This piece originally appeared 10.27.24 online on Dimepiece as “The .beat Watch: Swatch’s Y2K Fever Dream.” Read the full piece here or below.

For a couple of years in the late nineties, still in the first decades of the personal computer and mass adoption of the internet, the Swiss watch manufacturer Swatch launched an internet time marketing campaign for a new line of watches called the .beat – a watch with a direct relationship to emergent online culture.

The .beat watches weren’t visually subtle; they were released in a year when the future was looking round, bubbly, and made of plastic. The now-iconic bondi blue iMac was released in 1998, and the full range of colorful iMacs came the next year. But the most significant feature of the Swatch .beat line was conceptual: in addition to standard 24-hour time, the watches displayed a reading Swatch called "internet time", based on a worldwide shared clock that divided the day into 1000 “.beats”, rather than hours, and dispensed with the concept of time zones.

People around the world were beginning to use the internet synchronously and around the clock, and Swatch posited that a single shared system of time would avoid the need for time zone conversions and better reflect the time-agnostic reality of the world wide web – so the internet time reading, notated with a little @ symbol, would be the same globally, regardless of location. Instead of arranging a meeting at 5PM in New York City, you would meet “@959 beats”: 2PM in LA, 11PM in Rome, or 5AM in Manila. In the upper left-hand corner of the Swatch website you can still see a running internet time clock based on BMT, or “Biel Mean Time,” (Biel, Switzerland is home to the headquarters of the Swatch Group), and this article breaks down the workings of internet time with some granularity. The concept of internet time was borrowed from the tried-and-failed French Revolutionary calendar, also known as decimal time or metric time, which did not stick the landing in post-revolutionary France in 1792, and which Swatch rebranded as internet time, with the additional concept of the “.beat” – styled with the “@” sign or the period, presumably an aesthetic choice designed to align the concept more closely with a web or email address.

Though Swatch repurposed an old idea for a base 10 time system, the campaign for the .beat watches was more than just a rebrand of decimal time for the dotcom era. The launch of the .beat watches unfolded over 1998 and 1999, during the run-up to Y2K, an era when previously unimaginable changes seemed on the threshold of becoming realities. In an attempt to get the few millions of early internet adopters hooked on the idea of internet time, Swatch took a bizarre, imaginative and costly range of approaches to the publicity campaign for the .beat watches.

The first prong of their campaign was to enlist the support of techno-utopian, avant-garde technologists at the MIT Media Lab, headed by Nicholas Negroponte, who was all for switching to a base 10 time system. “Cyberspace has no seasons and no night and day,” Negroponte said to Wired about the release of the .beat watches. “Internet Time is not geopolitical. It is global. In the future, for many people, real time will be Internet Time.” On October 23, 1998, the BMT Meridian was inaugurated in the presence of Negroponte.

Swatch even sponsored the adoption of internet time as the official time system of Nation.1, an online community and borderless, conceptual country made up of young people that grew out of the 1998 Junior Summit at MIT and described itself as “a country built and populated by kids — the digital generation.” Nation.1 protested against war, hosted early online chat rooms and message boards for young people, and discussed the representation of children in world affairs, and in many ways seems like an ancestor of groups like Fridays for Future or the Sunrise Movement: digitally literate groups of young people using the internet to organize across continents and advance their own interests. Some early adopters were on board with internet time, and the pioneering early chatroom ICQ even adopted internet time as its official time system, displaying it alongside local time in the upper right-hand corner of its interface.

Swatch also took the opportunity of the .beat campaign to get involved with the emergent field of online video games by partnering with Sega, the Japanese video game corporation responsible for Sonic the Hedgehog. Sega was developing Phantasy Star Online for the Dreamcast, the first successful online role-playing game for consoles, and a forerunner to games like Fortnite or Call of Duty. Sega and Swatch actually integrated internet time into the game as a universal clock, imagining that players across Asia and North America could take advantage of gameplay on a unified internet time system. It was a prescient move: worldwide multiplayer real-time gaming, then a relative subculture, has since ballooned into a global monoculture. The Swatch x Sega collab may have just been a little too ahead of the curve, but it’s possible to imagine an alternate reality in which the idea took off and all video games run on a shared internet time clock, as well as the possibilities for a more developed overlap between gaming culture and watch culture.

The third, and maybe zaniest prong of the publicity campaign Swatch planned for the .beat watches was a series of advertisements broadcast from a specially-built satellite they called “beatnik” — a play on “Sputnik” and “beat”— launched from the Russian MIR space station. Drama unfolded when ham radio operators protested that it was illegal to broadcast advertisements over a channel that was designated commercial-free by an international treaty, in what they called “a flagrant misuse of amateur radio frequencies.” Swatch backed down, removing the broadcasting capabilities of the satellite, and launching it symbolically but without the planned transmission. Had it broadcast, it would have been the first ever purely promotional satellite in history and the first trademarked advertising slogan broadcast from space. It’s clear Swatch had identified their target audience for the .beat watches – teens, early-adopter internet users, and radio, computer and gaming aficionados – and promoted the .beat watches creatively over every available media channel.

Some Swatches are based on a single, simple idea, while others are part of a thematic series, reflective of a fragment of pop culture, or purely visual. The .beat watches, regardless of how the Y2K-futurism sensibility continues to age, were a product with potentially world-altering implications, and it’s rare to see the release of a timepiece with that degree of ambition, reflected in the grandiose scope and weird imagination of the publicity campaign for the .beat line. The campaign also illustrates the profound cultural reach of Swatch as a company, as do projects like their ongoing sponsorship of the Olympics (check out the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games collection), or their 1998 MusiCall “Adam” watch, for which Peter Gabriel composed the music. (This obscure Swatch promo answers zero of whatever questions you might have about the concept for that Swatch.)

What other watch manufacturer can say they’ve collaborated with MIT, Sega, the Olympic Organizing Committee, and Peter Gabriel – and advanced an ideological agenda about our organization and marking of time? Though it’s a company that primarily runs on novelty and gimmick, constantly producing new designs, rather than a luxury heritage product, it has to be said that Swatch as a company is one-of-a-kind. If anything, many of their watches prove that novelty, gimmick and imagination can produce some singular, beautiful products and ideas – the .beat watches included.

As the world wide web was quickly expanding, Swatch imagined a possible future in which watches had a more direct relationship to online culture, and maybe their over-the-top efforts to market .beat watches to early-adopters expressed some anxiety about whether watches would still be important to people as the internet became an increasingly significant part of daily life. (Spoiler alert, the wristwatch is here to stay.) Maybe what Swatch imagined in the long run was something in between a traditional analog watch and a smartwatch; in 1999, they just couldn’t fathom the internet being small enough to fit on your wrist. The question remains as to what kinds of watches might be released today if watchmakers engaged with emergent technologies and considered possible futures for the wristwatch with the level of openness and imagination Swatch brought to the .beat campaign. These days, Swatch’s marketing efforts, and the cultural reach of the company as a whole, seem pretty tame by comparison, though the internet time clock still remains in the upper left-hand corner of the Swatch website, leaving the door ajar for a possible return of internet time.