The climate countdown clock taking the symbolic place of the national debt clock reveals the shifts and continuities of elite eschatology. In both, free-floating moral unease (guilt and debt were once the same concept) is attached to a hyperreal realm of quantified abstraction./1

This externalization into simulated pseudo-objectification looks like a means of extending the panic but it also serves a coping function. Displacing bad conscience into abstraction turns it into an object of expert scientific management, but also into the equivalent of Fatum./2

One prototype is the astronomical models in some civilizations, which served neither the ends of disinterested knowledge or practical planning as we might expect, but of anticipating the apocalypse. Abstract modeling, in this sense, has long been tied to this ominous purpose./3