In 1998, Swiss watch company Swatch, working in collaboration with MIT Media Lab, pitched an unorthodox idea: to abolish real-world time and replace it with an internet-friendly time system without the need for multiple time zones. This Swatch Internet Time would not be measured by the sun and moon, but rather 1000 ‘beats’, each lasting one minute and 26.4 seconds, per day. Rather than being located at the Royal Greenwich Observatory in London, Swatch based their newly created global meridian in their headquarters in Biel, Switzerland.
“Cyberspace has no seasons and no night and day,” declared MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte. “Internet Time is absolute time for everybody. Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.”
Emerging from the first internet-driven tech boom era, Swatch’s corporate ploy to engage its audience was clearly a flop – but was the idea really that wild? After all, the internet is open to everyone 24/7, no matter where you are in the world. Moreover, this was an idea hatched when the internet was still in its infancy – when the incoming digital age felt like a borderless terrain, not limited by real-world rules.
Two decades on, our bodies are synced to the cloud like mobile devices or machines. With all of history available
