The Long Term

The Long Term is the book’s constructive chapter. The operations the preceding chapters trace are intergenerational projects that think in centuries, so the contest cannot be won on the electoral cycle — it has to be fought on the long term itself. But the long term is already occupied. A well-funded constellation of longtermisms has claimed it: the effective altruism of William MacAskill and Toby Ord and the TESCREAL bundle that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres trace back to eugenics; the technocratic discounting of the Stern–Nordhaus debate and the overshoot logic Andreas Malm and Wim Carton expose; the captured regenerative sovereignty of the previous chapter; and doomerist collapse science. Each converts the future into a single quantity that licenses present coercion. Against them the chapter develops intersectional longtermism — the future held as plural and the present as the moment of choice — drawn from five traditions of surviving and prevailing: Black abolition and environmental justice, Indigenous continuance, disability justice, reproductive justice, and antifascist-cooperative organizing. From them it distills quantitative egalitarianism, which demotes the number from verdict to evidence, and solidarity infrastructuring, the work of carrying these commitments into the long heat.

From §The Long Term and Its Claimants, mid-chapter:

The most prominent brand of contemporary longtermism grew from a movement called “effective altruism.” In the work of William MacAskill and Toby Ord, the moral weight of the vast number of people who might exist in the future is made to bear on present priorities: if the future could contain astronomical numbers of worthwhile lives, then safeguarding their possibility dominates almost every other consideration, and the catastrophes that would foreclose them — the existential risks — become the supreme objects of concern in the present. The framework includes its own deferral mechanism, the “long reflection,” in which humanity is to postpone irreversible commitments until it has had time to deliberate.

Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have traced the genealogy of this constellation — the bundle of ideologies they label TESCREAL — back to the eugenic traditions this book has documented from another direction. The structural feature worth naming is the conversion of the future into a quantity to be maximized. Once the future is a number of potential lives, present people, and present vulnerable people in particular, become small relative to it, and their claims are discounted against the astronomical stakes the framework has discovered. The will to simplify reappears as an incomprehensibly large count of lives for the remaining lifetime of the universe.