Casio: Adequate Enough to Rule the World

The essay argues that the Casio F-91W's "unreasonable adequacy" explains why it became the world's most popular watch and why adequate technologies, not sophisticated ones, often become the most consequential. It notes that the watch is cheap, reliable, ubiquitous and nearly unchanged in design for decades, and that it has been used by Barack Obama, Captain Ripley in Alien and Osama bin Laden. It also describes how the watch has been used as a timer in improvised explosive devices, and how a leaked document showed U.S. government interrogators viewed it as a sign of terrorist association. The author applies the idea to LLMs and AI tools, which are spreading quickly for similar reasons, and to blockchains and TCP/IP as clocks that shape time.