Notes on Unilinear Time

Key Points and Themes:

The convergence of different time systems is associated with modernity and processes like imperialism, capitalism, and ideological propagation. The dominant model is a linear, progress-oriented view of history.
This linear model of time has Christian theological roots in ideas like eschatology and the Apocalypse. It was later secularized during the Enlightenment.
Both capitalist and communist ideologies inherited this linear time model and its sense of future-oriented millennialism.
Indigenous cyclic time systems have been disrupted and replaced by capitalist unilinear time and its imperatives of continual progress.
In China, this linear time system was rapidly transplanted through Marxism, disrupting native Confucian and Daoist cyclic views of time.
The universalism of linear time enables judgmental comparisons of societies as more or less advanced. It struggles to recognize differentiated, nonlinear temporality.
Reclaiming nonlinear views of time can be an act of emancipation. Projects like Black Quantum Futurism try to empower alternative chronologies.
Accelerationism intensifies rather than challenges the linear time model with its technological determinism. Cosmotechnics offers a different unification of technology and culture.