Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

Jenny Odell describes _Saving Time_, her second book and the inspiration for her first Long Now Talk, as a “panoramic assault on nihilism.” The particular nihilism that Odell confronts is rooted in what she calls “Clock Time.” While the rigid, regular progression of clock time may feel like a universal truth to those of us raised under its regime, Odell argues that it is merely one among many ways of keeping time found across societies and ecosystems. Told loosely as a road trip around the San Francisco Bay Area — from the bustling port of Oakland to the beachside cliffs of Pacifica — Odell’s tale of temporal dissonance and harmony weaved together a story of time and modernity. Her core thesis: our lives have become rigid and contorted by the demands of profit-maximizing industrial clock time, but they do not have to stay that way. In order to make that case, she told a narrative that stretches across epochs and topics, stringing together stories from European imperialism, scenes from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times, and contemporary anecdotes from online communities of working mothers and disabled activists. The principle uniting all of these threads is a dogged pursuit of the capricious nature of time, with each new facet or mode of timekeeping challenging the monolith of industrial clock time. In both her talk and in her book, Odell refrained from offering prescriptive solutions, whether on the scale of individual change or revolutionary upheaval. Her approach is neither that of a self-help book nor a manifesto, but something weirder and more ambiguous. As she concluded her remarks to Long Now, Odell invoked the language of cultivation — both metaphorically, in terms of nurturing an intergenerational web of friends and allies, and literally, as she discussed how the temporal rhythms of growing beans and observing garden life can teach us about the latent chronodiversity of the world around us.