Are you content? How the internet rewired our brains

unorthodox idea: to abolish real-world time and replace it with an internet-friendly 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," Nicholas Negroponte, the MIT Media Lab founder, stated during a 1998 announcement, according to Wired. "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? Whacky as it sounded, the internet operates the same 24 hours for everyone, so creating a universal Internet Time wouldn’t be all that far-fetched. The internet was, after all, still in its infancy. Entering the digital age felt like a boundaryless terrain, not limited by real-world rules.

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