Temporal compression: how demographic categories erase trajectories and futures

Right now you focus on how dynamic processes get stabilized and reduced to identities. One further move is to analyze how this collapses time.

When a person or population is classified, their history becomes background noise and their future becomes implicitly forecast. A risk category, or demographic label doesn’t just name what someone “is”; it silently encodes a presumed trajectory (recidivism risk, chronicity, dependency, dangerousness, productivity). This makes interventions feel pre-justified and limits imagination about change.

You could frame this as:

• Demographic classification converting open temporal processes into closed narrative arcs.

• The future becoming administratively predictable rather than politically contestable.

This dovetails well with Scott and Hacking but adds a forward-looking dimension that’s often under-theorized.