Extractive Temporality
Measured Outcomes
🦠 Necrocene
🔮 Sustainability Theorems
A cross-domain analysis of Political, Economic, Cultural, and Ecological theories.
Political Theory
Short-termism
Economic Theory
Quarterly Capitalism
Cultural Theory
Accelerated Amnesia
Ecological Theory
Temporal Externalization
The Tyranny of the Clock: Time is linear, finite, and hostile - a resource to be exploited for immediate gain.
📑 Observations
Establishing a triage containing observations of social experience.
🪞 Self-Enquiry
How does my experience of time keep me trapped in emergency thinking, preventing me from acting for the long-term?
🩺 Diagnosis Questions
1. Does the system sacrifice future viability for present convenience?
2. Are decisions made against electoral or quarterly cycles rather than ecological or civilizational timeframes?
3. Does the system accelerate itself toward collapse?
Related Variables
-Discount rates used in economic planning
-Intergenerational wealth/well-being transfer
-Rate of cultural language/tradition loss
“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us.” - Golda Meir
🩻 Targeted Organ
The Womb
Capacity for Intergenerational Care
🧾 Rationale
To destroy Their future-making capacity.
💉 Extraction/Cultivation
Killing children, doctors, teachers; destroying schools and pediatric hospitals; creating generational trauma.
😷 Defense/Propagation
Future Discounting: Framing the destruction of future generations as "breaking the cycle of violence."
❌ Tetrad Analysis
- Object of Perception: Time / The Future
- ENHANCES: Immediate gratification; short-term thinking; crisis response
- OBSOLESCES: Long-term planning; intergenerational responsibility; patience; cyclical wisdom
- RETRIEVES: Apocalyptic and millennial thinking as cultural backdrop
- REVERSES INTO: Present becomes so mortgaged to the future that both become uninhabitable; emergency thinking prevents addressing actual emergencies
📝 Partial Diagnosis
Temporal Bankruptcy - Stealing from the future to pay the present
⚗️ Research Repository
🔮 Engagement Circle
🧊 Life Course
🎓 Case Study
Climate Change Inaction
The ultimate temporal externality.
📚 Literature
"The Clock of the Long Now"
By Stewart Brand is a book about the practical use of long time perspective: how to get it, how to use it, how to keep it in and out of sight.
