Re: [hrpc] I-D Action: draft-irtf-hrpc-political-05.txt

[Niels ten Oever <[e-mail]>]

On 9/21/19 4:18 PM, Stephen Farrell wrote:
> 
> Hiya,
> 
> On 21/09/2019 15:13, Eric Rescorla wrote:
>> Again, let's take the example of SSL, which was designed by Netscape
>> for its own market purposes and became a de facto standard because
>> Netscape had the dominant browser and people wanted to interoperate
>> with it. What's poltical about that process?
> 
> To be fair, there was a lot of IETF politics around
> Netscape and Microsoft related to that and IIRC TLS
> was only called that as part of an explicit compromise.
> 
> I think Eliot's examples (and NTP, which I raised)
> are maybe better examples of less/apolitical standards
> and protocols than SSL/TLS.
> 

Time, and its standardization, is a very political project. Going back to Aristotle (Physics iv 10-14) there is the difference between Chronos and Kairos, where Chronos became the number to measure motion (kinesis). There have been many other perceptions and measurements of time, that were able to exist next to each other, but as part of the colonial project, the European concept of what time was, was made the universal standard. That is why Greenwich Mean Time (in Great Britain) is used as a standard for the whole world. 

There are also many stories about the development of timezones, and their consequences, the way in which time helped shape labor, life, and how it altered complete societies.

I am not making a value judgment about this re-odering, but I am trying to show that NTP, which helps synchronize to a specific time regime, on which a lot of computing depends, helps promulgate a specific, and political, ordering. 

This book on the topic is quite interesting:
https://www.amazon.com/Colonisation-Time-Studies-Imperialism/dp/0719082714

Best,

Niels





-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
DATACTIVE Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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