Really פלצני question posted on a Q&A session with Ursula Le Guin (her reply is in this post’s title):
As opposed to the standard model of time travellers projected into previously lived cultural patterns, what do you make of the concept "collective experrience of temporal variation," such as stallled, recursive or redundant sequences of year sets. I am thinking of collective dellusion or the social construction of reality, wherein mere participation in humanity’s elaborated schedules makes distance between avowed temporal judgments and an undercurrent of more objective time. For instance, what would happen if global culture lost track of the passage of the years due to the complexity of information elaborating its rote performance? I am thinking of this not so much from a narrative science fiction perspective as an anthropological dissonance between (world) culture and context.
[ link from Rogers Cadenhead, who got it from Ansible ]