Longstorming

How temporal countercultures can ignite an ethos of patience—one that resists the techno-solutionism of the “longtermism” movement.

To longstorm is to riff across horizons of time, creatively drawing together philosophies, histories, technologies, art, ancestral lineages, geophysical knowledge, even myths of spirits or lives after death—until the imagination is swept into a storm of new perspectives. In Longstorming, Vincent Ialenti explores how weaving together visions of future worlds can transform how we think, perceive, and live in the here and now. Through atmospheric nature writing and vivid ethnographic storytelling, the book invites readers to slow down, inhabit stillness, and cultivate wide-angle temporal imagination in an Age of Haste defined by digital overstimulation, information overload, and planetary crisis.

The book’s case studies reveal philosophical reflection, anthropological curiosity, and ecological wonder as counterforces to the Age of Haste’s distractionism: a 10,000-year monumental clock, an arboreal timepiece calibrated to bristlecone pines alive for millennia, an Indigenous knowledge keeper contemplating mortality and deep time in an imagined visit to Finland’s nuclear repository in 2121, and more. Longstorming invites readers not to control the future but to imagine it otherwise—plural, coauthored, and unfinished—and, in doing so, to reimagine themselves.