Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely

Summary

This Long Now talk presents Bayo Akomolafe’s still-forming account of The Untimely: the excess, residue, and misbehavior produced inside modern clock time rather than a clean alternative outside it. He moves through Yoruba Twin Cosmology, Idowu, Eshu, the Black Atlantic, plantation bells, disability, ancestry, grace, progress, and attention to argue that clocks do not merely measure time; they discipline bodies while also creating gaps that cannot be fully governed. The talk’s practical invitation is not a plan or blueprint, but attention to Fugitive Temporality, Autistic Time, Ancestrality, and unknown tasks that already enlist people through cracks in modern life.

Key Claims

• Modern Time Discipline is not neutral measurement; it is a cultural and political story that organizes value, productivity, progress, and urgency.
• Long time, deep time, indigenous time, or spiritual time can still reproduce human mastery if they are used only as alternative clocks.
• Yoruba Twin Cosmology destabilizes simple chronology because first-born, second-born, older, younger, messenger, and successor do not align cleanly.
• Bayo connects himself to Idowu, the child after twins, and uses that figure to name The Untimely as surplus rather than resolution.
• Colonial Temporal Discipline appears in the Middle Passage, the whip, the plantation bell, marketable bodies, and forced rhythm, but those same commands produce gaps and excess movement.
• Music, sanctuary, awkward grace, Eshu, and the Great Dismal Swamp become examples of Fugitive Temporality: life worlds forming inside or beside systems of command.
• Autistic Time names a challenge to neurotypical calendar discipline through the story of Bayo’s son treating Christmas as an everyday event.
• Progress narratives can empty locality and ancestry when they make Africa or other places feel deficient until they catch up to Western modernity.
• Attention As Weather reframes attention as an atmosphere that bends toward value, status, race, credentials, and modernity rather than as an individual payment.

Key Quotes

“something between tick and tock” - shorthand for the excess produced by clock time.

“sanctuary is not a project” - Bayo’s warning against turning the untimely into scheduled construction.

“there are things I have to do” - his son’s answer, used to define untimely tasks that others do not understand.

Connections

• Bayo Akomolafe - speaker developing the philosophical and political frame.
• Long Now - host context; this source complicates long-term thinking by questioning the clock, progress, and alternative temporalities.
• Orland Bishop - named in the son’s Christmas story as challenging Bayo’s attempt to impose neurotypical time.
• Eshu - Yoruba trickster figure used to think decolonization from within the slave ship rather than from a pure outside.
• Great Dismal Swamp - historical fugitive space used as an example of life beyond plantation clock time.
• The Untimely, Modern Time Discipline, Yoruba Twin Cosmology, Colonial Temporal Discipline, Fugitive Temporality, Autistic Time, Ancestrality, and Attention As Weather - main concept cluster added by the source.
• Climate Adaptation, Systemic Degenerative Volatility, and Informed Optimism - adjacent Long Now themes this source qualifies by asking how countdowns, progress, and long horizons can reproduce modern temporal assumptions.

Contradictions

• No direct contradiction found. The source qualifies the wiki’s existing long-termism branch by warning that longer horizons or alternative clocks do not automatically escape modernity’s mastery logic.