Welcome everybody. This is your ex-Salon audio report, or the Saloncast number three. My name is Wasim Alcindi and I'm joined by Martina Cavaloc, who's one of the Zero X Salon research residents, Max Hampshire and Paul Zeidler from the Mason Project. And we're here to chronicle a recent Zero X Salon conversation on the topic of transcendental time machines.
Now, because the Salon, which is like a series of intimate and private conversations held behind closed doors, because we run that under a discourse rule called Chatham House. that means that we can talk about what was said in the in the room but not who said what essentially so we do these audio reports as a way to chronicle the proceedings of the salon and also to to give you as you know as best we can as unreliable narrators and janitors a kind of a filter like through our eyes of and our ears of how the conversation went and some of the topics that we that we covered. And so, yeah, we are here today to talk about that. Hopefully it won't take too long for us to have a whistle-stop tour through the history, politics, philosophy, and some examples
of time and weird temporalities. So, yeah, let's jump right in. So, I think one of the nice places for us to start is at the start so like we are talking about uh chronologies be they linear or otherwise um so maybe we can talk a bit about uh the history and the evolution of of timekeeping so as humans we've been um kind of living our lives with our diurnal cycles uh with the rising and the setting of the sun um you know since time began uh so to speak uh so the sun has been our clock you know we've had a celestial clock and um you know we as you know primitive humans developed calendars around the sun and also around the the moon but one of the problems with keeping time
from the sun is that the sun is not always in the sky out in the sky where we are right especially we're in i mean uh some of us are in europe like i'm in berlin and it's dark more than it is light at the moment and so yeah using a sundial to keep the time is probably not the not the best way of doing things and so there were all kinds of other ways through history that we used to record time. Water clocks were used in China for at least a thousand years and yeah, so we used the elements, we used the elements and the world around us to help us keep time, the movement of the stars through the sky to keep kind of a time on a longer register as we cycle through the seasons. We have our kind of like solar return, our annual cycles.
And so from there, I think we can draw a line towards mechanical timekeeping, essentially using weights, gravity, rather than things like the flow of water, you know, things like hourglasses as well to keep time. And then from there, we went more towards, from mechanical towards, you know, more precise and more technological forms of timekeeping, things like electronic devices, and where we are today with extremely precise atomic clocks. And now we even have what you might think of as nucleonic clocks. So the most accurate clock in the universe, or in the known universe, the most accurate human clock at the moment, uses the vibrations of the neutrons inside
an atom as its way of keeping time and this thing is accurate to less than a second over the life of the universe and so that is the like a very short history of time keeping as I can probably manage but I think one of the things that you know it's interesting to say before we you know throw this out into the conversation is that the trend has been towards increasing precision of you know and finer gradations of temporal measurement and that's been for various for a bunch of different reasons um i wonder martina if you want to uh jump in and we start talking about some of the reasons why we would want to be keeping time more and more precisely yeah thank you so much wasim um i think
someone um at the salon in berlin last week um said something interesting about uh that we can kind of get lost in a definitional approach of time and there is an aspect of that that is not too overly compelling and we may be better served by asking ourselves questions about what a clock is for and kind of questions around why do different clocks emerge at different times and what purpose do they serve so it's interesting to think that for example sundials were operating at a moment that had a precise relation to geography and to topology. And so it'd be very effective as a methodology to track time at a precise location.
And that relationship obviously became slightly obsolete through the years. And definitely through technological developments and the advent of more sophisticated time calculations were brought about by basically necessities in having to kind of bring together larger and larger distances. And so that's one of the reasons that, for example, some technological advances were made and some clocks emerged. And then the big, let's call elephant in the room is a relation obviously of time to labor and a relation of time to capital that then got further problematized with the advent of like factories and kind of
work in factories that needed to be tracked and accounted for in a way that was increasingly precise and needed to be increasingly more and more lucrative and so we can just think about the very notorious equation between time and money that it's perfectly integrated in our speech now but that obviously wasn't always the case so in that sense there is there was a shift at some point in which kind of time became more and more subservient to externalize needs. And it became a question of productivity and efficiency, so much so that at some point, some clocks were even tempered with. So to be able to extract labor over and above what was necessary to for
for the worker to complete during a work day. So there's definitely like a very real, very historical and concrete relation between those two different elements at play here that we need to account for. And then definitely this was, there was also a big shift between a classical notion of time that kind of, Well, we can get more maybe into the philosophy later, because that's like a very big conversation to be had. but there is definitely a shift to be accounted for between a kind of cosmological and natural account of time,
which is the traditionally Aristotelian approach that sees time as kind of a medium to account for movement, which is related to celestial bodies rotating in the sky. And then later on, this kind of binding of time with movement got severely problematized and then entirely severed when at different times and with different agendas, let's put it that way, both Newton and Kant dislodged time from this subjugation to space entirely.
so maybe we can say a little bit more about that yeah I'd love to say something about Newton I think then we'll open it up for for Kant I'm not qualified to say anything about Kant but I am qualified to say something about Newton and so yeah so Newton in his like seminal works like Principia Mathematica which was latter half of the 17th century 1665 sort of time and he was among the first if not the first like you know definitely in Latin like the kind of lingua franca of the age to put forwards a system of mathematics and physics that used a concept of a universal absolute time time t like you know the letter t in italics that you could then drop into equations like you could then solve equations for t but this required one absolute universal time
like the time of the universe and for that to be kind of you know absolutely monotonic and absolutely equal everywhere and if you can make that kind of assumption or formalization then a whole bunch of previously intractable problems in physics maths or natural philosophy let's say suddenly became if not solvable and tractable at least workable and so you could then start to build theories on top of these formalizations and reductions. And it was not a universally popular move. Newton's contemporary and or rival, depending on how you look at these things, and, you know, local of my environment here in Berlin, Leibniz, was apparently so disgusted by, this
is an apocryphal story, possibly, but I think it's quite fun to say. Leibniz was so disgusted by this idea of the universal time T that he started spelling his name without a t like so he that's why he's now known as leibnitz rather than leibnitz um i don't know if that's really true but i think it makes quite quite an interesting story and just as an aside um leibnitz's form formation formulation of calculus um you know both time independent and or time dependent uh was is the one that we use today uh but newton got the plaudits in the credits because he published in latin uh so you know to the to the to the victor go the spoils, but it's not necessarily the best work or the most accurate or the fairest work, then I think we can draw a line from Newton with this kind of absolute universalizing time
to Kant a century or so later. And Martina, do you want to start us off? And then, like, I think Max and Paul will also have something to say about this. Yeah, I think so. Essentially, the Kantian, let's say, Copernical Revolution consists in and of itself in the fact that it was able to kind of remove time from this dependency and subjugation towards space. And as I said earlier, there was prior to this, the more common philosophical knowledge of time, starting from Aristoteles, was that time was something that had to do with movement and something that had to do with particularly the movement of celestial bodies.
And so it could be argued at that point that without movement, there wasn't time to be accounted for. And Kant goes on to kind of produce as part of his transcendental aesthetic, an entire new model for what time and space are. are and he defined at that point time as a form of pure intuition and with that he also meant to say that time is something a priori which means that is something that is not dependent on an experiential let's say ingress into reality but rather is something that constitutes the premise upon which one then experiences objects in reality. So by separating
this kind of, yeah, this relation and dislodging this subservient, up until that point, very subservient nature of time to space, he was able to posit it as completely independent. And that's something that can be argued, then went on to produce a lot of the premises and a lot of the ways in which we see time now. And I think it's also maybe interesting, and maybe that's something that Paul and Max can introduce us to, to maybe quickly mention Anna Greenspan here and
her work on the transcendental time machine. Yeah, sure. So Greenspan's work is a, I can't remember exactly how she put it, but she begins her thesis by saying something like this is essentially an inquiry into both abstract, tying together abstract theory and the kind of also attacking the kind of mechanical underpinnings of practice, the practices of timekeeping through this kind of very short history, which is very similar to the one that we've actually just kind of traversed up until the start of the Industrial Revolution, essentially. And
I think the point the point the the kind of salient point of the thesis is that basically the the move the theoretical move so this kind of Copernican moves that you've just outlined of removing the subservience of time from space and actually in a way flipping that and saying and this kind of you know space can only actually be understood via this kind of transcendental intuitive recognition of time's kind of flow and time's passing. And tying this, basically capitalism, capitalist time, the time of the industrial revolution, of this separation of time from the calendar and the demarcation of time into these like
infinitely quantifiable slices could actually only have really happened because of this Copernican turn that had taken place, which we can get into, I think, in far more detail later on. But it's a very interesting application of this Copernican switch that seemed to throw a spanner in the works for all the previous conceptions of time that everyone else was dealing with. I mean, I could add something maybe since we are like talked a little bit about Kant, I can just add some kind of points towards this. So, I mean, for Kant, like time appears
like, I think like, I mean, it's basically all over the first critique, but it appears essentially in the transcendental aesthetic and also later in the schematism and the question of how basically objects find certain forms or how objects can be pressed or experience can be pressed into certain forms. And time there is also a really important almost piece which couples certain more analytic aspects with certain more a priori notions of senses in a way. So if we look at the transcendental aesthetic, time is essentially like a formal requirement,
which is a prior and which essentially needs to happen to make any kind of cognition, which then leads to some judgment. So it's really an essential building block. block and I think Martina already kind of like talked a little bit about this. Time is there defined really as an inner sense, so something which is essentially even so there are these two things which are space and time and time is even a prior to space in a sense, so like any form of of cognition always appears first sort of in time
before it can have any like spatial sort of kind of, yeah, recognition you could say. And I mean, we can go back into this later, but it's quite interesting to see that the relation there or like as they lose sort of like noted the whole like philosophy of Kant can be essentially read almost as a philosophy of time. Yeah, I guess I will. Yeah, we'll loop back to that in a minute. But let's take the next leap, I suppose, after camp. The next step is probably when Einstein arrives on the scene with general relativity in the early 20th century, like special relativity, then general
relativity and the you know just to boil it down to a nutshell nutshell here is basically like this is the first cracks in this idea of a universality of time of temporality um so relativity in a nutshell and especially the general um case is that there is no absolute time uh time is kind of only providing a partial ordering of events across the universe and the time in one place is not necessarily synced up with the time in another place. And you've, you know, we've all heard about those kinds of thought experiments of like an astronaut goes like, you know, on a space adventure, and they loop around the edge of a black hole, and then they come back home, and they've aged less than their friends, family, and colleagues on Earth. And the reason that is possible is because
the clock, so to speak, on the on the spaceship, as the astronaut has gone on that voyage, is ticking at different cadence because the universe is not an evenly distributed place things like mass gravity and energy are not evenly distributed and those things have an impact on the passage of time so yeah really Einstein kind of dealt the first blow to this kind of this you know all-encompassing notion of you know the time and really what came next after that was the advent of quantum physics, this idea that there is nothing really continuous in the universe, like everything is discontinuous, everything is blurry, everything is superimposed,
particles are also waves, and there are only certain values that certain parameters can take, and also there's kind of like a fundamental limit to the resolution of knowing things, And we have this concept of conjugates. So everyone's heard of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where we can only know either the position of something or the momentum of something to a certain degree. But once we get more precise in one of them, we get less precise in another. And the example I've always used to illustrate this, and it's a very relevant example for us today, is a pendulum, for example, in a grandfather clock. So if you want to know the position of it, you can take a picture. But if you take a picture, you don't know anything about the momentum anymore. You don't know about how fast it's traveling. If you want to measure its momentum, you can do a video and take a time average.
If you do that, then you don't know that much about the position anymore. So you're fundamentally restricted, given our current understanding and our historical understanding of how quantum physics and mechanics operates to know certain things. things and there's this concept um that uh we call now uh like plank length and plank time and these look like the fundamental limits the fundamental resolution of the universe in terms of how small a chunk of time uh can be at least that we as we understand uh you know physics through this quantum lens uh today and there's quite a lot of interesting work going on these days using things like quantum loop gravity theory which seems to suggest that time is actually just
a kind of a construct it's a way for us to understand you know what's happening in the universe and it's a really interesting thought experiment that warped my mind when i was doing my my phd in photophysics i've got phd basically light science of light and so relativity tells us that the faster something is going close to the speed of light is going the more the clock slows down for that particular thing in that frame of reference. So think about a piece of light, a photon of light, a packet of quantum energy that is traveling at or near enough as dynamic at the speed of light. It doesn't really have a concept of time. And that then feeds into this idea of waves and particle duality, that something at the speed of light is naturally a wave, and it doesn't really have like a location. And so it doesn't really have a speed.
and so if you're talking about speed you can't really um define a time in a in a meaningful sense so then all of a sudden this idea of of time as we understand it as starts to feel a bit a bit shaky and um you know related to this concept of time especially in scientific concept is this concept of entropy the idea that a disorder like entropy is kind of a measure of disorder in the universe and the general idea is that entropy kind of gives us an arrow of time but the level of disorder is always increasing in a system if all things are equal and work isn't going in to keep it tidy. Think about your bedroom. Your bedroom is kind of a closed thermodynamic system in a way and if you don't put work in, your bedroom is going to become more disordered over time and this is just kind of a consequence of the statistics of only having a small number of
relatively ordered states and a relatively large number of disordered ones. So with that in mind, you know we're kind of arriving back to the present and our sense of time our sense of temporality our sense of time keeping at least on this kind of like fundamental sense uh seems to be in disarray so maybe it's time for us to take a step back and we'll think about the language the semiotics and the conceptions of time and martina i know you've got some interesting things to say about that. Yeah, I think we were having conversation and noting in the last few days how kind of poor the language around time is currently and especially in the English language and what differences there are around different semantics and for example we've noted that are very different
conceptions of time, for example, from Greek mythology, whereas they would use to refer to different conceptions of time, such as Kronos and Kairos, which is a sort of distinction that we have completely lost in terms of language now, but that they would both kind of point at and permeate different different conceptions of time themselves and with that chronos being more related to an ordained and linear kind of conception of time where there's different segments that follow one another in the way that we're more used to referring to time now and it's interesting to put
that into relation with this other conception of time that is kairos which is more related to something that is qualitative rather than quantitative so it's a way of intending time that is the opportune time which is something that's both related to luck to being at the right place at the right time for example and it's something that could be argued maybe got lost as the church acquired more and more power and had a as an interest in ordaining chronological time over time of luck, which is what Kairos mostly points out. So these kind of differences that were present at one time and no longer
are very interesting to think about. And then there is entirely different conceptions of time that, for example, are subsumed by geometric forms. So we usually refer to time under the rubric of linear time and then within that though we are aware that there are different xenotemporalities for example that account for a time in the order of the circle or that account for time in the order of the spiral so there is all these different tensions that cuts through both I would say both history and geography because this also definitely refers to a kind of of a funneling through a westernized logic that decided to make of a particular kind of time
kind of the primary that gave primacy to a particular kind of time let's put it that way which obviously draws back to the considerations that we were making before around labor and capital and how those work and what kind of time has been deemed to be the most profitable in those kind of circles. So yeah, these are all very interesting concepts to prod. There's also like, I mean, there's an interesting kind of implicit teleology to everything that exists like in linear time as well. Obviously, it's if we're talking, you know, we kind of, you hinted at the kind of like the imperialist aspect of the imposition of linear time across most of the world at this point and
it's kind of an interesting protestant it's kind of an interesting you know protestant in a protestantism a certain millenarian kind of aspect to everything as well uh the linearity of how things and people exist as opposed to with something like a cyclic nature of time as just a you know the the notion of a rise and fall or just the existence of a thing or a person uh in this kind of section of a spiral or a circular time is then kind of removed and uh the ends become kind of paramount in that linear time as well which i think is also obviously uh you know deeply tied to all of the discussion of capital that we've already had but yeah to maybe on a deeper level there as well it's also quite interesting yeah that also clearly points to the fact that
this kind of conception of time is completely not only not entirely cogent but also very starkly arbitrary so i remember someone during the salon brought up this point about time zones for example and we noted collectively how time zones are not actually tied to a precise representation of land or geography but they're rather tied to political borders and that's a different thing entirely but there's a lot of these sort of examples interspersed into the culture that have now been inhabited as common sense and they're just used as facts whilst they're actually clearly
relying on a pretty arbitrary decision-making process. I remember we actually we came up with a couple of examples of recent time zone shifts one of them was Venezuela and the other one was North Korea and they shifted away from their like you know long-standing historical time zones for political reasons to kind of unalign themselves from various kind of international polities, which they were previously harmonized with. Just something else that came up into my mind that I don't know if we discussed at the Salon, but I think it goes back further than capital. I think we should think about how organized religion, like the word organized is in there. I think that's very interesting for us to relate to. how religion kind of used first calendars and then clocks as a way to inspire or maintain faith and devotion.
And I was thinking about the concepts of reincarnation, which didn't make it into most monotheistic, kind of like post-Abrahamic religions, but it seemed to have existed in, let's say, more the faiths of the East, or like you know animist and and more um like a pre uh pre-monotheistic traditions polytheistic traditions and also this concept of deja vu which i think we must have all experienced you know many times in our lives and that is some kind of like non-linear non-linearity of time is coming back to us you remember being in a time in a place with a person or doing a thing and then all of a sudden you're there and it's happening and you're like wait i know this i've seen this i've seen this I've seen this movie play before. And we never really have much of an explanation of that
in our kind of Western, like modern lives with these linear temporalities, reincarnation or deja vu. I'm sure there's plenty of other examples of kind of xenotemporalities kind of interjecting into our everyday realities. Do we want to take it now towards capital and politics? I think there's lots to say there. I think I have one maybe throwaway kind of example, but that might act as quite a nice dovetail here. It was a footnote in another one of Anna Greenspan's works, which was her book Shanghai Future, which was kind of looking through the city of Shanghai, looking at how in Shanghai, basically
making the broader point that Shanghai didn't experience the same modernity. It wasn't a Western modernity that it experienced by looking at the architecture and the development of the city, it experienced its own modernity, like a kind of a Sino-modernity, right? But this footnote, which I've never been able to find that much more about, was that one of the first kind of deeper kind of conceptual points that was made in the May 4th movement was the throwing off of the circular or the spiral kind of conception of time that existed in China and had existed in China as just kind of how people
thought about time. And it was the very conscious adopting actually of linear time that was one of the kind of the first deep kind of theoretical yeah decisions made by the movement and it's that's just maybe quite an interesting example that tied in quite a lot of the threads that we just discussed maybe to add to this since we're talking a little bit about like religion and also like different notions and different cultural formations in the sense of how time is seen, essentially. There is this book by Mois-Postone where he describes a little bit about
where he tries to bring the notion of abstract time into Marxist theory in a way. And he tries also there to kind of see where this notion is essentially coming from. And he makes this interesting point that he says, okay, this is something which is not developed in China or in some other country, but this is a thing which is developed in Europe, right? The clock itself and first mechanical clock could have been developed anywhere, but it was developed in Europe as an artifact there. And this has more to do really with the cultural formations which were happening at this time,
rather than a pure technical innovation of, okay, we have this technology and it makes sense. obviously these both things are like bound but um i thought that's also interesting uh points as we talked a little bit about xenofuturism and this sort of like different notion of uh time there all right so maybe we'll um we'll side along and now talk about i kind of uh i guess like a power theory of time or something like that so we already touched on um how organized religion has used uh you know, first the calendar and then the clock as a way to inspire reverence. So in the salon we looked at some examples of extremely ornate astronomical clocks. There's one in Lubeck near Hamburg which we looked at which I recommend anybody
who's listening to this to search online and take a look at and this thing was just incredibly ornate. um you know it's giving you um a kind of a it's taking up you know a large part of the kind of visual real estate in the church which is usually you know um the artifacts in there are set out and designed in such a way as to inspire reverence and awe and this thing is helping people uh the followers of the faith uh keep time not just in terms of the clock time but also in terms of um the the calendar so the holy events um that are demarcated through solar time in in christianity and um yeah there's been a lot of examples of of things like that and so like you
know i know something about islam islam works more on a lunar calendar than a solar one um but the and so the the dates of things more like like easter in the christian calendar um things move around relative to the to the sun but it's still obviously extremely important to know uh when um you know one month moves into another uh so for example uh when there's the holy month of ramadan where people are fasting from sunrise to sunset um it's extremely important to know the times of the sunrise the sunset and also the times through the day when um you'd be called to prayer uh you you know you would go and perform your uh salah your five uh prayers a day but also the lengths of the months would depend on the phases of the moon and so you wouldn't even know which was the last day of ramadan until the the moon came up and you got your your new moon or your new moon or
or whatever um and so uh yeah the sun and the moon were both extremely important for uh you know that particular faith um and so it's interesting to see the differences in the um like the ordinalities and the time keepings of faith um i think also you know that so yeah the clock and the calendar were used as an instrument of social order in that sense. And soon as there was quite good mechanical clocks, they were almost immediately used by the administrations in urban areas and cities to enforce things like curfews, to enforce things like restrictions on trading. And then we also talked about how the forebears of capital, factory owners and so on, as they mechanized and automated
and, you know, technologized their production processes and their, you know, their commercial processes. They also did the same with their timekeeping processes, but they didn't always do those things in a way that was fair and equitable. And I think that's really interesting as well. So there's a political question in all of that about like who is keeping time and for what and for why. So if there's a clock, somebody had the idea to make a clock, to build a clock, to design a clock in a certain way, to use certain kinds of technologies and affordances, use certain kinds of materials, then that clock was installed. And then there was a decision made to use that clock to enforce, you know, whether it's for social control, whether it's for capitalist productivity, whether it's for, you know, divinity and reverence.
So there are all these political questions embedded in the logics of timekeeping and temporality. And, yeah, that conversation opens up in all kinds of different directions. So I don't want to take it too far in any of them until Martina, Max and Paul have also had a chance to chime in. Kind of goes even deeper than what you were just laying out, which was, you know, there was a decision made somewhere to actually introduce this clock. The clocks themselves actually were very, it was very tightly controlled in terms of who could actually make a clock, right? There was a specialization, there was a process, there was like a guild. It was all of this, even just actually creating the artifacts of control was itself like very, very tightly controlled.
But also, yeah, I suppose they also stood as a, at least when kind of, I don't know, railway time, for instance, in the UK was being spread. And especially the differing railway times that you had spreading across America as you had the railways kind of, you know, beginning to move west and all of the mining and everything happening. then they also just became thoroughly emblematic of the imposition of social order right if you didn't have a clock it's because you didn't need a clock it was a certain it was an implicit in and out group that you was created just by the fact that you would have a clock in the center of a town or on a train station or the fact that you would you would even have a train station
kind of predicated the need of having a clock you know so they're quite interesting to see as symbols traveling with, I suppose, infrastructure as well, which then obviously brings us to questions of globalization later on, but I don't want to jump too far ahead historically. Yeah, I think there's definitely something to say about how our senses of timekeeping became standardized as society became less local and more, you know, translocal, national or even global. The need for standardisation itself, right? As opposed to the assumption that travelling halfway across the country
by the time you got there was when you got there. And then you would kind of reset to the local time of the next day. You would fall into their time zone, time whatever, flow of time. One thing I remember seeing when I was traveling around India, I think it was five years ago or so, I remember seeing like massive kind of timetables of local time at each train station, you know, the expected sunrise and sunset through the year. And they would just have those kind of These are smaller train stations like hill stations in land and former colonial summer retreats and things like that.
I didn't really understand what they were at the time. And then much later, I grokked that the British built the railways and they then brought this kind of standardization of temporality with them. And, you know, one of the ways they did that was building these massive effigies, these massive phallic clock towers in the vein of Big Ben all over, all over the world. And one of the things that's related to that in kind of predating it as well is in the kind of naval timekeeping and maritime timekeeping. So, like, you know, obviously there was a colonial scramble with the European powers traveling far and wide for like for trade, for supremacy, you know, like there was a slave trade, which was very well. documented. And one of the things that was really important for navigation, for efficient navigation,
was to know the time quite precisely so that you could then navigate from the sun and the stars. And there's this thing called the longitude problem. So it's quite simple to know your latitude just by, you know, surveying the celestial arrangement. But longitude was much more difficult for navigation. And Martina and I went to the Clockmakers Collection at the London Science Museum a little bit before the salon. And we saw a really eye-opening set of displays about the longitude problem. And I can't remember exactly when it was. Maybe you do, Martina. I think it was like middle of the 18th century, maybe 1748 or so, when there was a prize of, I think it was £20,000
pounds or something like that in old money, which would equate to millions, millions of pounds or euros or dollars now to solve this timekeeping problem so that naval navigation would become more efficient. And then by extension, the empire, the British empire could maintain its global and build its global supremacy, which is ultimately based on trade and subjugation and, you know, various colonial logics that we're very familiar with today. Maybe if we come back to the, like we were talking about the semiotics of timekeeping, there's also an interesting point related to all of that, where, so you have, when you have
a timekeeping system, you have different devices that are performing different roles in that timekeeping system. So you normally have something called regulator, and that is kind of your master timekeeper. And that is feeding the, you know, the precise passage of time as it measures to a clock, like to something like with a clock face that gives you the visual read of the time. But then you'd often have like subsidiary timekeepers, like, you know, the regulator would be the main one, and you'd have other ones that would be calibrated to that. And they used the language that we see today in computing systems, which in itself, you know, when we look at these things through a post-colonial lens, seem quite problematic today.
Things like a master slave, things like a client server. And there was even an example of a British timekeeping system with three regulators. And they were red, white and blue in the colors of the Union Jack, the British imperial flag standard. and of course the white one was the master and the colored ones were the subjugated ones and I think there's something interesting embedded in the semiotics of temporal supremacy in there. I think we're moving like slowly into the direction of sort of time as infrastructure but also like the synchronization of different timekeeping systems. And I think that's totally
something we should have maybe a more like deep dive on because I think it relates also to a lot of technologies which kind of things like the 50s or like 60s kind of like came up. So like things there like Unix time and like now distributed time systems, these kind of things I think all kind of of question how certain synchronization or certain ways of consensus in these kind of shared notions of time are achieved. And I think that's maybe an interesting thing to look a little bit deeper into, or is this too early? No, let's go there now. I think it's the perfect time to segue to kind of abstract time.
Yeah, there's an interesting thing with, just with kind of a laptop computer, or with any type of computer anyway, you know, you had to, previously you had time servers, right? So whenever you, you know, with any, I mean with a laptop, with a battery in it, then part of the, I mean the clock inside a laptop, and this is also another interesting thing of, or maybe it's a thought experiment of whether you could have computing or whether you could have a computing device without time, which is a whole other rabbit hole. So I'll put that to the side for the moment. But when your laptop is turned off, then there's still a bit of battery bleed, which is going to just keeping the clock
running. And one of the things that laptops do do as well when they turn on is that you ping ping a time server to just double check. So in a piece that Paul and I are kind of working on at the moment, I think we refer to this as command and control time. And I think there's an interesting split that we can see, which is also something that Greenspan talks about, which is this move towards ordinal time. So time is simply an appreciation of a linear sequence of events, not necessarily a linear sequence of events, as opposed to the constituent members of this linear sequence actually themselves having meaning.
So six o'clock coming after five o'clock. And then actually, it's just that the thing that we can call six is followed by five. But the fact that it's five and six itself doesn't necessarily have any kind of deeper conceptual meaning. and now with more kind of distributed systems stuff so for instance looking at how like google how spanner which is the um the protocol and uh software that google uses to keep its all of its many many data centers um in line so to speak which again this incredibly coded this incredibly heavily coded language that we can't seem to get away from, actually has very little to do with pinging a time server
or having this kind of centralized point of time. And instead, time is actually understood as the results of a leader election, you know, between servers. So different servers kind of taking the, having the opportunity given to them to decide what has just happened. And then everyone kind of agreeing on that. And especially when we're talking about the kind of power structures, that there's a very interesting shift in the kind of topology of how time is created and the kind of topology of power that you actually have flying around in these systems as well. I want to take the opportunity and just like shortly jump into the rabbit hole.
you were talking about, which is essentially the kind of question of like computation and time. And I think basically the question was, can you have a computer without time? And I think there is an interesting notion like that on like a hardware level, if you really look at like applied computers today, or like applied computer science, which is running on like hardware today, all of this is running essentially on like essentially turing machines or like limited turing machines which uh use some sort of hardware which has like a frequency right which has like also certain almost like a crystal in there uh like a quartz crystal in there which like really gives almost like a clock gives a certain like frequency in which certain like algorithms can be like computed or in which certain things can be
computed um and i think there is a there is an interesting point to be made that like um essentially like no like and this almost like ties back down to like Kantian epistemology that like almost like no like counting as like activity can be done without like time right without like a notion of time which is like inherent in the system so you could almost like make the point there that like um comes sort of like epistemology is also sort of a computational epistemology because all the things like specifically this upright notion of time is also like in every computational system and every like running computational system you sort of like have to have this so I think there is a sort of interesting loopback also which like brings the question of like that the first
computers were essentially just possible because of the sort of clocks essentially developed before yeah maybe it's also like an interesting question maybe it's also a question of abstraction to kind of go back to was seems earlier point regarding the uncertainty principle where or in a very loose way where you know maybe yeah you can have you could have a formal proof that exists outside of time but if you actually have to work through that proof or do any kind of actual calculation using computer hardware so doing any computation itself um that is predicated on the existence of having this synthetic quartz crystal somewhere in the actual hardware so this base frequency to actually fulfill and engage in the activity whereas you wouldn't necessarily need it the
other way around um i've got a question which is um can we conceive of modes of computation that are not machinic, that are not electronic? And if we can, could those potentially function without time? I'm saying this again. I don't want to jump the gun too much. I'm saying this because there are videos online of people doing cryptographic hash functions with a pen and paper. And I'm looking at that thinking, well, they could be doing that without looking at a clock. and they're not like you know consciously uh regarding their work with some kind of you know cyclical temporality so i do wonder if we can think about that true i mean but the i mean
the one of the but then interestingly i mean i think you could but then one of the interesting things about uh stuff like cryptographic hash functions and trapdoor functions especially is all of the things that make them attractive is the temporal aspect of a trapdoor function, right? It's kind of very difficult to recompute or to backwards compute from a hash to what was hashed, but it's very easy to verify. That's maybe also just an interesting thing to throw in there too, that even though you could do a hash function, the attraction of hash functions is predicated on time but also time in this there's an implicit area of time otherwise
no one would care about hash functions or maybe they would but like I doubt that people would care about them so much that's part of the deep core attraction of trapdoor functions right the temporal aspect of them even if it's kind of negatory or you know used because it obviously then gives you cryptographic security over something. Yeah, I mean, my answer to the question would be that sure, there can be like, of course, there can be like computational systems, which are essentially like the brain, right, but the brain has also like, sort of, and this is what Kanda's saying, right, the brain has also like this a priori sense, like inner sense of like time.
So even if you're calculating, you can't do calculations without your brain having this sense, essentially. So, yeah. Because even when you're calculating, if you're doing a multistage calculation, you need to know what you did first to get the result of that to then get the secondary thing. This kind of thing. Is that what you're kind of... Yeah, yeah. So let's say that time is also implied in memory as well. the ability to recall and stepwise operations. Yeah, completely. I mean, to maybe go down too deep a segue, there was an interesting theory of identity that Hilary Putnam was talking about,
and I cannot remember the title of that book. This is me dredging up bachelor's-level philosophy, so excuses to any Putnam scholars or stans who are listening to this that I get wrong. But basically, it was this idea where identity is actually constituted by psychological continuity between different states. So, you know, you're more psychologically continuous with the you of yesterday than you are with the you of three years ago. And so then kind of identity is this, essentially a curve that moves along the y-axis of time. and um i thought that was when i was studying i thought that was a very it was an interesting
and also but also quite also reductive uh notion of identity and again this this this temporality being baked in as like a basic prerequisite of of psychological continuity or identity or even kind of self-recognition is maybe further evidence to what Paul was just saying. But maybe should we talk a little bit more about distributed time systems? Because we kind of cycled a little bit back to the beginning of all this. I think a great place to start would be Unix time. Because I think that is a jumping off point for standardized computational systems.
and it will lead us, I think, to our kind of ultimate conclusion. So I'll just introduce the Linux timestamping system, and then we can talk about all of the things that that gives rise to, problems and affordances and problems. And so, yeah, just for anyone that's not aware, like Unix and or Linux are these open source operating systems that kind of run everything in the world, like almost every computer that does really important stuff, like mainframes, airports, hospitals, nuclear systems. They're running on a Linux operating system. It's an open source, fairly solid, reliable, sturdy operating system. I'm running the flavor of Linux on this computer that we're having this conversation on.
And I dare say that Max and Paul are probably running Linux too. I don't know about Martina. She'll have to clarify one way or the other in a moment. But so Linux has this timestamping system, or the way that it keeps time is uses what we call a 32-bit integer. So that is a number with 32 digits. And it started off on the 1st of January 1970. And that was basically like 00000001. and then every second incremented up, the number incremented up. So it's just this kind of like string, a string of digits, basically, that increments up by one every second of, you know, like our kind of human clock time,
the time of the Homo clockonomicus, I suppose you could say. And now the problem with having a 32-bit integer as your clock, in essence, as your abstract clock, is that we will run out of time at some point. we're going to run out of digits. And depending on how those 32 bits, the integers are constructed, we're likely to run out of time, actually in the not too distant future, in the next time stamping system. So there's this thing called the 2038 problem. And it's a bit like the next Y2K, the next year 2000 bug. And the problem with Y2K, which I'm sure many people remember from the time, or at least have heard about harking back, is that we kind of run out of digits. So some computer systems were so simple,
they only had two digits for the year. So it would have been like 1985 was just eight and five. Then 1999 was nine and nine. And then 2000 was zero and zero. Now like 99, and then you increment up one and you get back to zero. This is what we call an overflow. So we are kind of resetting the clock. It's a bit like in an old car with the odometer that keeps the track of the miles or kilometers that have run, you get to 99999, and then you go back to zero. And for a computer or systems that are relying on computers keeping track of things, this is potentially a disaster. And indeed, in Anna Greenspan's thesis, which we've been talking about quite a lot, in the final chapter, she gives an example of the Deleuzean concept of the aionic occurrence,
like a disconnection, or Hodler in that, a disconnection in space-time. It's a disconnection in time. And the example she used was Y2K as this disconnection between temporalities. I think it's particularly interesting in, I think, the way that she frames Y2K as this aeonic event, this kind of, this, you know, this rupture. And she talks about it through the language of Foucault, where he's kind of going in his kind of genealogical analysis of um well yeah concepts basically throughout time and his one of his his points as being that you know we we can't properly
imagine the 18th century man because the 18th century man was kind of uh experientially and therefore conceptually kind of on uh it is unavailable to us right and so her framing of these ruptures in time as actually being kind of non-events because it's impossible to think or talk past them um i thought was actually is a particularly interesting one with y2k because it really depends on the scale and abstraction and like the framing that you actually look at it right because to everyone else y2k was a uh kind of almost a maybe you know maybe if you're inclined one way it was a grand disappointment because nothing the world didn't spontaneously set on fire
at the time of the millennium but then i think if you actually ask um anyone who was working with systems back then then it was it was a series of it was it was a series of increasingly urgent events that actually built up to nothing, you know, which I think is a particularly interesting thing conceptually, but it's also a particularly interesting thing with regards to like Unix time specifically, and the reliance of having computing systems that need some kind of an abstract way of counting time both forwards and backwards um but having this firmly rooted reliance on kind of a calendric event the start of the year 1970 um as being a hindrance to
that and maybe yeah it maybe shows something interesting about unix time and kind of cyberspace time as Greenspan was talking about it at the turn of the millennium and as kind of brought before us this kind of the last maybe the last vestige of kind of command and control time of having a central point of time that everything is then reliant upon to kind of run its own systems and kind of increasingly small scales of localizability but also to network versus maybe what we get with blockchains. Even though they have Unix time inside of them, they can just kind of keep rocking without the same kind of thing.
And one thing that I kind of wanted to dip into with this a little bit was something that I was reading about the other day, which is an update of the Ouroboros consensus mechanism, which is a proof of stake mechanism and thought up by the very clever people at IOHK, where actually the internal clock of every computer that joins the network doesn't even, the internal clocks, this Unix clock, doesn't actually have to be in time with each other at all. But by joining, they are able to join the network to join this shared creation of time without actually having to rely too much on Unix time at all,
which I thought was very interesting. But also, I'm not going to try and explain it on a podcast because I'm not going to be unprepared to try and explain Ouroboros. We can take a step back. Yeah, Ouroboros is extremely complicated. I remember meeting Agalos Kiyas when I was at a university in Scotland, and he's very smart. To go back to blockchain 1.0, to Bitcoin, where it all began 13 or so years ago. And the thing about Bitcoin and blockchains more generally is that one of the reasons that everyone finds them so interesting, particularly people that have those kinds of Kantian persuasions or interest in the theories that are espoused by the school of German idealism,
is that they seem to prove Kant right in a way. They seem to be creating, in a metaphysical sense, at the very least, a new kind of time that is divorced from the outside, the kind of spatialization of time. I guess you could even say that these blocks, as they get added to this kind of ever-expanding append-only ledger, they imply a very kind of visible instantiation of an arrow of time. and with that a kind of a new temporality that is in many ways like its own thing, its own creation, its own inner form, its own pure intuition as Kant might say. But there are also some kind of weird goings on,
weird temporal goings on, you know, temporalities you might even say because the blockchains are so independent in a temporal sense from the outside clocks that they are kind of relying on the participants of the network to provide some kind of sense of temporal progression from the outside so that the blockchain can kind of do its ordering of events. And one of the ways that something like Bitcoin does that is by using these Linux timestamps that we were talking about, this Unix timestamps. So as a block is created, like as a miner wins the thermoeconomic lottery, creates a block and that gets added to the kind of this ordained and canonized added to the the record of history of the of the network um they put a timestamp in there like one of these
linux timestamps uh but it's not necessarily the correct timestamp like you know they could be telling you it's um an hour ago or it could be telling you it's 10 minutes in the future or it could be out by a few seconds or it could just be like a you know honest mistake and it's just like a couple of ticks of electronic time out. And there's this kind of like slippage between the clock time of outside and the block time inside the network. And there are some like interesting, weird things that can happen as a result of this. And one of the mitigations that happens in Bitcoin is using this thing like a kind of a construct, a moving average, a trading average of the temporality of these timestamps called medium time past or mtp um which kind of um i suppose implies that the miners might be
unreliable chronicles of time and because there is no no chronicle clock like a you know earth clock inside the blockchain network it's using the median you know one of the averages of the last 11 timestamps as the monotonic clock and so even if the timestamps are moving around so like imagine block 500,000 has a timestamp and a block 500,001 could actually have an earlier timestamp in Linux time. But because as long as the median time present, this trading average of the medians of the last 11 blocks is increasing, then everything is fine with the world inside the blockchain. But there are these kind of weird schisms because you have this kind of schizotemporal duality where you have the kind of cyber time, continuous time of the network where all the nodes in these networks uh broadcasting transactions and making actions and stopping messages and so on
and then you have this kind of collapse into this uh linear incremented kind of quantized temporal domain uh that is the block clock uh inside the blockchain and there's all kinds of interesting directions we can go uh to unpack that and i'm sure max and paul have a have a lot of thoughts on that one. So yeah, let's jump in. Yeah, I think xenotemporality describes it quite well, right? I mean, the first thing to note is that there is a sort of really distinction here towards, or a distinction between really a command and control infrastructure, which you had before, and sort of something which you could almost call like an imminent way of
determine like certain order of events right and with blockchains really this like what I would call like yeah this is almost like imminent time it's really something which is defined by the network itself rather than like some sort of like external source you could say right it's really defined by the people who who are participating, or in this case, the machines, which are participating into this network. And we talked a little bit about block time and the question of at what points are essentially this timestamp where blocks are getting mined or getting kind of propagated. And this is pretty much defined internally by some kind of difficulty, which is set by the protocol.
but also on the other hand by how much like capital and resources are actually going into the process of mining at the moment. So like the time is there or the time stands which appear, are they're pretty much linked also to some kind of like capital and resource like almost like extraction from the people who are like in the network itself or who are like participating in, I think you called it like an entropic lottery, I think. And I think that's a good term because it sort of like links the kind of, yeah, exhaustion or the kind of like work which has to happen, the computational work, the almost like brute forcing of like a hash
towards like a practice of like time making and time keeping. And I think that's a good work. I would just say that the shift from proof of work to proof of stake is also like an interesting it's kind of saying the quiet part loud with regards to the ability to create time via consensus with capital that the nodes actually have vested in the system right it's consensus itself like the actual which I don't know I feel like is also almost maybe a misnomer because I consensus is making time essentially it's a practice of like making a an agreed upon past amongst like different scales of network participants um you know which kind of was
seen hinted at before where you can have forks or you could maybe have like these tiny tiny forks where there's one or two blocks that differ but ultimately everything gets subsumed into this um the shared history of the ledger you know and all of these consensus mechanisms really are just experiments in how do you what is the trade-off between um labor and capital kind of allocation in a network where you supposedly can't trust if anyone is malicious or not and the creation of time itself uh in like a really stark way which i think is is uh particularly fun Yeah, I think it's a super interesting, Max. I was just thinking while we were talking then,
that we're kind of mediating through time between capital and energy. And so the shift from proof of work, which is using this kind of costly, burning energy, we're using consumption of a costly resource to create this, you know, using capital, deployed capital, to create this kind of like ordinal sequence to a chain of events that we're creating in time. With proof of stake, we're kind of doing away with the energy, but the system is necessarily then propped up much more on capital. So, you know, there is no notion, this notion of one people like, a lot of people like about proof of work. You could call it permissionless entry. Like if you have the result, if you have the machines, you can burn some energy and you get some coins. You play the game and you get some coins. With proof of stake, this is much more difficult or impossible. You basically need to be kind of admitted into the system.
And that maybe that's one way of thinking about this. Like we're kind of moving away from the energy and moving more towards a purer form of capital-mediated time. Yeah, well, I mean, the usage of energy, so having to rely on something that you kind of can't fake as having used in proof of work because Unix time has become so malleable is also maybe an interesting example of a historical moment that then has something having passed or something having changed as well. I would also like throw in just as a kind of like thought experiment, the point that like proof of work, I think is much more reliant on something
which is akin to more like an industrial production of something. So like the sort of notion there is like more something which you have in like a proper like industry. So you have really like a production of like, yeah, a production of entropy, a production of heat, but also production of hashes. While kind of like proof of stake, I think, is almost more something which is akin to what you would see in like financial capital. something where you essentially have a stake in something and this stake yields over time something without you having to produce something in a way of material production Proof of stake is the post-1970s decoupling
of the dollar from the gold standard of crypto but I mean what's the Bretton Woods moment then maybe it was Peercoin in 2012 maybe so I wonder if we might spend a little bit of time I think we're going to wrap in about 10 or 15 minutes I wonder if we can spend a bit of the time thinking about some of the examples of these kind of like weird temporalities or temporal arbitrages that we've seen in the last 10 or 13 years of blockchain stuff. And so one of the things I think is probably quite a good place to start is we talked a bit about forks.
Forks are kind of like divergent timelines in these blockchain networks. So basically, the blockchain grows block by block. We have this kind of mixture of a lottery and a bingo that is the mining. But there's no reason why more than one candidate block can't be found that satisfies all of the requirements of the network, this difficulty adjustment that we talked about that changes the probability of the lottery, and that keeps the clock relatively constant. It keeps the cadence of the blocks being found relatively constant. There's nothing to stop more than one candidate block that satisfies all the requirements being found. And then that kind of triggers a race across the network for the different miners that found these candidate blocks to have them accepted by the network. So it's usually down to whoever did the most work, who put the most energy into that block, most hashes or something like that.
But you can also have this kind of like, it could be like a factional divergence. You could have a kind of a schism, like, you know, think about how Protestantism started or how Shia Islam started. There was a disagreement over a protocol, essentially. And then you kind of get this kind of schismatic rupturing of a mass of people that adhere to a particular system. And so, yeah, we talked a bit about forks. But I think one of the other interesting things to talk about is this notion of the 51% attack, which is something that is specific to proof of work, to the mining. And this is a way that something like Bitcoin in the first place, it tried, you know, so Bitcoin is actually a very simple system relative to all of the newer systems that have come since it.
And the 51% attack is an economic attack that is allowed by the protocol, where if somebody puts more energy into a historical revisionism a new timeline a new historical record of the ledger then that one becomes the canon so in essence it's like a race it's like a thermodynamic race and if somebody goes back in time splits off the network you know previous block and then outruns the current canon canonical chain then that one then becomes the true chain and everyone has to switch over to that there's a chain reorganization and this is allowed by the network it sounds crazy to a lot of people that bitcoin would operate in this kind of eternal contingency that literally nothing could be written in stone but the reason it's like that is because if you join the network today the listener if you join the network today you need
to speak to the peers on the network and they will feed you the history and that's how you synchronize back to the present but you need to know which is the right history and so the simplest way of doing that is saying the longest chain with the most accumulated work is the true chain and that opens up this 51% attack which is if you control the majority of the computational resources the majority of the mining power then you can essentially rewrite the history and this is kind of a an interesting point of like is is this really a formalism is this rule really going to be something that people stand by or is it actually is are these things kind of functioning more like monies normally function as kind of a collective imaginary collective fiction or a social bargain something that we collectively agree to and i've got a thought experiment for you all to work through and maybe we can spend a few minutes thinking through some of the interesting
implications of this which is say that an alien arrives on earth today or tomorrow and they um they bring with them a source of plentiful energy. And this source of energy allows them, they get here, they see that we use Bitcoin to transfer value. It's very valuable. And they see that and they think, oh, we'll be right back. And they bring their plutonium drive or whatever, and they rewrite the history of Bitcoin, give themselves all the coins. Now, will the people of Bitcoin, the humans of Bitcoin, that have collectively agreed that this longest chain with the most accumulated work rule is how we determine the true Bitcoin, the true history of the legend and what coins everybody has will they abide by that or will they
instead say well the aliens showed up at block number x therefore we'll fork at block x minus one we'll change the rules we'll get back our coins and yeah to hell with them to help with the aliens i think there's an interesting point about like what are these things are they collective fictions or are they pure formalities interesting your thoughts I mean, it sort of touches also on this sort of like code is law question, right? And like, the it reminds me really on this question, which like happened in the Ethereum community, like, when essentially the first hard fork was happening when the DAO was exploited, right? And we have now exploits like every day, which are like probably bigger than the DAO was there. But like still,
at this point uh the developers sort of like um decided to fork essentially so um i think there there is this like question really which which you're pointing at which is really interesting which is um really is this a pure axiomatic proof system or is this something which is uh rather socially constructed and but but i think it like doesn't need to be like either or I think it can be to a certain degree like both, right? I mean, to a certain degree, you kind of have to socially agree to treat it axiomatically. Otherwise, it wouldn't really work as well just to further muddy the waters. Now you're reminding me of there was a phrase used in the Bitcoin sphere.
I can't remember exactly who it was. I guess in the time when there was also a schism, a network schism with a major breakaway faction that founded a coin called Bitcoin Cash in 2017 as an argument, a disagreement over the best way to scale the transaction capabilities of Bitcoin. And the concept was that it was an intersubjective consensus between the formalism, the axiomatic formalisms of the protocol as enshrined by the client code and the white paper and the social layer of the humans of Bitcoin, the people that run it and give it energy and use it, transact with it, give it kind of economic value and relevance. I think that seems to make sense in speaking to kind of what we're saying that it's like it's a little bit of both it's kind of a yin and yang um situation and the ethereum ethereum
classic situation was also quite similar um I think there was also kind of a moral dimension to that one where kind of you know somebody exploited some some people exploited uh uh a smart contract like this decentralized autonomous organization smart contract that had 14 of all the ethereum in it at the time which was i think 150 million bucks or so at the time i could be wrong and um the the real question was like do we change the rules so that um for the moral good so that you know the the good guys win but we changed the rules we changed we we broke the sanctity of the axiomatic formality or do we stick to the formalism but the bad guy wins and again like coming back to this notion of time travel in hollywood uh back to the future too is basically
the ethereum classic chain where you know biff gets the almanac from the future and he uh bets correctly on uh sporting events and he ends up in this kind of like dystopian you know the world becomes a dystopian nightmare uh because um the bad guy got the stuff and so like i think there's interesting parallels there i think there's like a there's a deeper kind of there's a deeper interesting parallel as well with for instance stuff like kind of radical constructivism as well but also I'm completely blanking on his name now I think his name's his first name is James where these theories of kind of intersubjectivity with regards to our environment but also with kind of with subjectivities themselves the idea that subjectivities can only actually exist
via the kind of internet intersubjective relations that the affordances right that we all have with each other and that we have with things which is kind of taking us back to what we were originally talking about and I don't know perhaps that's my academic philosophy inclination coming through or maybe not but that it seems to be the most I'm pro I'm pro fork as long as they're like organized forks forks are great it's essentially how I wanted to leave that on maximalism is um error yeah no not awesome well there's this concept of voice and exit which i think is quite relevant speaks to to folks so the idea is that um you have a voice inside the stakeholder
constituency inside the polity inside the parliament or the governance system but also there's a way that you can leave a fork is kind of a way that you can secede from the from the rules if you disagree with them it's a way it can be done respectfully as you say max can also be done and disordered way and the forks can be used as a way to stir up and foment discontent for good or for ill. I think that's a really interesting thing to bring in because there's, or at least usually when, you know, exit has become almost like a mantra in some of the more, maybe some of the more now more fringe uh kind of crypto circles and obviously it ties in with a lot of other stuff
kind of people who are talking about patchwork all of this kind of thing but the thing that i think forks or successful forks should we say show um which is is that you kind of there needs to be a certain um you need a certain mass to essentially have a successful exit and it's actually very it's kind of difficult to actually talk about exit in this like purely individuated manner that quite a lot of the time it is because exit on your own is just leaving but if we're talking about something like you know financial infrastructure then that's the same as just going off into the woods whereas you know there's a certain kind of a critical mass that's the phrase i was looking
for that's necessary to kind of successfully exit so exit is kind of always commune like it's communally predicated in a certain manner which again kind of seems to reinforce this uh intersubjective axiom this kind of intersubjective axiomatic kind of nature of how we have to treat these things and i think is also a very kind of i think maybe gives uh gives some weight to the ideas that we were talking about before of like creating time right because um you know we do there is like a paucity of how we can actually describe time in the english language and it almost seems a misnomer right doesn't it this idea of creating time it's something that we kind of have to work through conceptually quite a lot to actually start making sense of which is
very interesting. I would add maybe also one point there which is around the idea of like having this like really mathematical and formal proven systems where like everything is sort of defined and kind of the reality of computation today which is like absolutely not that so I think like that they are systems there are like software systems in which you can do like computational proofs and you can do formal type theory and these things and you can really build up to like this really self-contained really pure mathematical systems which uh sort of uh are in a sense pretty unfailable in a sense of um the box or in a sense of exploits and things but um besides from this there is this like
problem of like hardware and of actually like things where stuff is running on and then and these sort of like systems where things is implemented on there mostly not like in a pure realm of like formal verification and these things so there's always like even in even in like pure informatic theory this kind of like dispute between like okay you have this like pure mathematical systems but you have also like your cpu right or you have like essentially your operating system which is just a bunch of thrown together code which no one actually ever like formally verified. Is this where we talk about Erbit? I think that's a good place to wrap things. Why not? More like Erbit as an exercise in world building
as opposed to the temporality discussions that we've been kind of framing computing and computation in for this. Yeah, but I think, as you've said, as we've learned from this conversation and from the salon, that power and time are inextricably linked. And I think what's interesting is like, so we talked about Moelberg, Curtis Yavin, and, you know, so he essentially architected this system. And, you know, people talk about kind of dark enlightenment and the patchwork that he has kind of like, you know, been proselytizing about over the years as being a kind of kind of neo-feudalism, like, you know, with, you know, presumably him at the top of it. So it's not that surprising that you will find these kind of like hierarchical logics back in there. But I think it speaks to the difficulty of making and keeping time in a simple or in a formal sense without having power, hierarchy and control.
And that's why we see these kind of weird things happening again and again in the blockchain space, because there is essentially, you know, no gods, no rulers, but a whole bunch of rules. And that also applies to the kind of the construction of this temporal regime. I think this is probably a good place for us to wrap. It's been really interesting conversation. So thanks very much to Martina Cavallop, Max Hampshire, and Paul Zeidler. My name is Waseem Alcindi. And yeah, we'll be back with another one of these in the not too distant future. And so yeah, hold tight. Keep watching the clocks.