• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, March 13, 2015

Timekeeping and calendar devices, whether buried under lianas somewhere in Meso-America or in some Etruscan temple, don't just mark the hours, they mark a civilization's advance. And wristwatches are richly endowed with meaning even beyond what they say about our achievements in miniature mechanics, metallurgy and mastery of precision. 

They bestow upon the wearer a complex web of identities depending on how they look and function: they make us civil, smart, fatuous, elegant, frivolous, arrogant, thrifty, practical, what have you.

Well, the most incredible news in recent years on compact spatio-temporal devices doesn't actually involve a watch, not even one from Cupertino, Calif. It's about a small computer that predates the Apple Watch by, say, 2,100 years and the wristwatch itself by over 1,700 years. 

You can't wear the Antikythera device on your wrist — you can't do anything with it now. It’s not really a new object — scientists have been studying it ever since it was extracted from a wreck in 1900 off the coast of the Island for which it is named. But advances in our own technology have revealed more and more about how the collection of gears and slots works. In late 2000's new research on it revealed even more incredible things about what is now understood to be an analog computer that correctly predicted positions of stars and planets, eclipses and cycles of Olympic Games, among other things. And it says much about us: how relics shape our perception of a culture. 

Watch innovations have come and gone, some functional, some for show: digital, LED, and watches that pretty much do what the ancient Greek device did: show planetary movements, and lunar phases. Most innovations in watches are merely technically impressive, since precise time is no longer a point of differentiation for most.  

What does that make watches? Jewelry. Even the chunky ones with buttons, and deep-dive specs. They are bracelets that make a statement because temporal data is ubiquitous. This means the smartwatch, including Apple Watch, is one of two things: the next Antikythera device — the next milestone; or it is merely another bit of mechanical bling, one that serves as a carpal extension of the last bona fide milestone: the smartphone, which it requires to function to spec.  

By the way, here are some stats culled for my by YouTube data, marketing and digital rights firm ZEFR: there are 1,200 YouTube videos, eight million views, with 476,000 engagements on Apple Watch since the March 9 announcement. The videos have 237,000 “likes" to 222,000 comments. Fan uploads account for 84% of total views. On the announcement day video uploads surged by 1,008%, with 5.3 million views, per the firm. Most popular channels do not belong to everyday consumers, rather large news/tech review companies (The Verge, CNET, Bloomberg.)

As really amazing as the new machines from Samsung, Apple, and others are, they belong to the more generally revolutionary category of wearable technology, and more broadly, the so-called Internet of things, and even more broadly, the revolution that you can't see, the wireless worldwide web, whose only visible presence are the little transmitters on buildings and fake trees. And the ongoing invisible revolution watches you as you watch it, especially if it’s a watch. 

Which leads me to comedian Russell Brand's take on all this. Among other (scathing) things, he makes the point that Apple's health-tracking features, which can be looped in with a national database for pharma and health data researchers (opt-in required), is sinister. Whether or not you subscribe to Brand's assertion that Apple probably can't be trusted on this (given their involvement with NSA data netting) I'm sure most people probably think people like themselves have no control over their personal data anyway. That they might as well tap their toes three times and say, "There's no place like privacy."