Relational Ontology and the Fracturing of Collective Orientation
Civilisations do not unfold in calendar time. They unfold in horizon-time: the temporality of a collective’s orientation toward its own possibility. Horizon-time is not measured by clocks but by readiness—the pool of potential that a community holds open, maintains, and distributes across its metabolic and ecological relations.
The last century has not accelerated history.
It has accelerated horizon drift.
This post maps how technological perturbation—especially at the level of symbolic infrastructure—fractures the relational coherence through which a society sustains its horizon, and therefore collapses its horizon-time. The point is not that technology “moves too fast,” but that its effects displace the relational structures that metabolise meaning, leaving societies chronically unprepared not because they lack ability, but because they lack shared readiness.
Understanding this requires tracking three interacting components:
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Horizon — the space of projected possibility a collective keeps open.
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Metabolism — the practices that ground and constrain those projections into sustainable pattern.
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Ecological Transport — the circulation of meanings, commitments, and obligations through relational networks.
Technological perturbation destabilises all three in predictable ways.
1. Horizon Inflation: When Projection Outpaces Orientation
The first signature of technological perturbation is horizon inflation: a civilisational ballooning of projected possibility without a corresponding grounding in shared orientation.
AI, ubiquitous networks, and symbolic automation massively expand the theoretical space of what could be done. But projection is not readiness. A horizon only becomes meaningful when a community can inhabit it.
Under technological acceleration:
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Possibility expands faster than communities can metabolise it.
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The horizon becomes thin, brittle, and overextended.
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Projection loses its anchoring in lived relational commitments.
This produces the illusion of “future shock,” but the deeper phenomenon is a loss of collective footing. A horizon is stable only when the practices that sustain it—care, lineage, expectation, ritual, and coordination—are themselves stable. Displace those, and the horizon scatters into uninhabited futures.
This is the first phase of collapsing horizon-time: a future too large to orient toward, and therefore no longer ours.
2. Metabolic Lag: The Breakdown of Collective Grounding
Civilisations maintain metabolic coherence through slow practices: education, apprenticeship, generational transmission, embodied skill, tacit knowledge, and the rituals that stabilise value relations. These practices anchor ability within inclination and orient both toward meaningful participation.
Technological perturbation disrupts metabolism by:
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Severing skills from their ecologies of apprenticeship.
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Automating symbolic labour faster than communities can relationally integrate the consequences.
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Decoupling ability from inclination, so that capacities proliferate in the absence of orientation.
The result is metabolic lag: the core grounding systems of a society lag behind its expanding horizon. Anything can be done, but little can be integrated. The community cannot absorb the new patterns into a coherent lived ecology.
This is the second phase of collapsing horizon-time: the inability to metabolise what one has already made.
3. Ecological Drift: The Disarticulation of Meaning Transport
Meaning does not exist in individuals but in circulation—in the patterns of dialogue, expectation, accountability, and reciprocal recognition that make commitments intelligible.
Technological perturbation fractures these circulatory systems:
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Algorithms re-route attention away from shared symbolic structures.
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Communities fragment into micro-ecologies with incompatible horizons.
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Obligations lose their continuity across relational networks.
This is ecological drift: the disarticulation of symbolic transport.
A society in ecological drift does not lose meaning; it loses the pathways through which meaning travels. The result is a patchwork of semiotic microclimates that cannot coordinate or inhabit a shared horizon.
This is the third phase of collapsing horizon-time: meaning without a network.
4. What “Collapse” Actually Means in Horizon-Time
The collapse of horizon-time is not the collapse of civilisation. It is the collapse of shared orientation, which appears externally as:
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fractured political imaginaries
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institutional paralysis
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generational disalignment
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runaway technological momentum
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symbolic exhaustion coupled with hyper-production
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crisis fatigue and anticipatory despair
But internally, at the relational level, collapse is simpler:
A community can no longer hold open a horizon it can inhabit together.
Technological perturbation does not just accelerate change; it decouples the components of civilisational readiness:
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Horizon expands
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Metabolism lags
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Ecological transport drifts
When these three fall out of alignment, a civilisation’s temporal coherence shatters. Its horizon-time collapses.
5. Repairing Horizon-Time: The Real Challenge Ahead
If horizon-time collapses through misalignment, it is restored through recomposition:
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Re-grounding metabolic practices.
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Re-weaving symbolic ecologies.
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Re-stabilising shared horizons.
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Re-distributing readiness in ways that afford collective orientation rather than competitive acceleration.
None of this is nostalgic. The point is not to return to slower times but to restore the relational capacities through which a future can again be held open.
The task is not to resist technology, nor to uncritically embrace it, but to rebind it into a metabolism and ecology capable of sustaining a horizon.
In that sense, the crisis is not technological at all.
It is relational.
It is the fraying of the world’s readiness to inhabit itself.
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