You know time, right? It's a pretty cool concept, having things being able to happen in a causal sequence of events. Everyone loves it. The problem comes when you try to measure it.
For quite a while, nobody cared to measure time beyond the fact that it gets dark outside half the time. I imagine it must have been horrible if you ever had to coordinate something back then. Eventually some smart people figured out that the sun goes around the Earth at a constant rate, and so they started measuring the position of the Sun to figure out what time it was. Because the cycle of the Sun is very important, most measurement tools had some sort of fraction of a day as a base unit. Eventually, a standard was formed where the day was divided into 24 equal "hours", and that was good enough.
Soon after, though, people needed to coordinate things with greater precision than an hour. The Babylonians, not yet using the base-10 number system we all came to be accustomed to, split each hour into 60 equal minutes, and each minute into 60 equal seconds. This was good enough, since if you were trying to coordinate something with sub-second accuracy, you had larger problems on your hands such as "why am I trying to do this".
And ever since then, we've all just kind of lived with the fact that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in a minute. While the numbers used have become a lot more confusing in the meantime, it doesn't change the fact that this is a good way to measure time.
But here's the funny thing about time: it's not the same across the Earth. Since we measured all of our time based off of the sun, what time it actually was in the day depended on where the sun was from your perspective. If the sun is directly up at noon in one place, it'll be the middle of the night in somewhere halfway across the Earth.
Nobody really cared about this for a while; after all, how often were you communicating with someone thousands of kilometers away, let alone with a medium in which the time of day actually mattered?
Then, in the late 1800s, a guy named Alexander made something called a telephone. If you had two of them, you could place them quite far apart and still communicate with someone at the other end instantaneously. This was great news for humanity, but bad for timekeeping. Since the time of day depended on where you see the sun, talking with someone far away could be difficult -- their daily schedule would no longer remotely line up with yours.
Back then, there were no standards at all for timekeeping. In fact, there were so few standards that every town had their own definition of "noon", which could be off by only a few minutes, because that's when the sun happens to be straight up for each town.
There were a few early attempts at time standardization, but eventually the local time from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (now known as GMT) was used as a reference. This later evolved into UTC, which is basically just the same thing but without Daylight Savings Time (which is a whole other can of worms I refuse to get into). Since every country was in a different place, though, it would be massively inconvenient to use GMT everywhere, since that means that "noon" and "midnight" could basically be whenever. So countries started switching over to use some offset to GMT, so that whilst it is still synchronized, it (more or less) matches up with the previous timekeeping standard for every location.
These offsets are usually some number of hours ahead or behind GMT/UTC; for example, EST is 5 hours behind UTC, JST is 9 hours ahead of UTC, and so on. So while "local time" is still a prevalent concept, it's much less of an issue than it used to be: all you have to do is take note of the difference between two locations. And if you really had to coordinate a specific time with accuracy, you could just use UTC.
But soon after, the Internet came along. Local time was becoming an increasing issue when coordinating things with people in different time zones*If you haven't already, you need to see Tom Scott's timezone rant., since the mental math required isn't always the easiest thing. I haven't even mentioned things like Daylight Savings and fractional time zones, and not to mention the whole thing gets way worse if you're talking to people in more than one other time zone. If you want to coordinate things, why would you still use standards based off of the sun? What if there was a new standard, built from the ground up, to be used for synchronization, regardless of other factors like the sun and/or time zones?
In 1998, a Swiss watchmaking company named Swatch devised their own solution: Swatch Internet Time. It's extremely simple to describe: each day is broken into exactly 1,000 "beats" (notated with an @ followed by a number), where @000 is midnight and @500 is noon in UTC+1, the time zone in Biel*Biel uses Central European Time, which is actually defined as GMT+1, which is just UTC+1 but including DST. Internet Time does not observe DST in any capacity., where the Swatch headquarters are. Each beat is 1/1,000th of a day (exactly 1 minute and 26.4 seconds). Regardless of whether or not you're in Biel, the beat number is always the same across the world.
As a side note: if you're wondering why we didn't adapt modern timekeeping to use a decimal time system like Internet Time rather than the 12/60/60 divisions we use -- the French tried that out much earlier during the Revolution. It did not work out, largely because people were too used to standard time.
Internet Time was not meant to be used for keeping track of your day-to-day activities, it was expressly designed for coordination purposes, in order to have a clear, unambiguous way to represent the same moment across the Earth. And for that, it made a lot of sense to make a whole new system for it rather than adapting the old one.
After its unveiling in 1998, it saw a bit of usage, but the most popular one was its usage in Phantasy Star Online 2 for the Dreamcast. I've never played the game myself, but it made sense for one simple reason: the game was an MMO, and players from anywhere on Earth could be playing at the same time. If you needed to coordinate an attack against an enemy (or anything similar) in-game, it made far more sense to use Internet Time; you didn't need to know the time zones of your friends, nor their location. All you needed was to provide a time to meet at.
There were a handful of other applications, too -- Trackmania Nations Forever had the option of showing the current Internet Time when playing online. Swatch, being a watchmaking company, released quite a few watches that prominently showed Internet Time. There was even at least one phone with the capability to show it, as well. But unfortunately, after about a decade, it fell out of usage almost entirely, being delegated to a footnote or a fun piece of trivia.
And this is where this article turns into more of an opinionated blog post, as I think that Internet Time was a good concept that just never caught on.
I wholeheartedly believe that we can bring back Internet Time. The concept of a universal time zone*UTC is a universal time zone*I mean, the U stands for "Universal". It's in the name., and it's already made its mark on the world. makes far more sense now than it did in 1998. Ever since 2020, communication on the Internet has become much more popular*I wonder why?, and the need to synchronize events across timezones has become more of a necessity than ever.
UTC is great for coordination, but the fact that it's essentially just an extra time zone to deal with makes it more complicated than it needs to be. Internet Time is an entirely different thing, and thus builds a mental model that I genuinely believe would make cross-continent communication near effortless. They did it as well as they could; after all, it's just a single number that you need to keep track of.
Above all else, however, I just think that the Internet is losing its plot. In recent years, it's becoming more and more of a corporate dystopia*I had a glimpse of what could have been when I was much younger. The internet was my favourite thing as an elementary school kid, and now I just view it as more of a tool. I miss that.. It's no longer the whole "interconnected world" that everyone thought it would be. So why not bring Internet Time back? It's the least we could do if we want to re-ignite the spark that set the world ablaze.
Is Internet Time a perfect system? Not really. The use of Biel time as the base is just a bias, and it'd be harder to get accustomed to the fact that @1 is equal to just over a minute. I still think it could work, though -- if we were to adopt some kind of universal time system, why not go all the way and use one expressly designed for human use?
In conclusion, sorry for rambling. I just have a lot of things to say and not enough time to do so.