I’ve got two machines on me.
One’s strapped to my left wrist. The other lives in my pocket.
The one on my wrist can tell me the time (precisely in 12 hour format, roughly in 24), the day of the week, the month of the year, which year of the leap year cycle we’re in, and the current moon phase. But that’s its limit. There’s no software, only hardware. It’s programmed in springs and gears and levers and jewels.
The one in my pocket can tell me anything and do just about everything. It knows my voice, it responds to my touch, and it even instantly recognizes my fingerprint out of fourteen billion fingers. This machine even knows the angle, velocity, and distance it travels when I swing it around. And it always knows exactly where it is anywhere on the planet.
But sometimes I wonder which one is more modern.
The one in my pocket can do more, but only for a limited time. And then it can’t do anything. It dies unless it can drink electrons from a wall through a cable straw for some hours every day. And in a few years it’ll be outdated. In ten years it might as well be 100 years old. Is something that ages so fast ever actually modern?
And then there’s the machine on my wrist. It’s powered entirely by human movement. No batteries, no cables, no daily dependency on the outside world. As long as I’m running, it’s running. And as long as one person checks it out once a decade, it’ll be working as well in 100 years as it works today. It’s better than modern. It’s timeless – yet it keeps time.
As time goes by, my pocket will meet many machines. My wrist might too. But when I look down at the machine on my wrist today, and know that in 50 years my son will be able to look down at his wrist at the same machine ticking away the same way it ticks today. That’s a special kind of modern reserved for a special kind of machine: the wonderful mechanical wristwatch.
Marko
on 27 Aug 15Jason, give us pictures of both devices
Jimmy
on 27 Aug 15@Marko
Last time I saw Jason, he was sporting the Jaeger-LeCoultre Hybris Mechanica à Grande Sonnerie, which has a retail price of $1,474,070.
But Jason is a savvy businessman and IIRC negotiated down to $1.35M.
Picture below:
http://www.watchtime.com/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/48_jaeger_lecoultre_hybris.jpg
Jason Fried
on 27 Aug 15Almost, Jimmy. Mine was made of diamond. The whole thing was one diamond.
Bill
on 27 Aug 15I’m one of the few people I know that wears a wristwatch. I love it for the same reasons you do and I am fascinated by the mechanical function. My current “regular wear” watch is battery powered, but I have a preference for self winders.
Jimmy
on 27 Aug 15I was obviously joking in my last comment.
But in a semi-serious comment, what’s “old is new again”.
I remember wearing this “smart watch” nearly 30 years ago.
http://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/360891072386-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
Anonymous Coward
on 27 Aug 15My fantasy is a tiny ‘black box’ component inside a mechanical watch that controls one or more secondary dials with the primary timekeeper as input. You could swap in different black boxes, including digital ones that communicate with your phone, to get different behavior out of the dial. Worst case, put back in the original component or just leave it out to have basic timekeeping forever.
This is inspired by wishing the hour/minute stopwatch dials on my Accutron could read me push notifications from my phone in Morse code. :)
Michael
on 27 Aug 15Oops – I’m the author of the anon comment.
Jordan
on 27 Aug 15@Marko – just follow him on Instagram. I keep waiting/wishing for a Hamilton railroad pocket watch shot….then it would truly be a comparison of pocket devices!
Scott
on 28 Aug 15I love beautiful wristwatches. But an alternate view would be that the only thing they do is massively redundant and pointless. And yet, so lovely. And really, the only kind of jewelry a man can truly get away with.
Terry Wang
on 28 Aug 15A wristwatch does one thing and does it well. Wristwatch makers focus on delivering the best device that (arguably) ONLY tells you the current time. Wristwatches differ in forms, materials and prices but the core of them has been the same for a long time.
Smartphones on the other hand want to do so many things at the same time. It has to be general enough which means it cannot be very deep in one of these areas. Good things need focus, passion, and most importantly time (patience).
I always think single-purpose device is more charming (and flexible) than a general device that does many things.
Devan
on 28 Aug 15You could extrapolate that line backwards too, and deduce that a sundial is even more modern than a wristwatch as it needs pretty much NO maintenance and works perfectly fine as long as it isn’t cloudy. But then you need another device to calculate your lat/long and the season so you can calibrate the gnomon properly, so I guess that throws the whole argument out.
But the watch is also timeless within the context that it works in. What if in 20 years humanity decided to finally adopt the metric time system? Current hardware watches cannot be reprogrammed to fit the new paradigm, so whole new ones will have to be built.
Even better, what if they invent time travel? Then you will need a watch to remember the time you left, your current time and the time you will return to… ;)
Jay
on 28 Aug 15I don’t know about you Devan, but my watch has a flux capacitor and handles time travel just fine.
Kris
on 01 Sep 15I feel the same way Jason. I love technology when it makes my life easier and my work better (yes I am one of those people who watch Apple events) but I also love mechanical watches and fountain pens, I think in a way it helps balance my love of technology. I have been trying to unplug from technology when I get home from work to spend more quality time with my family (I’m not always successful at this). I agree with you that the thought of using timeless items and then passing them down to my sons is really appealing.
Mark Seifert
on 01 Sep 15Jason, I’ve had similar thoughts re print vs [any internet-connected device that you use to read stuff]. I think in particular, there’s this idea of [a lack of] digital permanence on a practical level that nobody has quite gotten around to talking too much about yet.
We say things posted on the internet are forever, and in a sense they are, yet when was the last time you were able to find some bit of wisdom you posted on some out-of-the-way message board 15 years ago? [10 years ago. 5 years ago] Good luck with that. Meanwhile, I could probably find some obscure silliness I wrote for a magazine 25 years ago, pretty easily on ebay.
Similarly, I’ve got many hundreds of newspapers and magazines over a century old, meant to be read and discarded, but here they still are, still being read. By contrast, I happened to be perusing Ev William’s old blog recently, and chuckled to myself that one of the guys who took blogging mainstream has a site full of broken images and dead links.
And I think those of us who have been buying music and movies long enough to have lived through a few format changes secretly fear what might be in store for our google play, kindle, and itunes collections a decade from now (or more, or less).
No mistake, I love where this is all heading and embrace it fully, but… our concept of “permanence” is a bit more slippery than it used to be. And is getting slipperier.
Max
on 01 Sep 15Jason, nice story as usual.
The latest paragraph reminded me of this evergreen scene from Pulp Fiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kngBtoylIVM
David A.
on 02 Sep 15Nicholas Nassim Taleb describes this phenomenon, in his book “Antifragility” and elsewhere, as the Lindy Effect.
This discussion is closed.