I say this all the time and people mostly laugh at me, but I mean it

Yes

all this "end of the decade" stuff has me ruminating a bit more, because it doesn't matter if the decade begins in 2020 or 2021 because decades aren't real

Yes, it's true

at the turn of the century in 1800 what percentage of the world do you think experienced that as the turn of the century?

absolutely nobody: alex what's your favorite nineteenth century invention?
me: time

yes, all the time

yes

there's a semi-famous essay about how time was the essential ingredient of capitalism vis a vis the english industrial revolution

precise timekeeping is an essential ingredient of wage labor, but the issue is bigger than that

time zones were only invented in the late 1800s

yes

the idea of standard time became necessary because of railroad travel but before then all the clocks in a given town were set to local solar noon

every settlement was in essence its own timezone, and most people did not have watches because those were only cheaply mass produced later in the century

time is fake is one of my fave things I tell people

it is wild to think we have never experienced the same noon as people 150 years ago, because thanks this thing that people of the past did to time, we take it as a standard

and it is

I was like but look how old I am but I am here for your point about decades .fuck that shit.

colonialism of the 19th century didn't bring industrialization to the non-western world but it did bring watches and hours

time and distance are both fake, only interval is real

yes

there's an article that ties into that capitalistic individual responsibility using that idea. now i wanna dig it up again.

hell january 1, 1800 in france was 11 nîvose year ix

I am not drunk enough for this

there's also a chapter in one of the books i was reading about how utilization of language as individual objects feeds into the capitalistic agenda, contrary to some lost indigenous languages that see language as relationships rather than objects.

which is somewhat related.

but you can see by the fact of calendar reform in france and elsewhere (our current gregorian calendar is a counter-reformation refinement) that reckoning with time was understood as an essential tool of the state

see also: france's slowness to adopt GMT

I don't wanna go down the Sapir-Whorf road I don't language enough for that

But the standardization of units of time and the easy access to those units via watches, phones, clocks, all synced together as part of a gigantic global paradigm, is really something

I heard finland is introduced a four week workday

It's not as though other ways of reckoning time don't have their own obvious ideological agenda— e.g. imperial china numbering the years from the beginning of the emperor's reign

yeah it's like...4700-something in China technically and I'm so here for that

in 1873 (meiji 6) japan introduced the gregorian calendar via imperial edict— they didn't have a 7 day week before

even under the modern regime they still make that notation

hnnngh yes Japan...reasons why their days are named for elements and the months are literally first month, second month, etc.

this was part of the wider "modernization" program that japan was undertaking at the time but also it was a way of not having to pay their state bureaucrats for an extra month because they changed when the new year would happen, thus staving up bankruptcy

still imagine being told by the government that in one month, we're changing time

y u p

completely!! there is now a six day week and the new year will happen in 200 days instead of 356

frequently I think about this but also in the sense that when you get too far everything is a construct so then I shrug and get on with it

we flip time twice a year

not in arizona

but anyway of course periodization is the eternal struggle of the historian

what is the nineteenth century? if you accept that centuries are an illusion what does the period then become?

some people will tell you that it was 1789-1914

& you can make an argument

but the essential struggle of periodization is that it forces things to happen in order instead of simultaneously— which is why you need a universal system of dates

who wants to work out what day it was in pre-revolutionary russia vs the rest of europe??

is russia a part of europe?? time is fake, qed.

anyway people who are still reading this plurk should tell me what their fav 19th century invention is

(and/or your definition of 19th century)

do the maxwell equations count as an invention

do they?

America. It went from being considered a temporary thing that would be absorbed again by the Empire to a nation the rest of the world considered might be here to stay.

I love studying the social constructs of how things are seen from the outside.

You could also argue that the US was really "invented" in 1865

I don't know things that were invented in the 1800s alas

lightfellows: Yep.

I know fashion by period

mauve

mauve

that's an invention for you

true, there were a number of color dyes invented in the 1800s to satisfy Victorian tastes, let's go with that.

Jane Austen

constantly

the telegraph!