How To Bend Time
And invent a time zone. And launch a satellite. And establish a country run by children.
Here's something (or, rather, two things) I learned recently that lie somewhere in between useful, hilarious and absurd. This is not a carefully constructed essay or anything – I'll mostly quote from Wikipedia – but I just had to share it.
You know how time can be really annoying sometimes? Time zones are a primary example, but also, say, when you have a list of time measurements, you have to use your phone or PC to add them together, because an hour doesn't consist of 100 minutes, so you can't do it in your head.
Well, in the late '90s, Swatch (the Swiss watchmaker) thought that there had to be a better way – and nonchalantly introduced a new time system, which they called internet time. It couldn't be simpler:
Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called .beats. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds.
For example, it's @366 as of writing this sentence. All of this was, of course, at least partially a marketing stunt for their new line of .beat watches, but while these are no longer manufactured, their website's header still features the current internet time, and the page explaining what it actually is is still online as well. That page also features an animation that is, unironically, way more hilarious than it has any right to be.
Okay, so that deals with one problem. No more time calculators needed, cool. So what about time zones? Well, if you watched the video linked above, you'll now know that, with internet time, there are none. Instead, the entire system is based, globally, on Central European Time... kind of. Swatch, for some reason, developed their own time zone, which is 100% compatible with CET – and named it wrong.
It is globally based on the time zone of Biel, Switzerland, where Swatch's headquarters is located, what is conventionally known as Central European Time (UTC+1 or West Africa Time). Swatch calls this "Biel Mean Time" (BMT), although it is not actually mean solar time as measured in Biel.
Okay, sure, no big deal. So what was that about a satellite? Well, get this:
In early 1999, Swatch began a marketing campaign about the launch of their Beatnik satellite, intended to service a set of Internet Time watches. They were criticized for planning to use an amateur radio frequency for broadcasting a commercial message (an act banned by international treaties).
This satellite, of course, never broadcast, and Swatch donated the transmitter batteries to the space station it was supposed to be launched from. The BBC used this as an opportunity to publish an article titled Hams jam space spam, and called it "the first incidence of space piracy" – all because of some watches.
There's one more curiosity here though:
Swatch Internet Time was announced on 23 October 1998, in a ceremony at the Junior Summit '98, attended by Nicolas G. Hayek, President and CEO of the Swatch Group, G.N. Hayek, President of Swatch Ltd., and Nicholas Negroponte, founder and then-director of the MIT Media Lab. During the Summit, Swatch Internet Time became the official time system for Nation.1, an online country (supposedly) created and run by children.
An online country? Well, that was the idea. Looking at their now defunct website, it seems like, in reality, it was more of a social networking hub, complete with a forum and chat. But:
The Nation.1 project explored a variety of translation and governance technologies as well as a variety of concepts key to the construction of a country. New approaches to youth-empowerment and autonomous self-government through the use of decentralized internet voting systems were discussed, as were topics relating to citizenship, education, economic exchange, trust, identification, and a usable international definition on what constitutes childhood.
And, perhaps the most amusing part about all of this:
On this last question, an arbitrary boundary of 25 years of age and under was eventually established, although the variables of this boundary were widely discussed. John Perry Barlow put in a request that the young at heart be admitted as ambassadors from the adult world, or at least be granted temporary visas.