'Chronopolis' by J.G Ballard - racing against the clock

We humans live stringently around the clock. We set alarms so we can get to work or school or university when we are supposed to, so we can start the day on a certain hour. We are governed by the invisible force of time, yet it is impossible to imagine a world without it.

J.G Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘Chronopolis’ presents a city devoid of structure.

Thirty seven years prior, the so-called 'Time City' used a master clock to monitor the minute-by-minute actions of its people. This time-ravaged city dictated when people would wash their breakfast dishes, turn on the television, and have their lunch breaks. This bleak world seems devoid of any sort of leisure and is only preoccupied with output, as its people race against the clock to complete the most trivial and mundane of activities. Though Ballard’s idea seems far-fetched and unrealistic - it offers a hyperbolic representation of what our technology-reliant world could look like somewhere down the line.

In the near future, Chronopolis, or Time City, is shut down and time is outlawed. Clocks and wristwatches are seized by the state, and members of the Time Police - a body created to prevent the ‘practice’ of time - are operating covertly. All that this new world has are alarms to signal the start and the end of the day - but everything else in between remains a state-imposed grey area.

Conrad Newman, the protagonist of ‘Chronopolis’, is obsessed with time - in particular, why it was ever outlawed in the first place. The world that he inhabits now lacks the order which underpinned ‘Time City’- and Conrad wants it back. He gazes up at the magnificent master clock and sees a solution to the unstructured society of today. In Conrad’s plight to revive time, a morally ambiguous dilemma seems to hang over us - is time a good or bad force in hinging modern life? That is left up to the reader’s judgement. We are left to question our own perception of time; should we be measuring our own productivity by the clock in the same rigid way as in ‘Time City’? Or should we be using the seconds that we waste checking our watches to actually do something useful?

Through the city of Chronopolis - Ballard presents a tyrannical, hyper capitalist system which is almost Orwellian. Where the government used hidden telescreens to control the economic production of its people in 1984, Ballard’s world is governed by the rudimentary technology of a clock. Although it seems dated, Ballard’s ‘Chronopolis’ provides a perspective on technology around the time that artificial intelligence emerged as an academic discipline. The dystopian story raises an all too relevant question - what will happen once we become so reliant on technology that we forget how to live?