Notes from the edge of civilization: July 5, 2026
Saving time in Quebec; wasting time in South Korea; and we'll see you on Mars.
Students at Quebec’s École nationale d’horlogerie may be among the few who are not anxious about their jobs being stolen by a humanoid robot soon after they graduate.
That’s because they’re learning something artificial intelligence definitely cannot do: how to sit in a quiet room for long hours, hold your breath, and reassemble parts so tiny a small breeze can ruin a day’s work.
This week the CBC profiled Canada’s only watchmaking school, and we highly encourage you to read the entire article or, better yet, listen to the audio documentary. It’s a superb example of radio journalism — the kind for which CBC became famous. And while Notes is normally full of snark and bite, this time we’ll just say this is a story worth reading.
It describes how the school in Trois-Rivières, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River northeast of Montreal, was founded after World War II to help veterans re-enter civilian life through a skill that required patience, discipline, precision, and calm. Eighty years later, it is still teaching how to repair machines most people don’t use, in a culture where most people throw things away.
One of the most poignant moments comes from Louis-Philippe Grondin, a 47-year-old student who used to work as an interior designer. He left the industry after becoming frustrated with creating spaces out of materials good enough to last for a lifetime, but which would all go into the trash in five to seven years because it was out of fashion. “I wasn’t at ease with that,” he said.
“It’s more meaningful,” Grondin says, “to maintain something.” Amen to that!
Cynics might argue that the students at a watchmaking school are wasting their time and effort. Who needs a watch to tell time anymore? Your phone does that, along with your oven, your car, and countless other digital gadgets.
A phone can tell you what time it is, but it can’t remind you what that time is worth. Leave that to a website called foodnevercomes.com. It does exactly what it says.
It looks just like a regular delivery app, where you can scroll menus, customize an order, enter an address, choose a payment method, and track a fake courier across a fake map.
But nothing is cooked, nothing is paid for, and no food will ever arrive.
The app belongs to a growing category of something called ‘dopamine sites’: digital spaces that recreate the thrill of buying without the inconvenience of actually receiving, using, digesting, cleaning up, or living with anything. It is consumption stripped down to its purest form: anticipation without consequence.
So, in contrast to the watchmaking school in Quebec, where students are learning to bring back to life something that is very real, we have a viral app from South Korea that caters to people who order food when they’re not hungry, only because they’re so under-stimulated, restless, and bored out of their skulls that pretending to order a hamburger from a restaurant that doesn’t exist can feel like some sort of relief.
Welcome to the dopamine economy, where people learn to desire without receiving, choose without committing, consume without consuming, and simulate satisfaction just long enough to survive another evening inside the matrix. This pure conditioning for life inside the digital corral. As we always try to remind: stay human, friends.
Since it’s a holiday weekend in America, we’ll keep this week’s Notes short, and end on some seemingly good news. In his July 4th speech, President Trump made mention of interplanetary travel:
“We’re going to be going to Mars very soon. And I think that's something that we do have in mind. And we're going to do the moon and we're going to go from there. We're going to go to Mars, and we're going to continue to be way ahead.”
Does that mean Don and Elon are back together again? We’re not going to Mars without Elon, right? Add this to the wedding of the year, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden with about a thousand of their closest celebrity friends, and we’re feeling the love here in America this weekend.
(It wouldn’t be Notes from the Edge of Civilization without a little snark, right?)
Excellent, excellent article. It is heart-warming to know that such skills are being preserved and actively passed on. After my dad's retirement he took an interest in clock repair and he was very good at it but you did not want to be in his house at 12 o'clock anytime time of day, LOL.
Priorities are really skewed, when space travel is more important than handling all the problems, we face here on earth.