In 2019, after years of effort, the I.E.T.F. released a standard for Network Time Security, a mechanism which adds capabilities atop N.T.P. in an attempt to make it more secure. (Time underlies much of the Internet’s cryptography infrastructure.) The expanding Internet of Things will only contribute to the ever-growing need for synchronization. Sharon Goldberg, a computer scientist at Boston University who worked on the Network Time Security effort, told me that she thinks time synchronization should have a cryptocurrency-like buzz around it (ideally with less controversy)—coders who contribute to it, she said, should feel proud enough to declare, “Everyone uses the software, it’s in everything, and I wrote it!” It’s striking how few people know Mills’s name, given how many know the pseudonym of whoever created Bitcoin.

It’s amazing how fragile our fancy pants civilization actually is, and this story is a wonderful case study into how hard it is to build a thing that can satisfy all the needs of our species.

It also serves as yet another reminder of how much it sucks dealing with time. Giving credit where credit is due: “leap smear” is a brilliant phrase.

Capitalism did not create clock time or vice versa, but the scientific and religious division of time into identical units established a useful infrastructure for capitalism to coordinate the exploitation and conversion of bodies, labor and goods into value.

Clock time, the British sociologist Barbara Adam has argued, connected time to money. “Time could become commodified, compressed and controlled,” she wrote in her book “Time.” “These economic practices could then be globalized and imposed as the norm the world over.”

One thing that often bothered me while working at JMG was our tendency to boil down what we do to basically selling other people’s time (developers, designers, and so forth).

I suppose that’s what capitalism actually is at the end of the day, but it doesn’t mean I feel real good about doing it.