Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword: The Clock Edition
Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword: The Clock Edition
https://peteranthonycowan.substack.com/p/technology-is-a-double-edged-sword
Publish Date: 2026-05-30 06:30:00
Source Domain: peteranthonycowan.substack.com
On November 18, 1883, residents of dozens of American cities lived through two noons in a single day — their traditional solar noon, when the sun was actually at its highest, and the railroad’s standardized noon some minutes before or after, when the new clocks said it was. After that day, only the new noon remained. The sun moved across the sky as it always had, but the clocks no longer followed it.
How that came to pass is the subject of this essay. First, a note on the frame I am bringing to it.
In a recent conversation with Dr. Paul Héroux, I made a sweeping comment dismissing technology, and he pushed back:
“I have to disagree with you, Peter, on one thing. You say technology is bad for us. I think technology is great as long as you don’t shoot yourself in the foot with it. I mean, technology is basically knowledge, you know, that’s applied. They’re applying science. So there’s wonderful things that we can do as long as we keep our eyes open and our minds not closed.”
He was right, of course. I will be writing a lot more about specific technologies — substations, wireless technologies, LEDs, AI, data centers — and the harms that follow them into bodies and ecosystems. But I am not coming at this from a general anti-technology perspective.
Technology itself is neutral, it is how we deploy it that matters. I work with an implicit framework about how I think about the use of technology that I would like to make explicit, so when readers encounter my criticism of a specific technology, they have the larger worldview that produced it as context. This essay lays that out, and does so by going into the history of a seemingly innocuous invention — the clock.
Time itself is not a technology. Time is a property of the universe — something we exist inside the way we exist within space, registered through change, sequence, and duration. Humans have always lived inside this relationship, but we haven’t always had a way to measure it. When you…
