the importance of time-travel
When something fits into a lucid, logical continuum, it’s generally remembered for how it (a) reinterprets the entity that influenced its creation, and (b) provides influence for whatever comes next.
Chuck Klosterman • But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
Our expectations and dreams of possible futures are, after all, deeply intertwined with our memories of the past. These memories are not self-evident but actively (and passively) constructed
Utrecht University • Around the Future in Eighty Worlds
Imagining the future is just another form of memory. It’s a kind of forward-looking nostalgia. “The history of utopias is the history of rear-view mirrors. Every utopia is a picture of the preceding age.”3 If your memory gets scrambled, your ability to envision a coherent future is severely hampered. When the past feels slippery or shifty, you lose... See more
Aaron Z. Lewis • The garden of forking memes: how digital media distorts our sense of time
we each inhabit a “non-time,” a gap between the past and the future that only exists if we can hold it open with our imagination.
Jenny Odell • Dear Future, Here’s the One Lesson I Want to Pass on to You
Today, we are nostalgists as much as we are futurists. The new technology enables the simultaneous experience and enactment of events from a multiplicity of positions. Far from signalling its demise, these emergent networks facilitate the democratisation of history, illuminating the forking paths along which its grand narratives may navigate the he
... See moreLuke Turner • Metamodernist // Manifesto
we each live in a present, a space for action. I no longer see you as an arrival point, far away from us on a line, or over the side of a waterfall. You, the future, are always imminent in my undecided present. We are at the center of time, and you, reading this, are also there. In both of our moments, we have so much to lose, but also so much to g
... See moreJenny Odell • Dear Future, Here’s the One Lesson I Want to Pass on to You
“The idea of the future, pregnant with an infinity of possibilities, is thus more fruitful than the future itself,” Bergson wrote, “and this is why we find more charm in hope than in possession, in dreams than in reality.” Once again, the seemingly dispiriting message here is actually a liberating one. Since every real-world choice about how to liv... See more
Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
“Each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew.”