Top Quotes: “Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture” — Jenny Odell
“The actual story of how measurable, countable equal hours came into existence is not a straightforward one. Landes suggests that a crucial deviation happened with the development of Christian canonical hours, particularly under the sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict. The Rule, which subsequently spread to other orders, specified seven times during the day when Benedictine monks should pray, as well as an eighth in the middle of the night. Determining that “idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the Rule also described punishments for monks who failed to hurry sufficiently upon the signal for work or prayer. Five centuries later, Cistercian monks, for whom spiritual enterprise also meant economic enterprise, would intensify this temporal discipline. With their bell towers and smaller bells throughout the monastery, the monks’ “temporal sensibilities” emphasized punctuality, efficiency, and the ability to “profit from this precious gift of time by ordering it and using it.” At the time, monks regularly hired labor and ran the most efficient farms, mines, and factory-like enterprises in Europe.
Canonical hours are not equal hours, and the monks’ bells were more of an alarm system than a clock. But some of them did use escapement-like designs-pendulum mechanisms rather than the passage of water. Landes calls it “an unintended consequence” that this technology, having developed in the monastery, caught on in a new context: the public and private clocks that spread as European towns centralized power and commerce. Once again, the bells were tools of coordination, but this time it was a bourgeois class that needed them. The clocks not only helped them conduct trade, but also marked the outer bounds of the day’s worth of labor bought from workers with nothing but labor time to sell.
Unlike the canonical hours of the Catholic Church, the hours marked by the new mechanical turret clocks were equal, countable, and easy to calculate. While capitalism did not itself create standard time units, they proved useful for imposing uniformity on workers, seasonal activities, and latitudes.
The separation of time from its physical context is preserved in our everyday speech. As John Durham Peters points out in The Marvelous Clouds, “o’clock” means “of the clock,” as opposed to less artificial standards (e.g., the light at one’s particular location).”
“In a piece on the “time tax” experienced by people dealing with government services, Annie Lowrey observes that poorly run bureaucracy deepens gulfs between the rich and poor, white and Black, sick and healthy. She calls it “a regressive filter undercutting every progressive policy we have.” Lowrey suggests the elimination of hurdles like asset tests and interviews, as well as the use of better tools — for example, well-designed forms easily readable in one’s own language.”
“Ira Steward, notable among labor leaders for embracing a racially inclusive vision of “the brotherhood of labor,” was one of the foremost proponents of shorter hours in the late nineteenth century. He described leisure as “a blank — a negative— a piece of white paper.” Getting an eight-hour day was not an end in itself but rather “an indispensable first step”: It would give workers the time to figure out more ways to get free, and “make a coalition between ignorant labor and selfish capital on election day, impossible.””
“In a signal of solidarity with Hitler, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco moved Spain to Central European Time (CET) in the 1940s. For that reason alone, Spain currently shares a time zone with Germany and is a full hour ahead of Morocco, which is due south. In 2019, the European Parliament voted to get rid of DST, but its actual abolishment was, ironically, postponed by Covid-19 and disagreements over whether to stay on summer or winter time.”
“Practical concerns continue to stand in the way. Arizona does not observe Daylight Saving Time because, as two Arizonans put it in 2021, “when you live in the desert, daylight is way overrated….So no, we don’t want to save it.” Moving to DST would put summer sunsets an hour later on the clock, merely “prolonging our heat-based agony.” Within Arizona, however, the Navajo Nation does observe DST — an exigency of running a legal territory that crosses from Arizona into New Mexico and Utah. (Whereas the Hopi Reservation, which sits within the boundaries of Arizona and is surrounded by the Navajo Nation, does not observe it.) Given the patchwork nature of some parts of the Navajo territory, it’s possible for someone to drive into and out of Daylight Saving Time several times on a single stretch of highway in Arizona.”
“In China, the one holdout from Beijing time is Xinjiang, a mountainous and desert region in the west that partially observes Xinjiang Time (or Ürümqi Time, named after the capital of Xinjiang). Situated on China’s border with Kazakhstan, Xinjiang is home to the Uyghur, whose pan-Islamic and pan-Turkic identity has never sat well with the Chinese Communist Party. Although Xinjiang was designated an autonomous region in the 1950s, China began trying to assimilate it politically, a project that included an effort to officially abolish Xinjiang Time in 1968.
On the one hand, Xinjiang Time appears merely practical: Xinjiang is more than a thousand miles west of Beijing, which puts its solar time two hours behind that of the capital. A sanitation worker in Ürümqi told The New York Times he thought they must be the only people who eat dinner at midnight (by which he meant Beijing midnight). But Xinjiang Time is fundamentally cultural, running along ethnic lines: Local TV networks put their schedules for Chinese channels in Beijing time, while Uyghur and Kazakh channels are in Xinjiang Time.
“A former Uyghur political prisoner told Human Rights Watch about a man who had been detained for setting his wristwatch two hours back to Xinjiang Time. It was evidence, Chinese authorities said, that he was a terrorist.”
“Although Native reservations in the United States were overseen by white agents well into the twentieth century, with traditional dancing typically restricted, the Lakota figured out in the 1920s that they could hold extensive dances on the Fourth of July — if they did it under the banner of patriotism. When this tactic worked, it spread throughout the northern and southern plains, with petitions for dances on New Year’s Day, Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, Memorial Day, Flag Day, and Veterans Day.”
“Uber workers in different countries studied financial news, anticipated Uber’s IPO, and coordinated a walkout across twenty-five cities in order to get media attention at the most opportune time. This paved the way for the formation of a new, international labor organization called the International Alliance of App-based Transport Workers (IAATW), which managed to do its work using a “transnational network of resistance over forums, group chats, and video calls.””
“With the Covid-19 pandemic, many abled people were thrust into a vexed relationship to time and proximity to mortality that sounded deeply familiar to those of the disability community. The scholar Ashley Shew described to Yong an experience of crip time that was not just about dissonance or inconvenience, but involved a different temporal center of gravity, one that must sit closer to the present: “Everything I enter in my calendar has an asterisk in my mind…Maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, depending on my next cancer scan or what’s happening in my body. I already live in this world when I’m measuring in shorter increments, when my future has always been planned differently.””
“In April 2022, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development began exploring ways to lower barriers to public housing for people with criminal histories. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, the same act that removed the ban on Pell Grants for incarcerated people, also extended eligibility for federal student aid (FAFSA) to applicants with drug convictions. But in some states, people with felony drug convictions still face challenges in accessing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps), and in South Carolina, they are barred from it for life.”
