We, the undersigned developers, project managers, remote workers, and victims of Daylight Saving Time, having suffered greatly and without reasonable justification, do hereby present this manifesto to the global community. We have written it in UTC. We think. Honestly, we're not sure anymore.
The Indictment
Time zones, as currently implemented, are a system of 37 parallel realities coexisting on a single planet. Not 24, as a reasonable person might assume — 37. Because the International Date Line has opinions, half-hour offsets exist for reasons no one alive can explain, and Nepal chose UTC+5:45 apparently out of sheer defiance.
This system was designed in the 19th century to solve a railroad scheduling problem. We have since split the atom, walked on the Moon, and connected every human being on Earth through a network of undersea cables. We are still using railroad time.
The consequences are not theoretical. They are felt every single day by every person who has ever attempted to coordinate anything across more than one meridian. Consider the following evidence.
It is currently impossible to schedule a one-hour meeting between a team in San Francisco, a team in London, and a team in Tokyo during hours that all three parties would describe as "reasonable." This is not a logistical failure. It is a mathematical impossibility imposed by the system itself.
Twice per year, approximately 70 countries collectively agree to change what time it is — but not on the same day, and not by the same amount, and some of them opt out entirely, and Arizona opts out but the Navajo Nation within Arizona opts back in, but the Hopi Reservation within the Navajo Nation opts back out again.
On these days, every cron job, scheduled task, recurring meeting, and automated deployment becomes a roulette wheel. Production databases have been corrupted. Medical appointments have been missed. One developer, whose identity we protect, reportedly shipped a billing system that charged customers for 25 hours on a 23-hour day.
We present, without further commentary: new Date().toLocaleString(). The output of this function changes depending on the machine, the operating system, the browser, the locale, the phase of the moon, and what the developer had for breakfast. It is the most unreliable function in the most widely deployed programming language on Earth. Time zones are why.
The Cost
The cost of maintaining the timezone system is not merely inconvenience. It is measured in engineering hours, in bugs, in money, and in the slow erosion of sanity among those who maintain software that must operate across borders.
The IANA Time Zone Database — the canonical source of timezone rules for virtually every computer on Earth — is maintained by volunteers. It is updated multiple times per year because governments keep changing the rules. Morocco once changed its DST schedule four times in a single year. Russia has abolished and re-adopted DST multiple times. Samoa skipped an entire calendar day in 2011 to jump across the International Date Line.
Every one of these changes propagates through every operating system, every database, every programming language, every API, every IoT device, every airline booking system, and every calendar application on the planet. The downstream cost of a single government's decision to shift its UTC offset by 30 minutes is measured in millions of developer hours.
And yet we accept this. We accept it because we have never known anything else, and because the alternative seems unthinkable. This manifesto exists to make it thinkable.
The Proposal
We propose a world that operates on a single, universal, coordinated clock. No offsets. No conversions. No "well, it's 3pm here, but what time is it there?" Just one time. Everywhere. For everyone. Always.
All clocks, worldwide, shall display the same time. We are agnostic about whether this is called UTC, Universal Time, or something more inspiring. We are open to suggestions. "Earth Time" has been proposed.
Local schedules shall adapt to universal time, not the other way around. If your business hours in Tokyo are 01:00 to 09:00, so be it. The numbers on the clock are arbitrary. The sun does not care what your watch says.
Daylight Saving Time shall be immediately and irrevocably abolished. No phase-out period. No grandfather clauses. It ends. The clocks do not move. Ever again.
Any software function, API endpoint, or database column that currently stores, converts, or displays timezone-adjusted time shall be simplified or decommissioned. Entire categories of bugs will cease to exist. The IANA Time Zone Database will become a historical document, like the Rosetta Stone — fascinating, but no longer necessary.
We acknowledge that this transition would require a period of adjustment. We also acknowledge that this adjustment would be less painful than what developers currently endure every March and November.
Objections and Rebuttals
We anticipate resistance. Humanity has been dividing the Earth into temporal fiefdoms since 1883. Below, we address the most common objections with the seriousness they deserve — which, to be clear, is very little.
But people need the sun to be up during the day!
They do. And it still will be. Universal time does not move the sun. It changes the number on the clock when the sun is up. If sunrise in your city happens at 22:00 Universal Time, you simply know that your day starts at 22:00. You already know that "lunch" is at different clock-times depending on your culture. In Spain, lunch is at 14:00. In Japan, it's at 12:00. Did Spain collapse because their lunch number is different? No.
The association between "12:00" and "noon" is arbitrary. It is learned, not innate. Children in a universal-time world would learn their local "daylight hours" the same way they currently learn that bedtime is at 20:00 — by being told.
But farmers need Daylight Saving Time!
No, they don't. Farmers have historically opposed Daylight Saving Time. This is one of the most persistent myths in the timezone discourse. DST was introduced for energy conservation during World War I, not for agriculture. A cow does not understand what a clock says. A farmer wakes up when the work needs doing, regardless of whether the government has decided to shift an hour.
The farming argument is so thoroughly debunked that continuing to make it should be considered a misdemeanor.
It would be too confusing!
More confusing than the current system? The current system where a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney crosses the International Date Line and arrives two days later despite being in the air for 15 hours? The system where you can fly from Samoa to American Samoa — a 30-minute flight — and arrive yesterday?
Right now, scheduling a meeting across three time zones requires a timezone converter, a calendar that understands DST transitions, and a willingness to accept that someone will inevitably show up an hour late. Under universal time, you say "15:00" and every single person on Earth knows exactly when that is. The confusion argument is not an argument against universal time. It is the strongest argument for it.
Midnight should be at midnight! Noon should be at noon!
Says who? China — the fourth-largest country on Earth, spanning five geographical time zones — operates on a single time zone. Has since 1949. The sun rises in Kashgar at roughly 10:00 Beijing Time. The population of Kashgar has not descended into temporal chaos. They simply know that their morning starts later on the clock. If 1.4 billion people can handle one time zone, the other 6.6 billion can manage.
This would never be adopted. It's too radical.
The metric system was radical. Decimal currency was radical. Abolishing the Julian calendar in favor of the Gregorian calendar was radical — and that transition was so messy that some countries didn't adopt it until the 20th century, resulting in the October Revolution actually happening in November.
Every major improvement to how humans coordinate has been called impractical until it was implemented, at which point it was called obvious. We are simply asking to be ahead of that curve.
But my culture's traditions are tied to specific clock times!
Traditions are tied to events, not numbers. "We eat dinner when the sun sets" is a tradition. "We eat dinner at 19:00" is a convention. If sunset in your city moves to 02:00 Universal Time, your tradition is perfectly intact — you eat when the sun sets. The number changed. The tradition didn't.
Ramadan already follows a calendar entirely disconnected from the Gregorian clock. Jewish Shabbat begins at sunset, not at a fixed time. These traditions survived the introduction of Standard Time in 1883. They will survive this too.
A Final Word
We do not expect the world to change overnight. Time zones are deeply embedded in law, in infrastructure, in the human psyche. Abolishing them would require international cooperation on a scale that humanity has rarely achieved.
But we have achieved it before. We agreed on the meter. We agreed on the second. We agreed on TCP/IP. We put a man on the Moon and brought him back using a computer with less memory than the device you are reading this on.
We can agree on what time it is.
Until that day, we will continue to file bug reports, miss meetings, and stare at timezone conversion charts with the hollow expression of people who have been betrayed by a system they did not choose and cannot escape. But we will not be silent.