This piece by Katherine Miller on (a)temporality in the age of the algorithm has been doing the rounds, and with some justification; it’s a strong piece of writing, and it’s grasping toward something important. I’d be lying if I didn’t find its implicit attempt to situate Trump as a sort of synecdoche for the state of the States somewhat wearying, but it’s eminently understandable, not least because life under 45 for anyone on the lefthand side of the fence is clearly very wearying also. (Furthermore, I imagine that anyone outside of the UK who reads UK-written essays of a similar thrust is pretty sick of everything magically boiling down to Brexit. Hell knows I am… and still I keep writing the fucking things.)

But ignore my carping, which is more in the nature of a stylistic note-to-self than a dig at Miller. It’s a good piece — though there’s a further irony in its being hosted at Buzzfeed, and accompanied by the sort of busy-but-pretending-not-to-be web design which sample-and-holds the very same temporal (gl)itchyness that the article describes.

The touch and taste of the 2010s was nonlinear acceleration: always moving, always faster, but torn this way and that way, pushed forward, and pulled back under.

[…]

The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.

I feel like the missing word in this piece is delamination: time hasn’t shattered so much as peeled apart, the shear layers shearing off of one another under the centrifugal force…

I guess we can chalk up another point for Chairman Bruce on the prolepsis leaderboard. When did he first start talking about atemporality? It seems like a lifetime ago, but at the same time just yesterday…