Thesis: Timelines Are Evil
Published at 07:41 on 31 October 2025
Before continuing, it is necessary to define what I mean by timeline in this article.
timeline, n. An online list of one-to-many communications from mixed sources.
So, Facebook’s infamous algorithmic timeline qualifies as a timeline, but so are its “feeds” of friends and groups. The chronological timelines of Bluesky and Mastodon are also timelines, and therefore also evil. An email account that is on one or more mailing lists is also a timeline, but an email account that is not subscribed to lists is not a timeline. If you log onto Facebook, the list of your friends is not a timeline, because that is a list of Facebook accounts, not communications from those accounts. If you click on a friend and view their posts, that is also not a timeline, because the contents come from a single source, not mixed sources. And so on.
Timelines are evil because of the time burden they impose. This is because of how computer technology makes it so easy to send information, coupled with how timelines often contain many senders of information, inevitably makes for very busy timelines.
Some very timeline-like things existed before the dawn of the Internet. Junk mail and junk phone calls turned physical mailboxes and telephones into such things. This is why so many people rightly found them objectionable.
Algorithmic timelines are more evil than strict chronological ones, because of the opaque nature of the criteria for ordering and selecting timeline contents, but even strict chronological timelines are evil.
The only thing that can make a timeline non-evil is sparse traffic, but due to information being so cheap and easy to send this can never reliably be the case. Evil is the natural state of most timelines, and even normally non-evil timelines will at times assume this state.
Timelines are the chief thing responsible for making people spend so much time online and disconnected from the real world that exists outside of cyberspace. Create a timeline for someone, and the fear of missing out on something important that might be buried in it leads them to spend unhealthy amounts of time online.
As such, timelines are probably responsible (or at least partly responsible) for much of the recent trend of politics and society getting worse, which is driven by organic and real-world interactions being replaced by time spent in cyberspace, based on opaque criteria, all the while being monitored and exploited by capitalists and politicians.
At least this is my current operating theory. I arrived at it as a result of struggling over why I spent so much time in front of computer screens, to the detriment of achieving other goals in my life. As such, I am now in the process of experimentally de-timelining my life.