This attempt at a timezone-less Internet time might’ve succeeded if they had been a li’l bit better at openwashing. It was too blatantly their corporate thing, with the day starting not based on anything astronomical but on Swiss standard time (i.e. where the sun is gonna be over Greenwich an hour later). To promote their own factory.
If they had tied it to 刻 time notches or to the revolutionary calendar, but emphasized the new timezoneless nature of “beats”, we coulda had something great. The original pitch that this wasn’t meant to replace normal time but just used as a separate tool to coordinate stuff online was good. Maybe we’d have moved over entirely after a while. And they woulda been first to market, which would’ve been even more appealing if it had been (or looked like) more of an “open standard”.
The fact that they also illegally planned to broadcast over ham bands was also a pretty bad nail in the coffin, along with the hypermedialized and dorky overuse of @ and dot prefixes.
As many 180˚s and life-changing, opinion mind blows as I’ve experienced in my life as an old, this isn’t one of them because I had the exact same take then: really liked it and felt it was a missed opportunity squandered by the same two criticism I have now: The UTC+1 thing is dumb (it’s not that big of a deal—and great for Swedes) and it’s too blatantly corporate and the “.beat” (dot beat) unit name is embarrassing. I was a teenager, more critical and less gullible than I am now. We all saw that it was just a dorky watch ad campaign, quickly abandoned by its own makers.
Meanwhile, here we are in a mess of timezones and DST and I have to say “it starts in three hours” instead of being able to list a specific time. Or specific day, even, since current clock system needs a date line which wouldn’t be necessary with decimal time. (On the other hand, it would mean that having both systems in parallel would be difficult west of the date line and east of whatever point becomes the “new Greenwich”.)
The fact that it didn’t map up to normal minutes & hours was kind of an advantage because it helped disambiguate those time stamps from normal timestamps. @500 didn’t look like 12:00.
I wish the amount of seconds in a day would’ve matched the old system so that a second is still a second. It takes five “beats” to make an integer amount of seconds: 432 seconds. But maybe we can work with that. Or 864 seconds for ten beats or 86.4 seconds for one beat. So we have a timekeeping system based on beats and seconds.
First of all, it’s not called “Biel” Mean Time any more because we don’t want to promote Swatch. It’s the Basic Mediterranean Time. A geographical feature not ruled by a single polity. Or, Boring Meridian Time if you want to go even neutraler. Still compatible with the old beats; it’s just a name change not a spec change. Which sucks for people near the dateline. That was an advantage of UTC over BMT; it placed the dateline in a less populated area, which becomes extra important in a no-timezones system. But all in the name of compatible with the original beats.
Second of all, there are two display modes. First is the traditional
beats view (a.k.a. mode 1) that still looks like @255, an at sign
and the number of beats since midnight BMT. The same beats you know
and love, no need to upgrade any old clocks, no need to trot out
xkcd://927, it still works.
Then mode 2 is the decabeats view which shows the current decabeat and
the number of seconds since that decabeat began. One decabeat,
abbreviated 刻 is ten beats which is 864 seconds. So @255 is
25.5#432 (no @ sign, separated by a # character). That example means
it’s 432 seconds since @250. Good for cooking and sports and for
conversion between traditional time keeping and decabeats, since each
h:m:s timestamp has an integer 刻#s equivalent and vice versa. Unlike
traditional beats which can’t represent exactly 12:06 for example, nor
can traditional h:m:s represent @11 without resorting to tenths of a
second.
If the app or device also provides mode 2, the decimal decabeat is
optional, i.e. either you can toggle between @255 and 25#432, or
you have 25.5#432. It’s only every fifth beat that the seconds and
that decimal tick up at the exact same time. Creating a nice li’l
syncopation. Don’t just have 25#432 if there’s no way of showing
that last digit.
Mode one is still gonna be the main mode! It’s better to say 30 beats than 3 decabeats!
…of “decimal” time instead of base 60 time if you’re gonna have a base 864 number, isn’t that going from the ashes into the frying pan? The point is if we want to ditch time zones, one good way to do that is alongside a radically different time representation. And the optional seconds view make things more backwards compatible and is good when we need finer granularity. And coarser granularity: one decabeat is just under a a quarter of an hour and ergo four of them almost make an hour. (Although 41 beats is even closer.)