linguistic entrenchment Ⅱ

Innovations in spreadsheets were designed by colonialists to measure the time of slave workers and optimize productivity. The clock was created by monastic devotees intent on fixing their time around prayer. In Phaedrus, Plato writes of an Egyptian king, Thamus, appraising the work of a god of science and magic:

Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function…

Today, spreadsheets power businesses, small and large, to spread wealth, create infrastructure, and manage the production of new parts of culture. The clock dictates a rhythm of work that relentlessly oppresses both ends of the wealth gap.

Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets…
- Neil Postman

If history is written by the victor, what should we know about our tools? Could those who gained mastery first have shaped language that circles them? How did the dissemination of access to innovation change our perspective on it?

Ford pioneered to demonstrate mastery of the stopwatch. His use of Fredrick Taylor’s time-motion studies created a new playbook for industrialization still in use today. Time became money in his conception. And this idea trickled down to play out its hand throughout the rest of western society for a century…