Longreads

The past, present and future of how we perceive time, and which units actually matter:

"The time you spend is not your own. You are, as a class of human beings, responsible for more pure raw time, broken into more units, than almost anyone else. You spent two years learning, focusing, exploring, but that was your time; now you are about to spend whole decades, whole centuries, of cumulative moments, of other people’s time. People using your systems, playing with your toys, fiddling with your abstractions. And I want you to ask yourself when you make things, when you prototype interactions, am I thinking about my own clock, or the user's? Am I going to help someone make order in his or her life, or am I going to send that person to a commune in Vermont?"

What’s as intriguing as Occupy Wall Street itself is that once again our Establishment, left, right, and center, did not see the wave coming or understand what it meant as it broke. Maybe it’s just human nature and the power of denial, or maybe it’s a stubborn strain of all-­American optimism, but at each aftershock since the fall of Lehman Brothers, those at the top have preferred not to see what they didn’t want to see. And so for the first three weeks, the protests were alternately ignored, patronized, dismissed, and insulted by politicians and the mainstream news media as a neo-Woodstock for wannabe collegiate rebels without a cause—and not just in Fox-land. CNN’s new prime-time hopeful, Erin Burnett, ridiculed the protesters as bongo-playing know-nothings; a dispatch in The New Republic called them “an unfocused rabble of ragtag discontents.” Those who did express sympathy for Occupy Wall Street tended to pat it on the head before going on to fault it for being leaderless, disorganized, and inchoate in its agenda.

In downtown Portland, across Southwest 5th Avenue from City Hall, stands a tall glass and aluminum tower. Inside this building, the Pacwest Center, is a safe. This safe keeps many secrets, but this story is about the disputed contents of a single envelope. Inside the envelope were the last wishes of a holy man, instructions to be revealed after his death. Many of the holy man’s followers were successful entrepreneurs: One founded Kettle Chips, a Salem-based company whose owners sold it in 2006 for a reported $320 million; others co-founded Golden Temple foods in Eugene, a company famous for its Yogi Tea brand. More than a few of his followers were practicing lawyers. But the holy man trusted one lawyer in particular with the most sensitive matters of money, family and legacy.

When I got back onto the elevator an hour later, the spring in my step was gone. My lawyer had informed me that a) my political career was over, b) my best friend and closest ally had been taping our private conversations for months, c) the contents of these tapes would be splashed across the front page of the newspaper for weeks on end, and d) I was probably going to jail.

WikiLeaks and Julian Assange’s mission for total transparency. "Assange is an international trafficker, of sorts. He and his colleagues collect documents and imagery that governments and other institutions regard as confidential and publish them on a Web site called WikiLeaks.org. Since it went online, three and a half years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantanamo Bay, and the 'Climategate' e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account. The catalogue is especially remarkable because WikiLeaks is not quite an organization; it is better described as a media insurgency. It has no paid staff, no copiers, no desks, no office. Assange does not even have a home."