          
          In the Middle Ages, for example, there was little need for a
          structured sense of time. The seasons set the tempo for
          agriculture. Craftsmen worked by the task, not the hour. It was
          the Benedictine monks who revived the Roman idea of the "hour" to
          order monastery life. They also invented that seminal management
          tool, the clock. Lewis Mumford, the social historian, considered
          the clock the "key machine of the modern age," because it
          "dissociated time from human events" and made it appear an
          independent and self-governing force.
          
          The next step was to transfer time management from the monastery
          to the factory. The early clocks had no dials, therefore no
          minutes and seconds. These came in the early 1700s, bringing with
          them new forms of "temporal regimentation" in the workplace and
          home. "The factory was the first place that the common man and
          woman were exposed to the schedule," Rifkin writes, and they
          weren't always grateful for the imposition.
          
          It wasn't just the sense of time that was changing. People were
          recasting their notions of the universe and even themselves in
          the image of their concept of time. Back in the pre-clock era,
          for example, when time was governed by tasks, God was a
          "craftsman" and the universe his "handiwork." After clocks came
          in, 18th-century thinkers such as Sir Isaac Newton and Adam Smith
          wrote this God out of the intellectual universe, and replaced Him
          with the idea of a "clockwork" mechanism that supposedly governed
          things physical and economic. "The new clock culture became
          imprisoned in its own tautological jail cell," Rifkin writes.
          
          The latest image in this line of development, he says, is the
          "information" universe, seen in the likeness of the computer.
          Thus a zoologist named William Thorpe calls physical life "self-
          programmed activity." And the same image creeps into the way
          people talk about their afflictions. Way back in the industrial
          age--15 years or so ago--people spoke of having a "nervous
          breakdown," a mechanical image. Now they think of themselves as
          "burning out," an image drawn from electronic circuitry.
          
          Rifkin says computers will touch off a new political struggle
          over time. Computers aren't just tools; they are a "time
          orientation," he says. Their electronic pulsebeat is the
          "nanosecond," which is one-billionth of a second--less than a
          human can consciously experience. "This marks a radical turning
          point in the way human beings relate to time," he writes. "Never
          before has time been organized at a speed beyond the realm of
          consciousness."
          



          Time Wars                                                    3
          
          
          
          
          Just as the clock separated time from human events, the
          nanosecond separates it from human perception. Rifkin spins out
          the implications at several levels.
          
          The first and most obvious is the way the computer hastens the
          flow of work and events. Those on front lines, of course, are
          data-entry workers, supermarket checkout clerks, and the like who
          now toil to the rhythm of the nanosecond. The average secretary
          used to do 30,000 keystrokes an hour, for example; for the
          average VDT operator, the number today is 80,000.
          
          It's almost a Charlie Chaplin sight gag, Rifkin observes.
          Enabling people to cope with more details, the computer generates
          more details to be coped with. And it makes people do so in a
          greater rush. "The tool that was designed to allow us to catch up
          accelerates the flow of activity in the society, [thus] requiring
          us to try to catch up even quicker."
          
          The real culprit behind the self-defeating quest for nanosecond
          speed, Rifkin argues, is the prevailing concept of "efficiency."
          The idea that everything should be done as quickly as possible,
          that work is of value only for how much it produces, is perhaps
          the one modern value that practically nobody questions. Like
          environmental pollution, it "crosses socialist and capitalist
          boundaries," he says. He calls it "an addiction,...a time drug."
          Once a society has bought into the premise, "there is never an
          end to wanting to be more efficient."
          
          Computers, he thinks, will make us confront the issue by pushing
          it to its logical extreme. He cites a computer-operated machine-
          tool factory at the foot of Mt. Fuji in Japan, that operates 24
          hours a day under the direction of a single individual. "Here's a
          plant where nobody participates in the unfolding of their own
          future," Rifkin says. "The ultimate efficiency would require no
          energy and no labor. We'd become totally uninvolved, detached,
          and not relevant to participate in our own decisions."
          
          Rifkin insists he is not suggesting a return to the natural
          biorhythms of the ox-drawn plow. Rather, he says, we need a
          better way to measure productivity. He cites as an example the
          Washington Cathedral, on which stone-cutters have been working
          for a hundred years.
          
          To most economists, this would be hilariously inefficient. But
          today's glass-walled office buildings last 20 or 30 years, if
          that long, while the cathedral will last for over a thousand. "It
          depends on your time values," Rifkin says. "If we measure
          productivity in terms of sustainability, then the Washington
          Cathedral is more productive."
          
          
          (Excerpted from the Christian Science Monitor, Aug. 24, 1987)
