Heterochronia

When we document our lives for and with social media, this is a kind of narrative; we’re telling a story. The ways in which we tell our stories affect the kinds of stories we tell, and this in turn affects how we view ourselves, our own intersection of biography and history–two other stories, one small and one considerably larger. We are entering a period wherein the stories we tell and are told are becoming atemporal. This has dramatic implications for the ways in which we both write fiction and do sociological work–both of which I do. And I am finding less and less meaningful distinction between the two.

Jul 19, 2012

Jul 18, 2012

“The only way we can do that is to start imagining the future, starting now. A foot forward can’t begin with a step back into the past.” —Back to the future!

Jul 17, 2012

“Our vision of the future has always influenced the way we design our everyday products. That’s the reason why cars from the 1950s look like rocket ships, and phones from the 1990s flip open like Star Trek communicators. Yet we’ve stopped imagining the future and started relying on tropes that belong to the past. Shiny spandex or angry androids. Take your pick. Either way, you’re buying into a vision of the future envisaged in the past.” —Back to the future! | Thinking Aloud | Image Mechanics

Jul 17, 2012

If postmodernism is dead, where are we now? Are we living in post-postmodernism? No. We’ve gone back to the future.

Imagine the future. It’s gleaming and space-age. It’s bright and modern, minimal, functional, and new. Except this isn’t the future at all. It’s the past.

A little over half a century ago, someone decided the future would look gleaming and space age. We’ve been playing catch-up ever since. Sixty years on, this promised future hasn’t arrived. Despite this, it still has the power to influence contemporary design.

Jul 17, 2012

“Similarly, Muslim astronaut Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor had to figure out how, exactly, one faces Mecca during prayers when you are moving at about 17,000 miles per hour and its location relative to you is changing minute to minute, sometimes as much as 180 degrees in the course of one prayer. It was decided that Shukor, who was on the International Space Station during Ramadan, could do no more than the best of his abilities, in trying to face Mecca, kneel, and perform ritual washing. A video from the Space Station showed how this wound up working, and, in a way, just how hard and odd it is to bring religion into space exploration, in a way not unlike that of the Russian Orthodox priest preparing a spaceship for launch.” —Communion on the Moon: The Religious Experience in Space - Atlantic Mobile (via iamdanw)

Jul 17, 20125 notes

Jul 17, 20121 note

This is commodity nostalgia — the sort that manifests in buying, collecting and studying consumer goods from the past. It’s expressed in an aesthetic of “quaintness” — finding anachronistic texts, ideas and objects desirable precisely because they are now considered outmoded.

Commodity nostalgia uses consumer goods as sensory bridges between a present defined as crass or uninspiring and a magical, glamorous past. Through the distinctive looks, scents, tastes and textures of longstanding brands — Brylcreem, Pears, Barney Banana, Fred Perry, Chanel No. 5, Glomesh — consumers can revisit their remembered pasts and imagine how it might have felt to live in whatever period these brands were at their peak.

“For Hutcheon, this element of feeling, of active participation, creates nostalgia’s power. So, perhaps the way towards an ethical nostalgia is not to feel guilty and helpless about our longing for the past, but rather to actively negotiate with it now, and in the future.” —Mel Campbell: the political power of nostalgia | Crikey

“many people re-enact favourite historical periods in their everyday lives by consuming goods from those periods – as ‘commodity nostalgia’.” —historical-re-enactment-as-political.html

“The attendees at the dawn service do not ask themselves why Australians died invading a country thousands of miles away. No, that particular issue’s rendered inherently irrelevant, since the backpackers go there not to think about history but to marvel at the height of the cliffs and the sharpness of the rocks, and to feel an awe at people their own age experiencing horrors that they couldn’t imagine. The question arising from the pilgrimage is thus not ‘why did it happen?’ (a query that leads not only into history but into politics) but rather ‘what did it feel like?’, an aestheticisation of the past that’s explicitly anti-political. [my emphasis]” —historical-re-enactment-as-political.html

“In a sense, Mad Men parties are a hipper version of those much-maligned historical re-enactment societies. Both create a vision of the past that is self-consciously imaginary and ephemeral. Yet they allow participants to feel a mastery over the past by experiencing – with their eyes, tastebuds, the bodily sensations of unfamiliar clothes and hairstyles – what it might have been like to live it.” —historical-re-enactment-as-political.html

Jul 15, 20121 note

“Perhaps this identification with one’s parents (before they were parents) is an attempt to find a personal connection to the past that doesn’t rely on one’s own memories. It’s literally intergenerational nostalgia.” —The 40-year nostalgia cycle

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence. A small, attentive child, in a stroller on some Brooklyn playground or Minneapolis street, is already recording the stray images and sounds of this era: Michelle’s upper arms, the baritone crooning sound of NPR, people sipping lattes (which a later decade will know as poison) at 10 A.M.—manners as strange and beautiful as smoking in restaurants and drinking Scotch at 3 P.M. seem to us. A series or a movie must already be simmering in her head, with its characters showing off their iPads and staring at their flat screens: absurdly antiquated and dated, they will seem, but so touching in their aspiration to the absolutely modern. Forty years from now, we’ll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were. It will be those stroller children’s return on our investment, and, also, of course, a revenge taken on their time. ♦

“So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past” —What “Mad Men” Shows About American Pop Culture : The New Yorker

Jul 13, 20121 note

“In part, Stephenson explained, this was because of the Internet: “Everything got put on hold for a generation,” while civilization digested the Internet and figured out what it could be used for.” —Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High … and Insurance

Jul 12, 20121 note

#Network Culture

“The development of alternative space launch systems has been curtailed by the unwillingness of the insurance industry to underwrite satellite launches on systems for which there is no good model of the risk involved.” —Neal Stephenson on Science Fiction, Building Towers 20 Kilometers High … and Insurance

Jul 12, 2012

“But wait! What about Skype and Chatroulette and all that? Seems like video telephony took off after all. Just not in the form of telephones. Technological progress is inevitable, but it will also inevitably be shaped by our needs and desires as a culture and as people.” —Enthusiasms

Jul 12, 20122 notes

#Retrofuturism

“I see retrofuturism as a conservative way of coming to terms with the present. It’s odd because it’s such a temporal loop: instead of wanting to replace the present with the past, as would be a pure conservative’s dream, we want to replace it with the way we imagined the future (our present) to be in the past.” —Enthusiasms

Jul 12, 20126 notes

#Retrofuturism

Is it possible to quantify our life through a series of conditions and events? What are the aspects of life that are responsible in making us ourselves? Does buying a pre-owned item gives one the legal right to another individual’s genetic data? Can mouse models of ourselves help us prepare for possible futures or will it impose them on us? Will we make different choices Re-living the same life? Can a mouse be Elvis? What makes you believe it can be?

Jul 11, 2012

#Design Fiction

Jul 11, 2012

“My vision of 2020, or 2050, or whatever, is that it will be totally normal. Only the past is alien, because you start to think, “How did they live without plumbing? Or cars? Or the internet?” The future normalizes everything. We have these major breakthroughs happening all the time and no one pays attention to them because they aren’t yet products we can buy. And once they are products we crave them, so they aren’t scary anymore.” —Mike Merrill (via sciencefiction)

Jul 11, 201229 notes

I would argue that it’s actually the “frozen” nature of these digital spaces that marks the passage of time; we can see — very clearly in many cases — the point at which they stopped changing and were marked by what is now our past. If a ruined physical space is a memento mori, abandoned digital space is more like a time capsule: a place in which the future has simply never happened. These spaces are atemporal, then, in that they give us a vivid glimpse of our own past that we can experience in the present and perhaps extrapolate forward into an imagined future — but because they aren’t ruined, we don’t imagine that future in the same way.

Jul 10, 20121 note

“We can therefore draw an important distinction between abandoned and ruined in the case of digital space; one doesn’t necessarily assume the other. I would argue that this has implications for how we experience time in these spaces. In the latter case, we experience the passage of time in the physical evidence of what time has done; time leaves a very evident mark. In the former, we experience the passage of time by virtue of how nothing has changed at all; an abandoned digital space is marked by emptiness and staticity.” —Atemporality and Abandoned Digital Space » Cyborgology

Jul 10, 2012

Changes in the neurochemistry of traders was first noted as an effect of the risk mechanisms in the brain early in the century. The traders on board the Arktika were employees of the worlds most demanding and simultaneously rewarding trading system. They developed extreme emotional imbalances outside of their work resulting ultimately in a policy of isolated residency aboard and urgent study of ways to stabalise their neuro-biology with the establishing of neuro-genetics laboratory on board. Later, the first growths developed on traders as chemical changes forced keratin cells in the epidermis to fuse. The pattern of the growths were influenced by the intensity of the chemical changes in the brain, themselves reflections of trading activity. Depending on the experience, age and stability of the trader the compound growths could extend up to 300mm without any side effects. The growths became objects of intense study from corporate geneticists hoping to gain some insight into this melding of man and market.

#Design Fiction

“For now, the Great Unfolding is about the promise of the new systems we can step into as we move beyond the polarization of the old systems that have proven to be useful but limited. The future is already here, it simply hasn’t scaled nor been mapped yet. The edges move toward each other as the center collapses. It folds in upon itself. It unfolds a new era.” —The Great Unfolding | Thrivable.net

Play

I do believe that we are now in uncharted waters when it comes to the dysfunction in our political system — and it is no longer a joking matter…we have lost the ability to execute even the basic functions of government, much less solve the most difficult and divisive problems facing the country. Thus, I am more concerned than I have ever been about the state of American governance.

“you probably can’t Farmville your way into the future.” —Is America Giving Up on the Future? - Umair Haque

Jul 9, 20122 notes

#Modern Ruin #Altermodern

Jul 8, 20127 notes

And that is exactly it. The continous partial everywhere is the aspatial experience of simultaneity in immediate media. I am in the city where my friends are at the same as the one where I am myself. The city for me is no longer only a city in space, but now also a city in time. An aspatial city, without distances, in a kind of aspace.

The ghost towns of China, Ireland and Spain - full of large empty house estates - may be a phenomenon that is on its way to Africa.

Built for people who never move in, they leave those who did with a worthless property they cannot sell. Spanning 5,000 hectares (12,355 acres), the development is the largest of several new “satellite cities” being constructed by Chinese firms around Angola, and it is believed to be one of the largest new-build projects on the continent.

Jul 5, 20124 notes

“It’s like a bizarro-world version of the Keynsian idea of getting the economy going by paying one group of laborers to dig holes and another to fill them in. But in this case, one group of workers are paid to pump oil, which is offshored to China. In exchange, a group of Chinese workers is paid to build a gate-guarded enclave for a non-existent pool of mega-rich locals that no one can afford to live in, and which gradually turns into a massive liability. Profit!” —

“

If China goes on to repeat the mission 60 or so years after the original, it would prove what? To my mind, it would represent a poverty of imagination, not riches. It would be one of a long line of Chinese efforts to “catch up” with the West. While it makes sense to try to catch up to the best in auto or airplane manufacturing, merely trying to repeat the glories of the American success program would be a step backward.

The U.S. Apollo moon program ended early because of the cost and because of a lack of purpose. Americans hit golf balls on the moon and drove around in lunar jalopies – cars and golf being two American obsessions. What would Chinese astronauts do differently? Play ping pong?

” —

Jul 5, 2012

#Modern Ruin #Altermodern

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. … We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.” (page 57)” —Excessive Candour

Jul 4, 20122 notes

SF is no longer about the future as such, because “we have no future” that we can do thought experiments about, only futures, which bleed all over the page, soaking the present. (Cognitive estrangement is us.) In 2003, SF stories can no longer fruitfully be defined as texts which extrapolate particular outcomes from particular “nows”; such stories that are published as SF are, in fact, nostalgia blankets: Instant Collectibles.

Jul 4, 2012

“atemporality”–the loss of a single authoritative source for the narratives with which we identify and define the passage of time, and the desituation of our narratives in what we perceive of as linear time.” —Speculative Fiction, Atemporality, and Augmented Reality » Cyborgology

Jul 4, 20122 notes

Speculative Fiction, Atemporality, and Augmented Reality » Cyborgology

“The future is there,” Cayce hears herself say, “looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.” —

–William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Jul 4, 20124 notes