Time to make the future
Part 3
By Jonathan Martineau
In the final part of his triptych, Jonathan Martineau questions collective presence and its connection with time. We want a livable world, but how can we imagine it when the time to build community is lacking? Reinvesting our presence is the only way to counter “this temporal poverty incompatible with democracy.” Our community and our world cannot come into being without our presence.
When spring comes, and snow has melted, it’s time for a clean up of the hen house. Inside and out, a clean sweep. I scrub drinkers and feeders, change the coop floor, wash nesting boxes and perches, compost everything. I’ve brought a few treats, bits of fruit and corn for my hens to peck at outside, while I spread new straw and collect fresh eggs.
The radio is airing this long story on the two richest men in the world. Two astronomical egos fittingly turning to space exploration. One sends other members of the ultra-rich in the thermosphere, ten minutes for a few million bucks – and tons of Co2. The other explodes rockets, launches a sportscar in orbit and wants to colonize Mars. Money transcends the Earth, galactic capital projects an extropian fantasy where transhuman billionaires colonize interstellar emptiness – while the Earth is left to burn. Whose future is this?
Hens adore pears. I should plant a pear tree.
« What are we present to, collectively? We share a historical moment; that’s our fundamental relation to one another. This present of history is made meaningful by visions of the future that orient practices, illuminate histories and legacies – while leaving others in the dark. These visions of the future are everywhere in tension and struggle, projecting conflicting interests, weaving the threads of what is to come. Our presence echoes in narratives of tomorrow. »
What are we present to, collectively? We share a historical moment; that’s our fundamental relation to one another. This present of history is made meaningful by visions of the future that orient practices, illuminate histories and legacies – while leaving others in the dark. These visions of the future are everywhere in tension and struggle, projecting conflicting interests, weaving the threads of what is to come. Our presence echoes in narratives of tomorrow.
The future of these “visionary” billionaires and other CEOs of algorithmic capital is served to us ad nauseam: more virtual, algorithms, lithium, masculine energy, robots, oil, reels, speed, efficiency and rockets. Move fast and break things. The future is growth, return on investment, and a brave new world where technology solves every ill. To save the world, click here.
But we are no fools. We know this mortiferous technique is homogenizing the world to better dominate and destroy it. The artisans of this algorithmically turbocharged ecocide have no imagination at all. Their future is the present: an oligarchy profiting from a dying world. The consequences are not their concern, hidden in bunkers, counting their billions until the last drop of oil burns in a vast mechanized putrefaction. Resistance? If needed, this future of apps, of unending mechanical acceleration, of militarized AI, will surge like a brown tide.
Hens are bathing in the sand while I clean the perches, I pick up Denise-la-grise and bring her outside with the others. I take the full bins down to the compost at the back of the garden. All of this goes back to the earth, life is cyclical, the human spirit constantly reinterprets, always repeats but never the same thing, comes back to itself in ever different ways, spiralling. Yet today, spirit linearizes, rushes headlong in automatic repetition, flattened like these durationless informational presents.
What future do we want? What future are we making?
« How to explore, deliberate, experiment, politicize and make our future in a time where everything accelerates, but nothing changes? »
We want a livable world. But to make this our future, we need time, and we lack it. We live under the telos of money, in a time that is not ours. Network clock-time, line-time, is the time of world markets, each of its passing hour accumulates capital and destroys ecosystems. How to explore, deliberate, experiment, politicize and make our future in a time where everything accelerates, but nothing changes?
Nowadays, as hours go by, algorithmic machines temporalize in our stead. They transform the past-memory into data, the present moment into a feed, and predict the future as a self-fulfilling prophecy. The temporality of algorithmic power nullifies difference; we can do no other. Under the yoke of machines that predict what has been and incessantly nudge us into eternal recurrence, we lose the thread of time. How can new collective projects be born in a time stuck on repeat?
Captive of this time, our presence atomizes, hyperindividualizes, sucked in a vortex of addictive and hollow content, a force-feeding that leaves an aftertaste of metal and wires. Our presence goes missing in a present now reduced to a data point. This generalized, existential and political temporal poverty is incompatible with a true future-making democracy. Our community, our world, cannot flourish without our presence.
« Liberate our time, to liberate our presence and revive our imagination, creativity, judgment. So that unpredictable presences emerge from a new horizon. A livable world, a concrete metabolism, a differing spiral that contemplates and reinterprets. »
Liberate our time, to liberate our presence and revive our imagination, creativity, judgment. So that unpredictable presences emerge from a new horizon. A livable world, a concrete metabolism, a differing spiral that contemplates and reinterprets. Instead of a future of silicon, clicks and algorithms, a presence of ruins, interstices and renewal. In the reclaimed community gardens of Detroit, the landless peasant villages in Brazil, in your local coop, in urban commons from Montreal to Barcelona, in First Nations anti-pipeline blockades. Presence in each moment we claim for ourselves, each gesture of care toward others and nature. Liberated time, oriented by a telos of justice and common good, reactivates the heritage of past struggles and launches the year zero of a true collective project.
Liberate time to make our future.
Hens are back on the perches, clucking. The coop is clean until next time.
Jonathan Martineau, May 5 2025
On the agenda: Jonathan Martineau will take part in a Brèches conversation on October 1st in the chapel of the Cité-des-Hospitalières to discuss his three texts. Full details.
Illustrations – Fatou Dravé
Editing – Judith Oliver
