The Real Problem With Double Wristing

The truth about the trouble with two-timing. Rant about AI, no extra charge.

There is a wonderful novel by Neal Stephenson, which I highly recommend for anyone looking for a big book with big ideas that doesn’t take itself too seriously (the main character is a guy who goes by Hiro Protagonist, a freelance hacker whose business card says, in part, “world’s greatest swordfighter” which it turns out is only true in VR, and it’s only true there because, as a friend reminds him, “you wrote the swordfighting code.”) The novel is called Snow Crash, and it takes as its subjects a lot of things that don’t bear on my subject at hand, including Sumerian, artificial intelligence, neurolinguistic programming, high speed pizza delivery, virtual reality, the Tower of Babel, and a portable gatling railgun powered by a portable nuclear thermocouple battery which is capable of cutting the top deck off a pirate ship with a single sweep, and which is called “Reason 2.0” by the author for one reason and one reason only: so that its gunner can wisecrack, “See? I told you they’d listen to Reason.”

In the novel, the chaos of the Internet has given way to the chaos of a consensus-hallucinated online reality called the Metaverse, which has its own thousands of sub-communities, all of which offer a variety of simulated somatosensory experiences. One standard common to all of these communities, but especially those which provide social and recreational outlets, is that nothing should intrude on the experience which reminds you that what you’re experiencing is actually a simulation. This is called “breaking the metaphor” and can be something as simple as a clipping bug in a program that results in someone’s anthropomorphic avatar getting its foot stuck half in and half out of a wall.

I bring this up because for many years I have been double wristing, and there’s a connection.

I thought the first Apple Watch was interesting, although perhaps stronger on promise than delivery, but as different models came and went, with considerable updates to hardware, software, and UI, I started to find them more and more convincing, and in 2022, I got an Apple Watch Ultra, which has been on my right wrist (and not infrequently, the sacred ground of my left wrist) much more often than not since then, usually but not always with a mechanical watch on the left. I don’t wear the Ultra to any special occasions, but it has become a part of my daily life and I have actually worn it more regularly than any other watch in my extremely unsystematic collection. I admit this with a certain level of feeling.

It feels weird to say that, because I haven’t stopped loving mechanical watches because of the Ultra, but facing up to the fact that I wear it on an almost daily basis is hard to do because it feels like I’m betraying the long proud tradition of mechanical horology. Feelings are not facts and the idea that somewhere, Hans Wilsdorf or Breguet are spinning in their graves every time I put on the Ultra is ridiculous; rationally, it’s all upside and no downside. Indeed, wearing an Ultra is a victimless crime if it is a crime at all; it’s been three years and it works flawlessly day in and day out; it’s well designed, offers so much more functionality than any mechanical watch that there’s no contest, and while its accuracy is the result ultimately of an atomic clock time signal transmitted over the Internet, it’s still nice to know that the time, every time, is the correct time, to the second. On top of everything else, it is still on the same Trail Loop fabric band that came with it when it was new, and that strap shows almost no sign of wear at all, despite having had the tine of the buckle passed in and out of the same loop hundreds if not thousands of times. There is the tiniest bit of fraying at the edges of the strap but after three years, every time I put the watch on, I look at the strap, which has been rode hard and put away wet a lot more than a few times, and I think, What a strap. Why cannot the Swiss make such a strap? Why, Switzerland? If the Ultra and the Trail Loop strap are symptoms of cynical planned obsolescence, they’re doing an awfully good job of hiding it. I am a serial early adopter and compulsive model updater, but the Ultra refuses to give me any reason to buy a new strap, let alone a new model.

There is therefore no practical reason to not double wrist with the Ultra; it overdelivers on just about everything, from functionality to durability to design and overall build quality, up to and including the strap. Whyfore, then, does it feel weird to double wrist?

I can think of several possible reasons. The first, which has already been mentioned, and which is an emotional argument against it, is that it’s somehow disrespectful to mechanical horology. The idea is indefensible enough to be dismissed without further ado.

Another argument, is that it looks dorky (or whatever word you want to pick which is more or less the equivalent of dorky). If being dorky were something I wanted to avoid, I’d have my work cut out for me; I have been identifiable as a dork (or nerd or what have you) for most of my life, and while I tried cutting a more urbane figure for a few years after doing the ad copy for a major ad campaign for Brooks Brothers, I took a bit of a left turn from mainstream trad dressing and affected a bow tie (I still have around thirty bow ties). Avoiding dorkiness, therefore, is not given as a plausible reason to avoid the double wristing practice.

I think however, that I have managed to finally figure out one important aspect of why it feels strange to do so, and it has to do with the narrative of a wristwatch.

People wear all sorts of watches for all sorts of reasons; I often pick a watch in the morning for the story it tells. For instance, right now, I’m wearing a cushion-cased Seiko Prospex diver automatic, which is one of a half dozen or so Seiko divers I’ve acquired over the years (and which include an SKX007, and a Black Monster, the only two watches I have ever bought which have increased in value) – the model is the cushion cased SRP775, known by the dogged nickname of “Turtle.” It’s a sturdy, solid, dive watch with no extraneous flourishes, a sixty click bezel with a wee bit of play that would be a hanging offense in a Rolex but which here is hard to get mad about at the price ($495 on a rubber strap when it was released in 2016) a ton of lume, and a matte finish cushion case; the watch exudes functionality and has about as much glamor as a shop vacuum; that however is precisely its charm; it’s about as honest a watch as you can find and it is not putting on airs or trying to be anything it’s not. When I put it on, I revel in its air of complete pragmatism, but I also feel a sense of connection to the larger history of Seiko dive watches, especially watches like the 6105, and their use by hard men in hard places, as everyone’s favorite ex CIA officer turned watch writer, Watches of Espionage, likes to put it. And appropriately enough considering we are talking about the Walter Mitty-esque, cosplaying aspect of being a watch enthusiast, it gives me a sense of pleasure to feel a part of the narrative of one Captain Willard, who went about twenty kliks up the Nung River past the bridge at Do Lung, that’s Cambodia Captain, that’s classified, Chief.

The same thing is true for a lot of the watches I own and if there is any one thing that ties together the incredibly heterogenous bunch of timepieces that grace my watch boxes, it’s that a lot of them tell stories – the Navitimer (“I’m a natural born stick-and-rudder man!”) the Speedmaster Hesalite Moonwatch (“I’m a steely eyed missile man!”) the Cartier Tank Louis Cartier (“I’m a suave urban sophisticado!”) and so on. So when I put on a watch, a lot of the time – maybe most of the time – I’m putting it on because it’s part of a certain narrative, and the stronger the narrative, the more pleasure I get out of wearing the watch.

And here’s the problem with double wristing with an Ultra. It’s not that it’s dorky (although it might be) it’s not that it’s redundant (an Ultra and a Speedmaster do not duplicate any but the most basic functionality) and it’s not because I’m betraying mechanical horology or disrespecting the tribe of watch enthusiasts. It’s because it breaks the metaphor.

Every time I look at the Ultra when I’m double wristing with a mechanical watch, it pulls me right out of immersion in the narrative that goes along with the mechanical watch, and suddenly, I’m not Captain Willard, or Ed White, or Alain Delon; suddenly, the needle scratches on the hi fi vinyl recording of the symphony of dreams, played by the Chamber Ensemble Of St. Martin In The Field, and I’m just this guy wearing two watches, running out to Trader Joe’s for a half gallon of OJ, and hey, maybe they finally got some more Marcona almonds in.

That said, I’m not going to stop doing it; at my age I’m lucky in that I do things pretty much for my own reasons and if double wristing is a dorky (okay, it’s dorky, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa) eccentricity, it’s an eccentricity I’m going to allow myself, along with repeating the same stories and being avuncular and offering longwinded advice when nobody asked. But it’s nice to have figured out what, for me, is the basic problem with the practice – a mechanical watch is a lot of things, but it’s also a kind of portable dream factory and it’s nice to not have something break the metaphor too often. And also, why in hell cannot the Swiss make such a strap?

Afterwords

Thanks everyone for reading, and thanks especially to paid subscribers who support Split Seconds with their hard earned specie. If you’re enjoying, please consider becoming a paid subscriber!

Also, I’d like to put in a plug for Greg Gentile’s latest article for The 1916 Company Journal: Ultra-Thin Watchmaking Part II: A Modern History Of Thin Elegance, And The Birth Era Of Extremes. This one was a labor of love: an enthusiast grade overview of the evolution of ultra thin watchmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries, including movements like the F. Piguet 21, the JLC calibers 803, 849, and many others, and the point at which ultra thin watchmaking stopped being an exercise in restraint and elegance, and started to become stunt watchmaking. You can also check out my latest review, which is a look at the new Jaeger-LeCoultre Polaris Ocean Grey, which I was expecting to be underwhelming and which absolutely was not, as well as a look at the amazing Cartier Astrotourbillon, designed by Carol Forestier-Kasapi, which was part of Cartier’s Fine Watchmaking Collection – one of the last great sustained efforts in maximalist watchmaking.

An Afterword On Artificial Intelligence

Mentioning Snow Crash reminded me of something: like everyone else, I Have Thoughts on AI. GPT5 was just released and it seems to have collectively underwhelmed those among us who thought AGI – Artificial General Intelligence, and even sentient LLMs – were both right around the corner. I don’t think AGI is anything like close and I even think, based on my meager expertise in the subject as I type away here at my kitchen table in my Fortress Of Solitude, that the LLM model for progressing towards AGI is fundamentally flawed. Lemme ‘splain you.

The problem with LLMs is that they are structured in a way that has almost nothing to do with how consciousness arises in the only place we know for sure it actually arises, which is in biological nervous systems in biological bodies. Consciousness seems to depend on the construction of an internal model of the body in the central nervous system, and this in turn arises thanks to input from and output to the sensory and motor systems. LLMs work by processing tokens – vector-based numerical representations of words and even fragments of words – and rely on training on huge amounts of human generated, natural language text to make statistically sound predictions about the order in which words should be generated. It is unfair to call them “no more than very complex auto-complete mechanisms” – the vector space for any token can have thousands of dimensions –but the pejorative characterization is not entirely wrong, either. I suspect that if AI researchers really want to make a conscious digital entity, they will need a major paradigm shift – I am as impressed by the fidelity of the simulation of interaction with a sentient entity as much as the next guy (hey, ChatGPT helped me and a buddy figure out how to destroy the Solar System) but the architecture and processing paradigms underlying AI have about as much to do with how biological brains and bodies work as a rubber duck has to do with an aircraft carrier.

For fascinating account of the evidence for consciousness arising from an internal model of the somatosensory complex, I highly recommend Antonio Damasio’s The Feeling Of What Happens: Body And Emotion In The Making Of Consciousness, a NY Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, whose thesis is: “Consciousness is the feeling of what happens – our mind noticing the body's reaction to the world and responding to that experience. Without our bodies there can be no consciousness, which is at heart a mechanism for survival that engages body, emotion, and mind in the glorious spiral of human life.” For a central thought experiment in how hard it is to tell if an entity is or is not conscious, see Searle’s famous Chinese Room problem. Perhaps it says something about the current state of LLMs that when I looked for a link on Google for “Chinese Room Problem” I miss-typed “Chinese Rom Problem” and got back news stories on the challenges of chip manufacturing with respect to read-only memory, in mainland China. Thank you Gemini, but no thank you, and again I say, no thank you.

Thanks again for reading!