Deep Time and Microtime: Anthropocene Temporalities and Silicon Valley’s Longtermist Scope

Abstract

Living in Anthropocene times entails living in relation to two seemingly separate temporalities – the microtime of digital operations and the deep time of geological upheaval. Though divergent, these temporalities are united by their unavailability to perception; microtime proceeds too fast to perceive directly, while deep time is too vast to apprehend. Taking these temporalities as a point of departure, this paper develops three arguments. First, it asserts that the temporalities of deep time and microtime increasingly impact contemporary existence, complicating familiar categorizations of temporal experience. Second, it argues that these ostensibly separate temporalities are ontologically connected through the operations of the tech industry, which is constructing a microtemporal system that extracts the planet’s deep time resources to delimit the future both materially and cognitively. Third, it suggests that Silicon Valley legitimizes these processes by funding the philosophy of longtermism, which appeals to distant timescales to marginalize injustices in the present.