Who Watches The Watchmen?

I haven't worn a watch in over 10 years - time is, for me, everywhere. Time is on my phone, on my computer, in my car, on my cable box, on my credit card receipts, on roadside signage it's everywhere! Which makes me wonder why the New York Daily News is so concerned about the success or failure of the Apple Watch?

Some people will surly love the Apple Watch and gladly plunk down $10,000.00 for the privilege of wearing it. Count me out - I really don't care to have Tim Cook tracking my whereabouts and vital signs 24/7 and God knows what the NSA will do with the Apple Watch info.

Now I know that I shouldn't judge the New York Daily News too harshly, they're only trying to sell ink on paper which is an even more anachronistic business model than watchmaker so who can blame them for showing some concern?

But if you listen to Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman over at edge.org discuss the past and future under the heading Death Is Optional you start to wonder if time is also? Someone should tell the editors of the New York Daily News. As Yuval points out:

"And you look at the last 200 years, and you see them collapse after millions of years of evolution. Suddenly, within 200 years, the family and the intimate community break, they collapse. Most of the roles filled by the family and by the intimate community for thousands and tens of thousands of years, are transferred very quickly to new networks provided by the state and the market. You don't need children, you can have a pension fund. You don't need somebody to take care of you. You don't need neighbors and sisters or brothers to take care of you when you're sick. The state takes care of you. The state provides you with police, with education, with health, with everything."

Certainly, there are decisions that need to be made by the state - hard decisions where time and space and life hang in the balance, but Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?) In a Republic like the USA the different branches of government are to watch each other and provide a balance of power - In the corporate world these safeguards are outdated and very 18th Century. More Yuval:

"And you can say that maybe life today is in some ways worse than in 1700, because we have lost much of the connection to the community around us ... it's a big argument ... but it happened. People today actually manage to live, many people, as isolated, alienated individuals. In the most advanced societies, people live as alienated individuals, with no community to speak about, with a very small family. It's no longer the big extended family. It's now a very small family, maybe just a spouse, maybe one or two children, and even they, they might live in a different city, in a different country, and you see them maybe once in every few months, and that's it. And the amazing thing is that people live with that. And that's just 200 years."

Our modern day O-zymandias prefers the corporate machine to the human republic and my guess is that Tim Cook does too.

It all makes me nostalgic for a human President - one with heart and soul, who cared about America and the wider world and formulated a strategic vision that brought about relative peace for 30 years.