Dracula, the Time Disrupter

Count Dracula possessed many supernatural powers, including telepathy, hypnosis, shapeshifting, and weather control.  But he also possessed the less frequently recognized power of time confusion.  Dracula caused his victims to lose track of time, to mix up times and dates, and to abandon precise statements of time in favor of such vague terms as noon, midnight, sunrise, and sunset — all of which hindered their ability to resist his evil plans.

As Hollis Robbins argues in her chapter in Economics of the Undead, “Killing Time: Dracula and Social Discoordination” (excerpted here), Count Dracula arrived in London at a key point in economic history.  In 1897, Europe had only recent undertaken a shift in timekeeping standards, from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar and from local time to Standard Time.  Notably, Dracula hailed from a region of Europe known for resisting the new timekeeping standards.  Austria-Hungary and Turkey, on either side of Transylvania, had voted against the 1884 resolution that established Standard Time and the 24-hour day starting at midnight.  And Eastern Orthodox countries — notably Romania, including Transylvania — did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918.  Dracula’s power of time confusion is connected, both literally and figuratively, to his place of origin.  By disrupting perceptions of time, Dracula poses a threat to economic health.  As Robbins puts it:

Britain’s economic prosperity in the nineteenth century was largely dependent on the adoption of international standards such as Greenwich Mean Time and the universal day, which ensured smooth coordination for trade, legal transactions, railroad travel, and mail delivery. Dracula, whose powers are governed by the sun and the moon rather than clocks and calendars, works to destabilize social coordination.

This concern with social coordination appears more recently in Matthew Yglesias’s recent article at Vox, wherein he makes the case for eliminating time zones and replacing them with Universal Time — that is, having the entire world operate according to a single clock, presumably Greenwich Mean Time.  Yglesias hastens to say that people would still live their lives in a manner that makes sense given the local position of the sun; only the names that people call their hours would change:

All of which is to say that within a given time zone, the point of a common time is not to force everyone to do everything at the same time. It’s to allow us to communicate unambiguously with each other about when we are doing things.

If the whole world used a single GMT-based time, schedules would still vary. In general most people would sleep when it’s dark out and work when it’s light out. So at 23:00, most of London would be at home or in bed and most of Los Angeles would be at the office. … The difference from today is that if you were putting together a London-LA conference call at 21:00 there’d be only one possible interpretation of the proposal. A flight that leaves New York at 14:00 and lands in Paris at 20:00 is a six-hour flight, with no need to keep track of time zones. If your appointment is in El Paso at 11:30 you don’t need to remember that it’s in a different time zone than the rest of Texas.

In other words, the argument for replacing Standard Time with Universal Time is that it helps people to better coordinate their behavior — which was also the argument for replacing local time with Standard Time in the 1800s.  Yglesias is essentially saying that the people of the world didn’t go far enough back then, and that it’s time to take the universalization of timekeeping conventions to its logical extreme.

All of which makes me wonder:  What would Dracula have been like had he arrived 200 years later, in the year 2097?

In the mid-21^st century, Yglesias’s proposal gained traction, persuading much of the world to abandon time zones in favor of Universal Time.  Yet a few intransigent nations have stubbornly clung to the old time zones, and their continuing recalcitrance creates the potential for confusion — confusion that a supernatural being might exploit to his advantage.

Our 21^st-century Dracula hails from Finland, a country caught between modern Sweden (among the first adopters of Universal Time) and backwards Russia (which still uses the old time zones).  When he goes on a whirlwind tour of the political and financial capitals of the world, he causes everyone he meets to forget about Universal Time.  Some reset their clocks, watches, and computer settings to their old time zones.  Others see existing clocks on Universal Time but unconsciously interpret them as the old time zones.  The resulting discoordination leads to Y2K-like disasters, from stock market crashes to debt crises — or worse, collisions of orbiting satellites and lunar transport ships.  And God only knows what happens to the unlucky tourists whose teleportation pods materialize them in the same destination at the same time…