Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not — Polyani
Flexworking was planned, 9-5 was not — me
When you look at the history, it’s amazing how much the synchronized monotemporality of ~1884-1984 was largely an emergent convergence towards a global equilibrium temporality
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Rather satisfyingly, the monotemporal era lasted almost exactly 100 years. The opening bookend is the 1883 standardization of US railroad time, the closing bookend was the Apple 1984 ad, which interestingly, first ran on Dec 31, 1983, to ensure it qualified for 1983 awards.😆
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Those are not just symbolic events within a smooth history, the actually did represent sharp dis ontinuitied. Monotemporality was manufactured by the railroads, killed by the personal computer. The boot-up/shut-down transitions were less than a decade in each case.
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To my original point, monotemporality was unplanned in the sense that people didn’t realize how deep the effects of synchronizing time globally would be. Railroads just wanted to manage ops. Labor unions just wanted more humane hours. Newspapers just had to win circulation wars.
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But all that somehow harmonized into a condition where everything got regimented and regulated. Like a bunch of unsynchronized fireflies coming into bottom up synchronization. And before you know it the whole world is synchronized.
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One reason OODA-loop type thinking (time-based competition in war and peace) was so effective starting with WW2 was that world had gotten into a homeostatic synchronized state, where everything had a tendency to harmonize with the global tempo. So breaking tempo = defection ftw.
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Replying to
Though you can’t attribute its breakdown entirely to temporal defection. My estimate:
20%: temporal defection
30% destabilizing harmonics (like marching soldiers on flimsy bridges causing catastrophic failure)
50% growth yields of monotemporality becoming unpredictable
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Good question. The murder was planned (along with unbridled laissez faire actually) to preserve economic growth. The murderer was neoliberalism. The method was deregulation. The cases belli was panic over the rise of Japan. Motive, means, opportunity.
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Replying to @vgr
So if monotemporality’s murder was planned let’s say “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” our new time lords custodianship is degenerating into a stagnated ceremony-bound oligarchy pretty fast. can we thrive in non linear narratives?
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“Can we thrive in nonlinear narratives?”
It’s not an inevitable outcome. We have to invent our way out of atemporality (the “murdered time” state). Half my project with multitemporality is to frame the invention problem. The other half is to survey experiments already underway.
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The invention problem, incidentally is almost exactly isomorphic to distributed computing. There’s some very detailed rhyming. The CAP theorem is tantalizingly close to the Mundel-Fleming trilemma in global macroeconomics. Both are 3-way constraints on global synchronization.
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