Notational

Take, for instance, product manufacturing. A Styrofoam cup will be used once for about four or five minutes before being thrown away. The turnover time of the industry that purchases that cup is going to be a couple weeks or a couple months, at most. Those are the time scales that that object is created for. However, the refuse of that Styrofoam cup will last for millions of years, because it’s not biodegradable. What does it mean to live at a historical moment in which the time scales that we operate on are so radically out of touch with the time scales of the temporal footprint of the things we make?