Relationship with Time

Carnival time is cyclical, regenerative, and collective. Hierarchies collapse; fools become kings, the sacred is mocked, and the grotesque body — open, excessive, laughing — takes center stage. François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel embodied this mode: giants born through grotesque parodies of childbirth, endless feasts and banquets, obscene

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I didn’t fancy the linearity of conventional biographies,” he said. “Lives don’t run in straight lines, and every time we think about them in retrospect (i.e., every time we start remembering) we actually rethink them. Our lives are stories we write and rewrite. There is no single reliable narrative of a life.”

The internet embodies this carnival temporality with startling clarity:

• Cyclical bursts : meme cycles, outrage waves, and news frenzies erupt, fade, and return with variation.

• Inversions : anonymous users become viral, while experts, CEOs, and politicians are mocked, parodied, or dethroned.

• Acceleration & simultaneity : the timeline collapses

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