#Futures

[neo--queen--serenity]

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes 🎲📱

[thegoodmorningman]

Everything is probably fine. Just go about your normal life.

[thecorruption-thespiralsversion]

TMP Stream Of Consciousness Theory

(Like, I'm forming it and I'm not sure where I'm headed here)

Spoilers All - TMP

So as I'm reading through a lot of Lena Post on here it's starting to strick at me. Her wording when she vaguely explained things to Gwen in EP 13, Futures.

Gwen asks if they're the bad guys.

Lena hesitates before answering "We are... Managing, the bad guys."

Unlike the The Magnus Institute they aren't collecting Statements, they're keeping track of them.

Lena doesn't see herself and her work as good, but a necessary evil.

This would make Lena NOT Jonah's Parallel, but Gertrude's.

To Gertrude, Michael was a necessary evil, but she hurt no more people than absolutely necessary.

Lena isn't willing to put her employees in unnecessary risk.

The Magnus Institute was destroyed and OIAR has something called The Magnus Protocol.

They're preventing the Dread Powers from taking hold. Be it Fear, Hunger, or Regret. They're making sure no one of them gets a real foothold into our world. And if one gets to close. Well, they have their last resort.

The Magnus Protocol

Non Vacillabimus

We Will Not Falter

[quasi-normalcy]

Anyways,the reason why we no longer have an agreed upon aesthetic of what the future should look like isn't because of apocalypticism; it's because modernism--which during the nineteenth and twentiety centuries, seemed utterly inexorable, like a train going in only one direction, foreclosing all other possibilities--is basically dead. Like, if you look at the stereotypical "future" in 20th century sci-fi, it was basically just the same thing that they were doing at the time, only Moreso. *Taller* skyscrapers! Personal *aircraft* instead of personal automobiles! Rockets to the moon, just like getting on a jumbo jet to Amsterdam! And anyway, we've reached the end of that--we're past even the Cyberpunk version of "what the future should look like"--and because there's no obvious "right" answer, no one can agree on what it should be.

Anyways, for my money,the future needs to look like a garden.

[saywhat-politics]

Not a stock market expert…is this good?

[fatehbaz]

Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:

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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Aboriginal/Indigenous time-keeping. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time (British longitude; Victorian fascination with death, antiquity, paleontology). Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".

Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.

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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".

Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.

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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.

Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.

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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.

Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.

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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.

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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)

See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.

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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:

Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.

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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".

Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S.  Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.

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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.

Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.

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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.

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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.

Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.

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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.

Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.

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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.

James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.

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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.

Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.

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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.

Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and  Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.

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The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.

Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.

Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."

Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.

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"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".

Elaine  Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.

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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)

Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)

[fieriframes]

[Through the dark of futures past, the magician longs to see. One chants out between two worlds. Fire walk with me.]

[rhymesalot]

To Day

Today will be different than yesterday. Yesterday was sunny, today it’s gray. Yesterday was warm with skies of blue. Today is rainy and there’s nothing to do. ~ Oh, I’ve projects o’many, my list is long. The radio blasts yet another old song. With pencil in hand my mind goes astray. I’ll scribble on paper things I don’t say. ~ Today will be different, I’ve changes to make. Yesterday was wasted, but I did buy a rake. Yesterday’s gone, its memory will wane. Today is here and I’ve a future to gain. ~ I’ve done some bad, but mostly good deeds. Now I’ve all the things that one really needs. And for love, joy, health and youth I’m glad. I scribble today: three out of four ain’t bad.

~*~ SCK050625

[zinjanthropusboisei]

Where's that quote about how science fiction isn't about predicting things that will happen in the future, it's about analyzing issues that are already happening?

[royalwilmon]

futures we should try to make (ch 2/8)

rating: explicit word count: 10,740 (2/8 chapters) summary: Simon’s rookie year playing hockey in the NHL is off to a slow start. That is until the troubled son of a former hockey legend gets traded onto his team. With explosive chemistry on and off the ice, Wille and Simon have a good shot of taking the league by storm.

(Read from the beginning on AO3) (Read chapter two on AO3)

[sowhatifiliveinasmalltowninjapan]

Jimmy Eat World (2004)

[palatteflags]

Neon Green, Black, Futuristic, and Androids based Robotkin moodboard~ ^^ For @d1g1tal-1mmortal1ty! Hope you like!!

Want one? Send an ask! -mod Jay

[unaskedformagnustheories]

Recap Notes: MAGP 13 "Futures"

Spoiler Warning: this is a purely selfish exercise in remembering what the hell happened last season (from someone caught up thru MAGP32, 3/6/2025 & all of The Magnus Archives). No promises I'll keep up with it.

Summary: I'm not saying Darrien (first of his name) deserved it. I'm just saying he sounds like the type to drive a cybertruck and I think that speaks for itself.

Casement: CAT3RB4622-17092023-14032024

Sue me. I'm not above enjoying episode 13 is about bad luck. Think I mentioned before, but overall this case functions much the same as MAGP09 just with e-trading instead of dice rolls. It's well done, I just don't have too much to say on it. We do get a nice backstory expansion pack for Sam and Celia (one more padded than the other). And I'm glad Jonny and Alex confirmed in the season 1 Q & A that we can take Celia's word here that she had a few wild years (post finding herself in TMP-verse) and Jack's her son, because I don't I'd have been particularly interested in a cuckoo subplot. He's just her kid and that's that. Sam's a confirmed disappointment to his parents. Also thought I had a candidate for who the law firm might be from a blink and you'll miss it mention in the text, but seem to have lost that. If I find it later, I'll come back and edit it in. Would like more details on just what sort of incident he had that led to him parting ways. And tiny bonus Alice lore in that she became an orphan during her and Sam's time at uni. Explains her protectiveness towards Luke (and her misplaced turning that towards Sam, possibly the reason they broke up? do we have mention of why they broke up?) as well as her financial support of her brother. Probably something she was forced to do via circumstance, and has trouble letting go now that they're both adults. Provides motivation for sticking it out in this job. And for the big boss woman, Lena's worldview is hella fun here when we compare it to Gerry's from MAG 111. LENA (speech-like:) The world is full of opposing forces. Some benevolent, most not. In order for the wheels to keep on turning, all these forces need to be monitored and balanced. That is where we come in. vs.

GERARD No. There aren’t any god-like powers of hope, or love, or indigestion, or whatever. At least not that I’ve seen. Just fear. I don’t know why.

Do I think there are actually benevolent supernatural forces in TMP? Not sure yet. But considering the case we're bookmarking, my money (even if I don't have millions in personal equity to bet) is on: any benefit the OAIR thinks they're gaining from playing with fire is a long-con towards a bigger, more catastrophic crash. The folks who think they can control anything are just too busy congratulating themselves on their cleverness to see it. Excited for the fire.

[desire-mona]

JAMIROQUAI?

[cognitivejustice]

“One year of nuclear weapons spending could pay for wind power for more than 12 million homes to help combat climate change, plant one million trees a minute, or clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 years in a row,”��