The Reality Bubble
Page 22
Losing minutes means losing money. But in our modern system, a minute is a lifetime. Even microseconds count. And nowhere has the pace set by machines outstripped human ability to keep up more than in the global financial markets. Wall Street trades on a time scale that the human brain cannot even perceive. In the past, merchants trekked for weeks and months in order to trade their wares, whereas today’s trade in stocks is a shuffle of billions of “buys” and “sells” sealed by computer handshakes that happen at the speed of light.
These days, we routinely send round-trip signals from New York to London and back again in about sixty milliseconds. That means I could send a financial transaction across the Atlantic Ocean six times in the time it takes you to read this sentence. If time has always been invisible to us, time in the past at least registered at a human scale. We could see the shadows of the sundial or watch the minute hand tick from one second to the next. For high-frequency traders working in today’s stock markets,*9 the financial time they trade within is completely undetectable. The markets operate in what Jeremy Rifkin calls “computime,” a blur of digital time that flickers past us at such high speeds that the clocks can no longer be read by humans; they can only be understood by computers.
For us, one millisecond *10 passing to the next is imperceptible. In fact, it takes the human brain a whole thirteen milliseconds just to process an image. But for computers, it is these briefest of gaps of time within the network where algorithms make split-second financial decisions that are exploited for a profit. As Sal Arnica, author of Broken Markets, has said, “By the time the ordinary investor sees a quote, it’s like looking at a star that burned out 50,000 years ago.” That said, financial time does not operate evenly in the world. There is computer time and human time. We have just looked at how clock time is utilized to trade within the global marketplace, but our worth—and how we much we sell our time for—more often than not has less to do with our intelligence, work ethic, or inherent abilities and more to do more with where on the planet we are born.
Time is precious to all human beings. Certainly, my time is not worth any more or any less than yours, but the rewards for our time are not equal. At the extremes of the spectrum, the difference is chasmic. In 2018, billionaire Jeff Bezos made $8.96 million an hour, even when he slept. For a Dalit—formerly known as an “untouchable” in India’s traditional caste system—the dirty work of cleaning up latrines earns about forty-six rupees a day, which, given an eight-hour day, is about five cents an hour.
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ONE UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCE of being a publicly acknowledged genius is that you never seem to have enough time. Reporters were always hounding Albert Einstein to question him about his mind-bending ideas. But time is as precious for theoretical physicists as it is for CEOs, and Einstein had an ally in his long-time secretary, Helen Dukas. Whenever someone called or dropped by wanting Einstein to explain his theory of relativity, she was instructed to tell them, “An hour sitting with a nice girl on a park bench passes like a minute, but a minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour. That’s relativity.” Einstein’s realization was that there could be no such thing as “correct” time at all.
Until the beginning of the twentieth century, scientists had been under the working impression that time was absolute. Sir Isaac Newton’s famous 1687 treatise Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy had been the guiding principle of physics. In it, Newton outlined his three laws of motion, alongside his principles of absolute space and time, explaining how the universe functioned. We now call this Newtonian mechanics. In the Newtonian world view, if a clock were precise enough, and the same standards were set in place, then two clocks—say, one on Earth and one on Jupiter—would tick at the same pace, and thus the passage of time would be identical in both places. That seems reasonable. After all, that’s how English navigators figured out longitude.
What Einstein proposed, and mathematically proved, was that this was not at all the case. Firstly, space and time are not separate things; they are unified. And because of this, any movement through space affects time. In this view, the two clocks, on Earth and Jupiter, which are moving relative to each other at different rates of speed, would tick differently and display different times on their dials.
We know this to be true, as today’s GPS signals require at least four different satellites to determine a location on Earth. The atomic clocks triangulate your position by measuring the time difference it takes for the signal to arrive from the various satellites. For civilian GPS, these time signals allow us to measure the latitude, longitude, and altitude of something like your cell phone in a shopping mall down to an accuracy of 4.9 metres. But for GPS to be accurate, the clocks themselves have to be super-precise and operate within the same range of forty to fifty nanoseconds. But here on Earth, and twenty thousand kilometres up in the sky, time is not the same.
Satellites zoom around us at an orbital speed of about fourteen thousand kilometres per hour, fast enough, according to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, to make their clocks run slower. Seven microseconds slower per day, in fact. At the same time, because of their distance from Earth’s mass, clocks that are farther away from its gravity feel less of its effect and run faster. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, this is the case. Without calibration, the atomic clocks housed in satellites would run ahead by forty-five microseconds each day. Together, then, the effects of special relativity and general relativity mean that the satellite clocks (seven microseconds behind and forty-five microseconds ahead) should be off by thirty-eight microseconds, or thirty-eight-millionths of a second each day.
Thirty-eight microseconds does not sound like much, but if we did not account for it, within minutes the error would render GPS useless. According to Richard Pogge, professor of astronomy at Ohio State University, after just two minutes spatial positions would be totally off, and with cumulative effects GPS systems would have errors in the order of ten kilometres per day.
So we know it’s not just a theory. The math is accurate. And while advanced physics can account for these differences and translate them in such a way that we understand how they affect us in everyday life, physicists themselves aren’t really sure if time is even a “thing” in itself; that is, if time is something we’ve concocted or if time as we know it really exists.*11
Consider this: in the same way that math has “imaginary numbers” (like i2 = –1, more a concept than a visible thing), physicists also work with imaginary time. Real time is what we measure in our daily lives with clocks. As Stephen Hawking said, this is “the time that we feel passing, the time in which we grow older.” If real time starts with a point called the Big Bang, and ends with a point called the Big Crunch, then in imaginary time there is a time that wraps beyond those time scales—the time outside of those times—that allows us to question whether time as we know it functions according to “reality.” In A Brief History of Time, Hawking puts it like this:
This might suggest that the so-called imaginary time is really the real time, and that what we call real time is just a figment of our imaginations. In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down. But in imaginary time, there are no singularities or boundaries. So maybe what we call imaginary time is really more basic, and what we call real is just an idea that we invent to help us describe what we think the universe is like.
For physicists, then, imaginary time is something that “exists” in that it can be described mathematically even though it can’t be experienced. The inverse could be said of clock time. We experience it even though we are not sure to what degree it really exists. That’s because we invented a tool of measurement, the clock, that describes the measurement itself. A clock measures time in the same way that a ruler measures space. But a ruler doesn’t really measure space at all; it measures intervals—or what we call centimetres or inches—measu
rements, as we’ll see in the next chapter, that we made up.
Like the stone that Samuel Johnson kicked in Chapter Two, the realness of time, just like the realness of the stone, may be deceptive. In a similar vein, the eminent physicist Brian Greene put forward this conundrum: What if time isn’t real and is just a mental projection? That is, maybe there isn’t some invisible border between the past switching into the present and then switching us into the future. Maybe time isn’t somewhere “out there,” because time is a perception, a projection from within our brains. As he writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos, “This…leaves open a pivotal question: Is science unable to grasp a fundamental quality of time that the human mind embraces as readily as lungs take in air, or does the human mind impose on time a quality of its own making, one that is artificial and that hence does not show up in the laws of physics?”
In other words, what is science measuring if the only thing humans are even capable of experiencing is the eternal moment that we call now? *12
There is one thing we can say for certain: whether time as a dimension or a perception is real or not, we are living by something manufactured. Einstein proved that there is no universal beat of time, and yet here on Earth we have organized our lives into a system of time that is synchronized.
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“IMAGINE VISITING YOURSELF in the future,” the voice in the ad begins. In the scene, a frustrated man is running late and misses the bus to work. Suddenly—through TV magic—he is transported into the future, where he comes face-to-face with his older self. The two versions of himself are jogging together along a gorgeous beach on a sunny day. The older man is tanned, relaxed, and smiling. He turns to his younger self and says, “Still in the rat race?”
The ad is well known to many Canadians. In the 1990s, it was a commercial for London Life Insurance’s Freedom 55, a financial planning service so named because fifty-five represented an ideal retirement age. By 2010, however, with inflation and rising costs, retiring even at the standard age of sixty-five began to look increasingly unlikely. A Sun Life Financial survey that year found that only 28 percent of Canadians believed retirement at age sixty-five was feasible. Expectations continued to change, and the following year newspaper headlines started asking, “Is Freedom 75 Boomers’ New Goal?” And by 2017, a new tagline entered the mainstream that bumped up the retirement age again, with “Freedom 85: Staying in the Workforce.” The thought of early retirement for many people today is a far-fetched dream. Some might wonder, “What’s next, Freedom 100”? Or perhaps “Freedom When You’re Dead”?
Retirement is the cheese dangled before us in the rat race. Our personal time, the thing we are all born with, is subjugated to clock time, the thing we invented. We’re promised that if we work hard all our lives, in our senior years we’ll be rewarded with free time to finally do exactly as we please. But as anyone who has been unemployed for a long stretch knows, leisure time is not “free” time at all. That’s because leisure is sold back to us. Leisure costs money.
Even if you have all the time in the world, there are very few things that can be done on an empty pocket. You can go hiking, swimming, play a game of chess, or read a book from a library, but most leisurely pursuits have been commodified and become big industries. Yoga practitioners in the United States alone spend $16 billion on classes, clothing, equipment, and accessories. Golf, even more upscale, is a $70-billion industry in the United States. The illusion of free time is the ouroboros of capitalism. Leisure has entered the marketplace so that it feeds back into the economy.
Consider how shopping, an activity regarded largely as a chore until the 1950s, became a hobby, or what’s now even known as “retail therapy.” Today, going shopping is considered a treat, a relaxing way to spend the weekend. Beyond the Sunday stroll along the high street or at the mall, now hordes spend their days on “shopping tours,” the purpose of which is not to see any sights but to be bused to windowless outlet warehouses to get deals on brand-name merchandise.
We shop as if our happiness depends on it, because we are told it does, and because we don’t want to commit the sin of being behind the times. Fashion, we are told, keeps us up to date. If in the 1950s a style of skirt could last a decade, by the 1980s fashion had transformed into distinct “seasons.” But for a time, these seasons were still connected to the physical seasons; we need warmer clothes in the winter and lighter outfits in the summer. On the runways, February and March are traditionally when the fall/winter collections are unveiled, and in September and October, models are dressed in the spring/summer collections for the following year. But today’s fashion cycle has accelerated far beyond that. In the world of “fast fashion,” there are fifty-two seasons a year. As soon as something is in, it’s out, sending fashionistas scrambling to buy more clothes to stay current.
If we are trained to become slaves to fashion, we cannot forget the slaves of fashion: the invisible garment workers putting in overtime at fractional wages so that retailers like the global chain Zara can receive shipments twice a week and companies like H&M and Forever 21 can introduce new styles every day.
This hyper-speed manufacturing cycle also affects the natural world. In the documentary RiverBlue, fashion designer and activist Orsola de Castro can be overheard saying, “There is a joke in China that you can tell the ‘it’ colour of the season by looking at the colour of the rivers.” The river behind her is stained from textile dyes. It is not blue but magenta.
The vast amount of power and energy required to mass-manufacture, market, and ship goods at this accelerated pace for a population of over seven billion has led to a very real and physical shifting of the world’s weather patterns. It is no joke that capitalism’s hyper-acceleration through “fashion” is literally changing the seasons. Our economy is causing climate change. For economists, this equals growth; for ecologists, it equals devastation.
Alongside the rapid rise in wildfires and deadly hurricanes, rising temperatures have severe consequences for species that migrate and feed based on the seasons. In nature, as we saw earlier, timing is everything. But in recent years, while the atomic clocks that synchronize our modern world have become ever more precise, something strange is happening to nature’s clock, because everywhere around us its timing is off.
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IT WAS A REGULAR WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON in Central Park, New York City. Joggers took to the paths in T-shirts and shorts, people picnicked, little kids rolled and tumbled on the grass, their faces dripping with melted ice cream. It was 25.5°C (78°F), which would have been perfectly natural for a summer’s day, but if you took a moment to look around you would notice a clue that something wasn’t right. Everywhere in the park, the deciduous trees were leafless. This hot summer-like day in 2018 wasn’t taking place in June, it was February.*13
Freakish weather events are occurring at an increased rate around the world. But it’s only when a sustained pattern forms that scientists can attribute it to a change in climate. For gardeners everywhere, this change is increasingly evident. They only need look in their backyards to notice their own “flower clocks” have begun to bloom at unusual times. According to a major study by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, plants are blooming ahead of their spring schedule. In 2016, over six hundred plant species bloomed early, almost double the number of the previous year. Across the Atlantic, the same trend has been documented. In 2010 and 2012, plants on the east coast of the United States were flowering earlier than at any point in recorded history. According to scientists, it’s happening because the “sweet spot” temperature at which seeds begin to develop has been coming earlier. For plants like Arabidopsis thaliana, that temperature is between 14°C and 15°C. Early warm spells are affecting many spring flowering plants, with every 1°C rise in temperature triggering plants to bloom on average 4.1 days earlier.
The ripple effect is felt across the plant and animal kingdoms. The scientific field of study is called phenology
. It looks at the timing of biological cycles within a range of species as they relate to the climate and seasons. In many species, timing of food sources, migration, or reproduction is linked, forming an intricate interdependence. And across many species there’s been a desynchronization, or a decoupling.
An example is the relationship between the miner bee and the early spider-orchid. The orchid, while named after a spider, produces flowers that actually resemble a bee, specifically the female miner bee. Since 1848, botanists have kept records of the orchid’s blooming time, which coincided with the bee’s reproductive cycle. The flowers release a hormone that mimics the female bee and seduces males of the species, which attempt to copulate with the flower. This act of trickery pollinates the orchid. But warming temperatures have thrown this reproductive cycle out of synch. For every 1°C rise in temperature, the orchids bloom six days earlier. The change in temperature has an even more marked effect on the bees, with the males emerging nine days earlier, and the females fifteen. The result is that the male bees are no longer “mating” with the flowers, preferring to mate instead with the female bees. This is good for the bees but not for the orchids, which have come to rely almost exclusively on the miner bees for pollination—and ultimately, existence.