clocks are undoubtedly totalitarian. in what sense? as franzen put it in purity, you could cooperate with them or you could oppose them, but the one thing you could never do, is to not be in relation to them.

what is even more totalitarian, is the hour and the half hours. our day is carved into 48 even slices, and hangouts, meetings, gatherings of all size must squarely occupy a number of slices. you could not suggest to meet at 3:10pm or 9:54am without toeing the line of social acceptability. we've even begun organizing our own time around these markings. i grant myself bedrot time until the next hour begins, i compute how long i must sleep to achieve a full eight hours, and then set my alarm for the start of the next slice.

the slices of the day were created for convenience, by ancient societies with different number bases, because that number was nicely divisble by a number of things. the unforeseen consequence of it all, of course, is that our time now occurs in increments of these half and full hours. had we 36 hours in a day, i would spend less time in less than useful meetings.

did you have a class that goes until 2:35pm and your next one starts at 3:25pm? that's too bad, have fun filling out that when2meet, those 50 minutes exist for you but not for our totalitarian overlords.

i'm not saying we should not have clocks, or a discrete unit of time. we need it -- i can't tell my advisor to meet at sunrise and end when the candle melts, and discretization is necessary to count time. but the half hour and the full hour just seem too brittle for their totality.