Friendship ended with Swatch Internet Time, now tenpo ko is my best friend
The funny thing about time on the internet is that Americans keep writing things like "8:00PT" and there's no obvious way to convert that into something I can use everybody ends up having a different relationship to it. And so, in the early(-ish) years of the World Wide Web, Swatch came up with "Internet Time", a brilliant new time system/marketing gimmick that would unite the world's timezones and make scheduling on the internet much easier, if it had gotten widespread adoption, which it didn't, really.
I still think it's kind of cool, though. Swatch Internet Time divides each day into 1000 .beats, the current .beat time is always the same everywhere in the world, and it's indexed such that "@ 000" is midnight in... not UTC, but UTC+1 (because Swatch (the company) is based in UTC+1, of course). As I'm writing this the current time is @ 314. Using 1000 subdivisions is neat, I like systems like this that operate outside established standards, but it makes it pretty hard to convert by hand to the form of time everybody's used to. So Swatch used to sell watches with the Internet Time on them, and nowadays internet-ti.me is a nice converter and clock for it.
Sadly Internet Time never really caught on, probably because it was a cool new system that you had to convert to, and for scheduling events it turns out to be fairly easy to use UTC for all written communication and then do the offset math in your head. I wonder, though, if Internet Time had caught on, and .beat times being integrated into more devices had given people an innate understanding of what the numbers mean without having to convert them, whether that world would be better than our own. Maybe we wouldn't have the current situation where most websites try to convert timestamps to local time, but not all, so I often have no idea seeing context-free timestamps on the internet whether they're supposed to be in my time, or UTC, or something completely different.
Anyway all that is to provide probably unnecessary context for what I really want to talk about, which is a different universal time system called tenpo ko. Tenpo ko is like Internet Time in that it's meant to be a timezone-less time system for communication on the internet, but it's based on UTC+0 and has just four divisions ("elements"), each six hours long, called 🔥 fire, ☁️ air, 💧 water, and 🌱 earth. (Using the emoji in the names like you're talking about 🐲 Bowser is optional.)
Four divisions is not really precise enough to talk about specific times, so the standard is to just use hours and minutes when needed. At time of writing it is ☁️01:33 (some time has passed since the .beat time given earlier). Now at this point you might be thinking, this is just UTC again but every day is now four days with silly names. And yeah, that's completely accurate!
What's useful about this is that the silly names make it possible to talk about time in terms that are vague, but also universally point to the same absolute time across time zones. Fire, air, water, and earth can be used as absolute counterparts to morning, afternoon, noon, night, and similar words for time relative to timezones. So tenpo ko probably isn't hugely useful for scheduling things, but I think it's a neat way to talk and think about time in an absolute way without having to do any math to understand it.
If you're talking to somebody in a different timezone, knowing their UTC offset still means you need to do a calculation to work out if it's getting late for them or not. If you know which of the four elements is around their night, though, you just need to compare that to which element it currently is based on your rough time of day, which is easy enough to remember. This doesn't tell you their exact time, but it is enough to know if you should be telling them to go to sleep.
(also the name tenpo ko is from toki pona, and the system fits into the toki pona philosophy nicely, being a time system that doesn't focus so much on exact numbers. because, y'know, nanpa li ike, ko li pona.)
And finally, the third half of this post, which demonstrates a use of the tenpo ko system:
Meta-posting with tenpo ko
My active hours on the internet tend to be during late fire and through air, and I'm asleep (or at least unavailable) through most of water and earth. Based on what I see, the active hours for Cohost (and generally, the internet as a whole) seem to be centered on earth and early fire. This means that I tend to wake up to plenty of new stuff to backread and lots of activity (which can be either blessing or curse), and then later on when I'm entering my peak "waste time on the internet" phase of the cycle the rest of the internet is... not. Which can be a bit underwhelming.
A few times here on Cohost I've thought that the site seems to have a lack of people posting, because I check a few hours apart and nothing much has changed, and then I remember, oh yeah, everybody is asleep. Maybe I should start following people who post during air... maybe I should be taking advantage of the peace to do non-internet stuff without feeling compelled to check it frequently.
