The defense of durée is my claim that every violation of cognitive sovereignty squeezes the time people have to deliberate. So defending durée, the right to think at your own pace, is defending self-government. The word is Bergson's and I'm using it for politics.
How the word moved
It appears in April and May 2026, at the end of the AI Polyconflict essays and again in Cognitive Sovereignty. The kill chain went from seventy-two hours to twenty-two seconds, and the Stack War runs at algorithmic velocity. I ended up calling cognitive imperialism a colonization of time, and I said plainly that defending durée isn't nostalgia for earlier eras.
In my words
"What I have been calling cognitive imperialism is, at its deepest level, a colonization of time."
from Cognitive Sovereignty, 7 May 2026
"The defense of durée is not a defense of prior eras."
from Cognitive Sovereignty, 7 May 2026
Related
- Related Cognitive Sovereignty - Of all its forms, agency over time is the one that matters most.
- Related Public Intelligence - Public intelligence is what the defense looks like in practice.
- Related Industrialization of Lethality - Kill-chain compression is my sharpest example.
- Related Planetary Duree - Same Bergsonian word, very different scale.
Still open
Here durée means human deliberative time, and a month earlier I'd used it for the impersonal duration of the planet. I haven't connected the two uses yet, and I don't know if they connect.