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Realizing the presence, promise, and power of the Kingdom of God.
RESOURCES FOR SHEPHERDS

The Tyranny of the Now

T.M. Moore
T.M. Moore

Nicolas Carr, “The Tyranny of Now”, The New Atlantis, Winter, 2025.

Nicolas Carr revives the information and communications theories of Harold Innis, who in the early 1950s wrote about the power of information to change societies in a variety of ways.

Innis distinguished between media that were time-biased—rooted in the past, slow to change, and durable over time—and those that are space-biased—progressive, innovative, and focused on the present. The media “play an important part in shaping a society’s size, form, and character—and ultimately its fate.” So it is important to pay attention to maintaining a tension between these two ways of thinking about media.

The biases of communication “shape human perception.” And in our day, that perception is uprooted from the past and focused on the now, and could be the unraveling of our social and cultural fabric.

We do not care to consider the lessons of the past, and the future is somebody else’s problem. More information does not necessarily mean more knowledge. These days more information means more distraction from the lessons of the past and the shape of the future merely to fill the present moment with interesting shiny things and various amusements.

Innis foresaw all this in his writing—not necessarily the exact form it would take, but the drift of it from his vantage point. We are trapped in the tyranny of the now, and Christians have not escaped this blindness to the past and the future.

This is an important issue for those who shepherd the Lord’s flocks, because people who become serfs to the tyranny of the now are likely not aware of what they have lost or are about to lose. Christians must be taught to understand the times as God does, so that we will know what we should do to escape the snares of the devil and folly of our own sin.

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T.M. Moore