{"id":259457,"date":"2026-05-30T06:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/technology-is-a-double-edged-sword-the-clock-edition\/"},"modified":"2026-05-30T06:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-05-30T10:40:15","slug":"technology-is-a-double-edged-sword-the-clock-edition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/30\/technology-is-a-double-edged-sword-the-clock-edition\/","title":{"rendered":"Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword: The Clock Edition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Technology Is a Double-Edged Sword: The Clock Edition<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/peteranthonycowan.substack.com\/p\/technology-is-a-double-edged-sword<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-30 06:30:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: peteranthonycowan.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n

On November 18, 1883, residents of dozens of American cities lived through two noons in a single day \u2014 their traditional solar noon, when the sun was actually at its highest, and the railroad\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

How that came to pass is the subject of this essay. First, a note on the frame I am bringing to it.<\/p>\n

In <\/span>a recent conversation with Dr. Paul H\u00e9roux, I made a sweeping comment dismissing technology, and he pushed back:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>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\u2019t shoot yourself in the foot with it. I mean, technology is basically knowledge, you know, that\u2019s applied. They\u2019re applying science. So there\u2019s wonderful things that we can do as long as we keep our eyes open and our minds not closed.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He was right, of course. I will be writing a lot more about specific technologies \u2014 substations, wireless technologies, LEDs, AI, data centers \u2014 and the harms that follow them into bodies and ecosystems. But I am not coming at this from a general anti-technology perspective.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the clock.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Time itself is not a technology. Time is a property of the universe \u2014 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\u2019t always had a way to measure it. When you…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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:…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":259459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/substackcdn.com\/image\/fetch\/$s_!Xo3r!,w_1200,h_675,c_fill,f_jpg,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep,g_auto\/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ffad34a-bad1-4a5e-a4b4-38b618d0b1e0_560x591.jpeg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[129,85],"class_list":["post-259457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","tag-solar","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259457"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=259457"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":259460,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/259457\/revisions\/259460"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=259457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=259457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=259457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}