Some Thoughts On Gatekeeping In The Watch World

You shall not pass!

Image, Andrej Lisakov, via Unsplash

A subject which comes up occasionally when people talk about how people talk about watches is the subject of gatekeeping, which is itself a contentious term as it can mean many different things depending on who is using it.

Merriam-Webster, which is as much a standard for definitions and usage in language as anything can be these days (why, you might say they’re a gatekeeper for definitions, hahahaha) keeps it simple and says that it means, one who keeps a gate, and secondarily, one who controls access to something. Gatekeeping was one of Vogue’s Words Of The Year for 2022, along with “gaslighting” and “nepo baby” and there André-Naquian Wheeler wrote, “Another Gen Z–beloved word this year: gatekeeping. This was especially popular on TikTok, where users decry anyone who withholds information or access. What began as a way to describe powerful institutions or people hoarding valuable power was now used for, say, an influencer not sharing where they purchased their nice sweater. ‘Gatekeeping is just, like, a regular word in my and my friends’ vocabulary these days,’ says Gen Z’er Irene Kim, Vogue Runway’s production assistant. ‘When my friends and I were purchasing Taylor Swift concert tickets, we’d say things like, “I think my friend is gatekeeping the Taylor Swift ticket prices. I don’t think the tickets are that expensive. Twitter is saying it’s not that much.”

The sense in which I’ve heard and seen the term used in the context of the watch world is a little different, however. There the term is used not just to mean someone is gatekeeping when they attempt to control who has access to the watch community; access to the community (if not the watches) is now available to anyone with a smartphone. More precisely, it’s used to mean a situation in which someone arrogates to themselves the privilege of determining who has the right to be a part of the watch community.

In general terms, this is of course simply the age-old and virtually universal debate over who has the right to be considered a real – a true –aficionado, of just about anything. You can find gatekeeping in this sense in just about every fandom and every fandom-like community you can think of, whether it is wine connoisseurship or cars or selvage denim or the Marvel MCU or Star Wars (especially Star Wars. I don’t know why but the Star Trek fandom seems more mild-mannered. Maybe it’s a Federation thing). I bet if you went back and dug enough you would find Romans who were massive charioteering fans of the Blues or the Reds, who put down what they perceived as other, lesser fans who didn’t maybe remember that the reason the Blues lost by half a chariot length to the Reds four years ago was because Aurelius Heraclides had a hangnail on the third finger of his left hand that affected how he handled the reins – what are you, stupid? Everyone knows that.

In fact, What are you, stupid? is nothing less than the fundamental rallying cry of anyone who deliberately or not, is a gatekeeper to perceived legitimate membership in a particular community.

I have always had the impression that at least a lot of the time gatekeeping happens inadvertently, which doesn’t make it any less real, but does make it possible to view it when it does happen, with a little less feeling that it is necessary to judge someone morally culpable. (Nobody wants, or at least nobody should want, to be a gatekeeper for what is and is not morally culpable in fan or enthusiast discourse). Rather it seems to me that gatekeeping behavior is simply an unavoidable consequence of people having an emotional investment in access, expertise, or simply their own opinions. If you combine that with what as far as we know is a tendency older that the genus Homo to see the world in terms of Us and Them, a lot of the backbiting and acrimony in public discourse on watches seems not only understandable but also unavoidable and inevitable – God knows it is everywhere else people talk to other people, why not the world of watches.

The fact remains, though, that it is problematic, and for a number of reasons. There are all sorts of gatekeeping, including the inherent gatekeeping nature of luxury and access to it, and of course the universal and universally poisonous manifestations of gatekeeping deriving from racism and sexism and nationalism, to which the watch community is no more immune than any other.

Another form of gatekeeping, though, is gatekeeping around personal tastes, and gatekeeping around what is perceived to be insider knowledge.

In watchmaking specifically you can follow a whole sort of taxonomy of opportunities to both learn something and to almost immediately deploy it for the purposes of gatekeeping. I suppose the perennial example is “in house” although I think these days, the watch community overall has kind of come around to thinking that anyone who sneers at a movement for not being “in house” without any further qualification, are themselves showing a naive view of watches. Still, for many years, especially when I was first getting interested in watches and first getting involved in talking (and arguing) about them online, the notion that “in house” was a meaningful criterion for judging whether a company’s watchmaking was fine watchmaking, was prevalent enough for most of the major watch brands to move as quickly as they could towards making as much of their production as possible, “in house” or vertically integrated.

Unsurprisingly this has produced some mixed results, although we do have as a result an interesting variety of movements, balanced perhaps by the loss of some legacy movements of great interest, including a number of hand-wound movements, a number of chronograph movements, and, sadly, the JLC 920, which was used in its heyday by Patek, Vacheron, and Audemars Piguet and which is now only available as the base caliber in a handful of extremely expensive complications. (The “in-house” calibers which superseded it may or may not be more interesting historically and technically and may or may not rise to its standard qualitatively).

Over the last few years the watch community seems to have collectively, if somewhat gradually, moved away from thinking of “in house” as a standalone standard of acceptable quality and we have moved on to other and less general terms and standards becoming occasionally part of gatekeeping, deliberately or otherwise. “Sharp inner angles” is the new “in house,” or so it seems to me sometimes. On my own Instagram feed I hosted fairly recently a quite spirited argument over the relative merits of Etachron vs. Trivois regulators (however I hasten to say that it was, aside from some of the somewhat prickly back and forth, a lot more interesting than another debate about “in house”).

One of the ancillary features of gatekeeping is when we believe that the particular features of watches and watchmaking which interest us, are the only ones that should interest anyone, and the classic example of course is in the world of technical watchmaking. There is no reason why anyone should care more about how many turns a balance spring should have and where the center of gravity of an overcoil should be, than they should care about who wore what watch to the Oscars or Pitti.

Likewise, there is no reason to think that because someone doesn’t care about who wore what watch to the Oscars or to Pitti, it means they don’t understand something fundamental about the role watches have played in the world or will play in the future; Watches Of Espionage and Celebrity Watch Spotter on IG serve different audiences but they certainly seem to be able to coexist without the one detracting from the other. Some people are fascinated by design and some people collect Soviet era mechanical marine chronometers, and nothing else; everyone has their thing. In five hundred years we have seen every type of watch imaginable, from more or less purely decorative objects that function as fashion accessories (which is as a matter of fact what a lot of the first watches were; take a look at some of the paintings of hose-and-jerkin wearing nobles showing off their jewel-like watches in Renaissance paintings if you think watches-as-style is a new phenomenon) to scientific instruments essential to navigation at sea and the building of empires, to exploring the nature of the larger universe.

The one place I do think it is valuable to take a broader view, however, is if you choose to write about watches professionally. This matter is complicated by the fact that the category of professional watch writer – professional enthusiast watch writer – seems to be a relatively new phenomenon. There were in the pre-internet post-Quartz Crisis days some consumer publications devoted to watch and clock collecting but if you pick up a copy of the NAWCC Bulletin, you are unlikely to mistake it for a copy of Revolution. For much of the history of watchmaking, watch writing consisted largely of writing by professionals for professionals and to the extent that horological writing existed as something you did professionally, it was usually as a subcategory of the larger jewelry industry, or something you did for trade publications or fellow technicians.

Today however, and for many years prior, professional watch writers writing for consumers have more often than not, been enthusiasts first and professional writers second. This is not to say that enthusiast watch writers do not write to a professional standard but simply that, as with writing about cars or wine (I imagine) one comes into the business with certain views already more or less firmly in place. This is partly because if you going to write about watches, you are more or less dead in the water unless you are actually interested in watches on some level.

For our purposes, though, it has also generally meant that, rather than see it as our job to have a broader view of watches and watchmaking, we have often seen it as our job to promote our own view of what watches and watchmaking should be. This is not only inevitable but probably to some extent, even desirable; we are after all interested in a reviewer’s opinion at least as much as we are in simple facts. But a watch writer will I think find themselves handicapped at least partly, if they don’t have a somewhat broader grasp of the history of watchmaking, as well as all the worlds to which watches are related, which includes everything from the history of design, to the basics of classical mechanics, to the history and techniques of the decorative arts (and much more).

Part of the reason for recognizing the degree to which all of these apparently unrelated fields converge on the subject of watches, is simply that for both the professional and the serious amateur enthusiast (and again there is so much overlap, and there has been for so long, that it is impossible to tell where one leaves off and the other begins) is that to be uninformed, is simply to put yourself at the mercy of the marketing departments; you hear a claim, have no reason to doubt it and you reproduce the claim without qualification.

It also follows from that, that a wider perspective puts you in the position of having a much better chance of offering real value to whomever is consuming the content you are producing. I think it’s hard to do better than to have someone who finishes a piece of horological writing to say two things to themselves: “Well, that was entertaining,” and “Wow, I didn’t know that.”

This goes as much for watches as design and style objects as it does for technical watchmaking; it cuts both ways and if you don’t know something about the history of design, at least over the last century or so, you are in a disadvantaged position to offer an interesting perspective on the design side of things as well. Watches don’t exist in a vacuum and from the geometrically disciplined but exuberant watches of the Deco period, to therelatively austere and utilitarian designs of the 1950s, to the Pop and Op-art influenced designs of the 60s and 70s, to the unbridled and seemingly exaggerated designs of the pre-Financial Crisis era, they are designed by their designers in a particular context.

I will say, though, and I know this might be controversial to some people, that I think if you are going to write about watches you should at least have a grasp of the technical fundamentals. Watches, as a friend of mine and occasional collaborator wrote once, many years ago, are machines. I don’t say that everyone ought to know what an all-or-nothing piece is in a minute repeater but I think it is a professional responsibility for a watch writer to understand the basics. As John Gardner, the author and famous writing teacher once observed, a writer should at least be able to spell and by the same token, a watch writer should at least be able to understand technical watchmaking well enough to understand how it affects other aspects of a watch including its design.

That said, one of the most basic problems with gatekeeping, is that it fundamentally oversimplifies a wonderfully rich and complex subject. Here the old saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, applies. Having a particular interest is one thing, but the (admittedly natural) prejudice that one’s special interest is the only legitimate interest means missing out on a lot. A watch might be mostly an exercise in technical horology, or mostly an exercise in design, or mostly an exercise in the expression of decorative crafts but taken as whole, watches touch so many worlds that it would be exhausting to list them all and that complexity, which we oversimplify to our loss, is a feature, not a bug.