Swatch time

I saw this on HN this morning. Nearly 30 years ago Swatch created Swatch Internet time. The units are called .beats, and they’re a decimal timekeeping system (1000 .beats per day) based apparently on the solar day in Biel, Switzerland. The second in this new timescale is defined as 1/1000 of a day, but since it seems to be defined in terms of UTC, it’s probably a translation of SI seconds..?

It seems like UTC with a different hat.

All the finery aside, Swatch time abolishes timezones and daylight savings time so that referring to time can be more natural. If it’s 584 .beats where I am, it’s the same time all over the world. This is supposed to be refreshing for people who spend a lot of time trying to coordinate people in different timezones. Someone on HN mentioned this post, So You Want to Abolish Timezones. If you read that and still think .beats are a good idea, I’ll be stunned.

I’ve talked before about time coordination and how the definition of “the time” is sociotechnical, with an emphasis on socio. If there’s any problem with timezones it’s that there aren’t enough of them. The original timezone scheme in the US had 144 timezones.

Sure, it’s hard to agree on when to have a meeting, but that’s only because globalization is hard. You need to have either social empathy for how people organize their lives in other places or a dictum that everyone change their idea of the day from something natural to something arbitrary, like the natural time in some place I’ve never been to.

So be happy that the world has such diversity! And refer back to your timezone tables. Because timekeeping is as complicated as the places and people that keep the time.