Time Machine Cities: A Chat with Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats

Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats' mind works at hyper-speed. There is hardly a hiccup in brain-to-mouth interfacing. Throw him a question, and there is nary a pause or interruption as he extemporaneously meanders through his answer.

Known for merging conceptual art and philosophical musings, Keats imagines projects that crystallize challenging ideas in playfully absurdist fashion. He's copyrighted his own mind as a sculpture, created epigenetic clones of Lady Gaga and President Obama, attempted to genetically-engineer God, and launched the First Intergalactic Art Exhibit in 2006. Earlier this year he set up the Electrochemical Currency Exchange Co. in the basement of the Rockefeller Center, where he exchanged ions between newly-minted Chinese and US coins.

“Money is inherently unstable,” Keats said in a press release at the time. “Currency traders have learned to play the market for their own financial gain. At Rockefeller Plaza, we’re looking at currency fluctuation as more than a mere abstraction. We’re actually putting money to work.”

This summer Keats unleashed yet another installation examining the illusory concept of currency with his quantum time bank. With his latest project, Spacetime Industries, Keats creates a thought experiment in relativity and time management.

As Spacetime Industries CEO, Keats re-imagines himself as something of an efficiency guru (think Tim Ferris' 4-Hour Workweek). Instead of simply helping others manage the clock, Keats advises how relativity can actually help people control time. "General relativity for everyday efficieny," reads Spacetime Industries' motto. And, as part of the exhibit, Keats drew up blueprints for three time-managed cities and an elevator house. Whacky ideas, to be sure, but illuminating as always.

MOTHERBOARD: What got you thinking of time dilation for this project?

I guess in realizing on how many projects I work on at any given time, it goes without saying that I never seem to have enough time to get them all done. I've been thinking of time and how to manage it for as long as I can remember. It's frustrating. Many of the so-called gurus are trying to manipulate you by some sort of sense that you could save time by working harder. That's all well and good, but there aren't enough hours in the day.

So, I started thinking about how many hours there are in a day, and whether there might be a way to get more hours or, even better, to elongate them. Naturally, that led me to Albert Einstein, who was the guru of how to make the clock run at a faster or slower rate.

Einstein wasn't strictly speaking in the time-management business; he was in the relativity business, essentially trying to understand the speed of light and the nature of the universe. In the process of building his theory of relativity, Einstein came up with some highly counter-intuitive phenomena that have since been born out in experiments. One of which is time dilation, which says that in the presence of extreme gravity, you'll find that a clock will run slower than one that is in much lesser gravity.

So, established physics served as the groundwork for your project. Then what happened?

Relativity is all well and good for winning a Nobel Prize, or working out the precise time for GPS clocks, but I wanted to do something that was more useful to me and for other people. That led me to connect this with the problem of time management. Rather than time management being a euphemism for discipline, I wondered if you could also manage time itself. It wouldn't be a psychological trick, which is kind of what Tim Farris is proposing, or what Steve Covey's various time management consultancies have spawned. You could use physics, which is something much more fundamental.

It takes a little bit of a cognitive leap to get from the fact that clocks run at different rates in different places, to figuring out how you can use that to optimize your life. You won't achieve anything if you just slow down the clock; it will just slow down everything. My thought was that we basically need to create time zones that operate at different rates based on the use of gravity or spinning hubs that will, through centripetal force, have the same effect as gravity.

Think about the international space station. The astronauts are getting the same thing as you would get on a planet, not because the space station is really big, but because it's spinning really fast.

So, what's your solution?

You can zone the city so that your cultural, industrial, and maybe even your data processing districts are running at a faster clock rate than you are in your residential district, which is spinning faster and therefore time is running slower relative to another district. Then it gets to be really helpful in being able to help manage time. That was the starting point, but then I went into other possible approaches.

…which were?

We all know that zoning a city in any way can result in all sorts of political issues, especially in this country. I didn't want to get stuck in the quagmire of that planning, so I also designed a house. There are a couple of ways in which it might work; one of which is with a fast-spinning bedroom. Another is a bit more sophisticated, and that is an elevator house. This really wouldn't work so well on Earth, but if you lived on a neutron star it would work really well. You'd have space elevators for each room, and each room could be raised independently to a different height relative to that host star. As a result, each room could be optimized for the things you do in life.

If you have a garden, for instance, it could grow at a faster rate relative to how you're living, and you end up being able to harvest a lot more cherries or apples. You could also do this with your stock portfolio since the stock market has been shown to increase in value over the long-term. But, the long-term is a long time to wait, so if you could make the long-term short-term, you could profit enormously. All of this is much more self-interested, but once again self-interest seems to be the way to get things done in this country. And the time management business has always been all about that anyway.

What's the story with your Time Ingots, which appear in the exhibit? You're selling them, as I understand it, correct?

Yes. My Time Ingots are a much more practical technology from the standpoint of the fact that they won't require another several hundred or thousand years of development to get near-light speed motors running. They are basically really handy, and they're made out of a lead alloy. You can put one on your desk, and as a result your clock time is going to be marginally slower than everywhere else. Maybe a billionth of a second every billion years, if you're lucky. [laughs] But, every billionth of a second counts, and micro-management is the wave of the future.

What are your thoughts on time management when it comes to the Internet? I'm interested in this as a writer in online media who is always doing a dozen things at once all day long.

Well, I think that one application that seems to me quite obvious is that you can put a data processing center or server farm in a low gravity zone. As a result, you wouldn't be able to access it instantaneously; you could process and harvest that data at a later point by going from one district to another. From the perspective of Big Data, there is an enormous advantage to time management.

But, I think that what you're maybe alluding to is that if you could, for instance, communicate something that got to the destination before you sent it, that you would save a lot of time because you wouldn't have to send it. That is in the realm of science fiction. [laughs] The whole thing works because the speed of light is constant and you can't violate that. The best you can do as a writer is have your editor in a different zone.

There are a lot of upsides for you as a writer if you want to consider other habitats. If you wanted to consider moving to a neutron star or quark star; or, better yet, there are stable orbits around the event horizon of black holes. In that case, you could slow your clock down by a factor of 90 percent.

So, if you think about how that would dilate your deadline, it would be an enormous advantage. Of course you would have to somehow get your assignment to your editor; and, again, we come down to the speed of light, and you can't communicate faster than that. I think the best thing would be if you were to place your editor into a stable orbit that was several hundred thousand kilometers out from a black hole, and put yourself right near the event horizon, and that could work really well. Maybe this is the future of journalism. [laughs]

What will people see exactly at your exhibit?

I am showing blueprints for three time-managed cities, which urban planners and government agencies might take an interest in. Those will be on display as will an architectural model for my elevator house. I will have a miniature version of that house which people can try out. It's basically a step ladder. If you stand on the step and a friend of yours stands on the floor of a gallery, and you give it approximately a lifetime or so, you would have about a 90-billionth of a second's difference between you in terms of time. The gallery, of course, is only open to 8:00pm. Nevertheless, you could get a little bit of the experience that way.

The shop will be selling the Time Ingots for $29.00 a piece. I will also be presenting a Time Warp undershirt, which would allow you to zone your own body. That is to say that the shirt has a high density area around the heart, which will give you a clock rate on your heart that is going to be slower than the clock rate on your brain. Since your heart will determine the number of beats to some extent, setting aside any number of diseases, it will therefore determine how long you live. This will allow you to optimize your life.

How much are the Time Warp undershirts selling for?

There will be several undershirts for sale for $99.00 a piece. And if Calvin Klein or K-Mart are interested in going into mass production on these t-shirts, then that is certainly an option. The same is true for the Time Ingots. These are highly feasible, and certainly become more meaningful when they are produced at any significant level beyond what I can achieve working by myself by hand. Wal-Mart would be ideal, because that really is going mainstream. And the more mainstream this idea gets, the more interesting it becomes potentially. At the same time, this idea is open-source; so I'm more than happy to assist people who are interested in developing their own competing operation, or in collaborating for that matter.

What I like about this project is it reveals the absurd tendency of humans attempting to manage time.

I think that's an excellent point. I think you're right: time management, as we've thought about it previously, certainly seems to me to be more absurd than anything I'm proposing. So, I like that idea a lot.

What else do you hope people, whether it be the exhibit's visitors or folks who read about it online, take away from this project?

I certainly hope this moves people to think more about time and how it can be managed. Even if I'm not able to convince civic leaders to put cities onto moving hubs, then at least the possibility of managing time by way of physics becomes a point of conversation that gets us out of the rut of thinking about time management purely in terms of a corporation trying to optimize employees by making them work harder, or by some equivalent means of psychological manipulation.

Maybe we can broaden the conversation about the full gamut of ways in which time can be managed, and how time can operate in our lives.