Aboriginal scholar and author Tyson Yunkaporta illustrates how deep time thinking, born of an intimate relationship between a place and its community, can radically reshape our relationship to the cosmic order.
You wrote that “the key to keeping track of stable innovation processes across multiple generations is story.” You said—I love this quote—“that it can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion. Story that maintains the continuity of creation requires a lot more work, however, and it develops over time from thousands of data sets held in relationships.”
Data is vulnerable. Data just disappears. All your photos in Photobucket—how long are they gonna be there for? Is someone just gonna maintain that server forever, and maintain the costs for that, and keep losing money? Nah. So the only way to store data long term, like proper long term, is in intergenerational relationships, where data is stored in narratives, intergenerational narratives. That can last for forty, fifty, sixty thousand years. That can last as long as relations are continued—that data will last. It’s the only safe way to store data in the long term. And like you say, a revolutionary idea—it probably is, you know? I didn’t think of it like that when I wrote it. It’s true though, eh? That’s the only way to store data in the long term.
Well, some of us are grappling with this. We’ve started changing the language, you know, and have this sort of different code that tries to make English do what our language does, but more, because there’s a kind of self-consciousness within it. So the new English terms—we sort of hyphenate words and jam ‘em together, like “place-time.” We talk about, you know, I’m in this place-time, or in that place-time, and we’re talking about a seasonal moment, but in a particular regional location, et cetera. You know, we cobble these together. And even the idea of pronouns—because there’re pronouns in our languages that don’t exist in English, so there’s not just us, but there’s us-two, us-only, us-all, et cetera, like that. We put these together, but they’re kind of self-conscious in the way they’re put together; in the fact that they were needed to be put together in this way, you see that they’re trying to describe something that is not understood by the decoder of the word. It’s kind of in it—you can see that self-consciousness. So anyway, there’s a few of us trying to put that together: “place-time,” “time-place.” We’re hyphenating words and starting to use those instead. Because it kind of demands of people, if you are asking them what time something happens, it demands that people are thinking about the place where they are and what’s gonna be going on there.
And it’s not time-space, like Einstein—it’s time-place because place has meaning, you know, place is specific. Place is specific seasonally and regionally and in a million ways; it has story, and it has meaning—all the special places there. It has your maps of meaning on it, your travel roots and what they mean to you and how you store your knowledge in that. Every human being’s got that. Even the worst people in the world still have a remnant of that, you know? I don’t care if your ancestors going back ten generations have been living in cities or towns—you’ve still got that. And that doesn’t go away, because that’s what human beings are. We are like: I’m located, therefore I am.
Well, I think for a start, prophecy’s bullshit. Deep time diligence is sort of looking at all the systems and the trajectories of these things and doing catastrophic risk analysis, doing all these kinds of things, doing these things collectively. So as a group, everybody’s out there observing what’s happening in nature and what’s happening in your economic systems and communities, and we keep coming together and everybody’s bringing a different data set, and some of these overlap, some of them are contradictory. But in the aggregate, we get a sense, together, with that one big brain—the computational power of a group of people together, you know, big community together doing all this work—that, that works. That’s deep time diligence, because you start building the stories that you need and the Lore that you need and the knowledge that you need for the system as it’s shifting.
