This month in the Contrsptions book club we’re reading David Landes’ seminal Revolution in Time, on the history of mechanical clocks and watches.

We’re testing the theory that mechanical timekeeping drove divergence and therefore post-modernity in civilization. So far theory is holding up. Landes’ core idea is that by making time decentralized and cheaply portable it moved culture from time obedience to time discipline, making it a kind of private property in the process and making our psyches clocked psyches. That catalyzed individualist society and emergent societal coordination eating state and religious coordination. This is a counterintuitive reading since clocks are generally considered engines of synchronized modernity rather than postmodernity. But that was really only true if early clock-tower scale public clocks. As they got smaller and more personal, and sub-personal, they drove divergence.

Strong parallel to AI in that clocks too first emerged to serve religious needs (including monks literally keeping vigils looking out for the second coming just like our millenarians await the coming of AGI). But they quickly escaped that niche theology market and ate secular society.

Technologies that start out yoked to religious purposes are often the most powerful ones. Religions are like booster rockets.