Billionaires seek to own space and time with corporate form

Evidence

These same billionaires aren’t stopping with space but are interested in appropriating time, as well, putting clocks in mountains. Jeff Bezos has put more than $42 million into constructing “The Clock of the Long Now,” a project originally conceived by computer scientist and entrepreneur Danny Hillis, within a mountain Bezos owns in Texas. It will tick once a year for at least ten thousand years, with a cuckoo coming out every millennium. The purpose of this clock, according to founding board member and futurist Stewart Brand (of course our conception of slow time has to have a corporate board today, in the Corpocene), will be to “embody deep time for people” and “be charismatic to visit,” as well as “be famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse.” Billionaires will own space and time—or at least this seems to be the goal—while they conflate their personhood with the corporations they manage. Space and time will have corporate boards, becoming “people” under law, with monuments that are themselves “famous.” Meanwhile “natural persons” are rendered powerless, beyond legal regulation, stripped of rights and privileges, abandoned by capital and left to wither unless one can make oneself exchangeable, valuable—unless one can make oneself a corporation. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 391

Categorization

• QUESTION: The clock ‘ticking once a year for ten thousand years’ — worth chasing the actual engineering and what ‘becoming famous’ legally means for a monument.
• SEED: Yields an angle: corporate personhood extends beyond commerce to landscapes, deep time, and celestial bodies — who holds the rights to Mars or a mountain clock?
• DEEPTHINKING: Connects the ‘Corpocene’ to literal temporal appropriation — the deepest public good (time itself) becoming a corporate monument.