> The pedant in me is slightly miffed by the very conscious use of that five-digit year notation (e.g., 02033) in the article (this being the home of that jarring monstrosity)
Yes its a bit of an affectation, and it does seem to annoy some people, but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that". That observation by Danny Hillis:
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all." [1]
...is still pretty true. There is very little mention of the future that isn't either gadget-focussed or terrifying (ie the climate crisis). We just don't have any signifiers that people want to use. I'd like to be able to say that Long Now has had some influence regarding this, but sadly (outside of a smallish bubble) I don't think it has. At least they're trying though and doing interesting stuff, I guess.
(Disclosure: Long Now charter member fwiw)
[1] https://longnow.org/about/ (I removed the leading zeroes because I'm pretty sure they weren't in the original quote)
> but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that".
I think it does the opposite. 4-digit years that don't start with 0 don't necessarily imply it ends at 9999, because that's just not how numbers work in general. On the other hand, including the 0 prefix implies that 5 digits is significant in some way, more like an ID than a simple count or like a combination lock which requires N digits, and as such implies there isn't anything after 99999.
It might be that works of Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) hold an answer to that. He convincingly argues that somewhere around 1990s the humanity lost the ability to conjure alternative futures, or having ideas about the future at all, because capitalism now sets the limit of what is thinkable. According to Fisher, any future without capitalism doesn’t appear to be thinkable, so all humanity is left to do is infinitely rehashing ideas of last 50-60 years (post-WWII period, coinciding with emergence of the late capitalism).
My intuition tells me that at least in the US, the lack of apparent future visualization is due to a lack of optimism. Nobody wants to share their nightmares, it just isn't polite or enjoyable for anyone.
Edit: reminders that our experience is a tiny sliver of time that has passed and the thought we can gift the future our efforts today is consoling.
There are many people mentioning future dates. It's just that it's mostly scientists telling us how many years we have before something terrible happens if we don't change our ways radically right now.
Yes its a bit of an affectation, and it does seem to annoy some people, but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that". That observation by Danny Hillis:
"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all." [1]
...is still pretty true. There is very little mention of the future that isn't either gadget-focussed or terrifying (ie the climate crisis). We just don't have any signifiers that people want to use. I'd like to be able to say that Long Now has had some influence regarding this, but sadly (outside of a smallish bubble) I don't think it has. At least they're trying though and doing interesting stuff, I guess.
(Disclosure: Long Now charter member fwiw)
[1] https://longnow.org/about/ (I removed the leading zeroes because I'm pretty sure they weren't in the original quote)