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Y Think Tank Societal Researcher, temporary (6 mon

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Application limit reached. {{LimitExceededMessage}} There are no previous jobs in this list. The job posting you are looking for has expired or the position has already been filled. If you are interested in one of our other opportunities, please visit our career site. We are experiencing an issue with our job search.

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Actual Disasters and Crisis, Human and Anthropocenic

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Actual Disasters and Crisis, Human and Anthropocenic

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Film by Yarimar Bonilla et al. on Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria

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Film by Yarimar Bonilla et al. on Puerto Rico after hurricane Maria

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Aftershocks of Disaster. A film by Juan C Dávila and Yarimar Bonilla.

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Actual disaster within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a disaster is never a singular event...

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Actual disaster within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: a disaster is never a singular event...

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GAZA Trailer (Sundance 2019) - Garry Keane, Andrew McConnell Documentary

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The coronavirus pushed the sales of doomsday survival condos for the super rich

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The coronavirus pushed the sales of doomsday survival condos for the super rich

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A pandemic, like any other crisis, has a way of exposing the chasm between the haves and have-nots, and perhaps the deepest trench right now is the one between the one percenters self-quarantining in dramatic and expensive fashion-and the rest of humanity. While most of us scroll social media and stay glued to cable news, Peter Thiel has a New Zealand hideaway and Jeff Bezos reportedly rules over 300,000 acres in West Texas. We've all probably heard about them, but did we ever really think we'd see them put to use?

In 2017, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman told The New Yorker that he estimated over 50% of Silicon Valley billionaires already had purchased some kind of apocalypse insurance, like a safe room, bunker, or overseas escape.

One of the best options is in Middle America. If you're part of the 1%, why wait for sluggish government support when you can burrow 175 feet underground in a refurbished Air Force missile silo in rural Kansas that markets itself as a survival condo? Aquaculture, movie theater, dog park, rock-climbing wall, 50,000-gallon pool, spa, even ex-Green Berets and Navy SEALS for security-and a water park. A 920-square-foot space runs about $1.5 million; 1,840 square feet is $3 million.

Project developer Larry Hall claims the building's nine-foot-thick epoxy-hardened concrete walls can withstand direct nuclear strikes-and as COVID-19 spreads, Hall said that he's "seen a spike in inquiries." Wealthy people, and even preppers, may be responding to the outbreak in all kinds of ways, but one person who's already reserved his spot at the condo is Tyler Allen, a 51-year-old Florida entrepreneur who owns multiple "fortified locations," as he describes them. For now he's staying "highly alert" at home, but he's prepared to join his potential neighbors-"A-list celebrities, a who's who of Silicon Valley, Republican, Democrat, no matter"-at the silo when the time comes. We spoke to Allen about life in underground luxury. What follows has been edited and condensed for clarity.

I started thinking about survival back around 9/11. Now the divide between the right and the left, everybody has their own survival concerns and survival needs. I started researching the economy and the collapse of the dollar, stuff like that. I'm more concerned about social unrest, with continuity of family, continuity of business, meaning, for lack of a better description, a Camp David for your family on a little lighter scale.

When trouble comes, let's take Florida. Trouble comes in hurricanes and when hurricanes come, it's not just the hurricane. Your power goes out, now you're worried about your children. You're trying to get to work, nobody can get to work, it's a real problem. If we know a hurricane is coming in Florida, we can head out to the 'cabin,' we call it, the survival condo, bring your team leaders and family and basically ride out a hurricane like you're in a Hilton hotel. That's basically what this is. All the luxuries: swimming pool, movie theatre. You know, it's nothing more than trying to prepare for disaster with your family and get through it without suffering.

The biggest question everyone asks: what are you gonna do if something happens, if you're stuck, how are you going to get there? You have to have a realistic plan. If you're survival-minded, you have a five-day head start on most everybody else. For example, a hurricane is coming to Miami, I live in Orlando. Most people sit there and stare at the TV, wait to see what happens. I would rather get in the car, get out of Florida before the two hours are up. You have to have the ability to get to where you're going to stay during crisis situations, so [someplace like New Zealand] would be too far.

That's not my only destination, the survival condo. I also have other fortified locations I own as well. Larry, with the condo project, is the most hardened, protected against almost every type of problem that can come. Some of my hard facilities have a bunker but it doesn't have protection for biological infection, doesn't have protection for radiation. The survival condo has layering; it has it all. I'm protected from everything.

The coronavirus seems to be highly contagious. A lot of government agencies are very concerned. I'm concerned about how concerned the people get. I believe the threat will come from mass hysteria more than the actual virus. If all of a sudden there's quarantines being thrown out, whether it's overkill or not, quarantine means shelves empty, people getting angry, lawlessness on the streets. Things can get crazy. That's more a concern than the virus itself.

I'm staying highly alert. I'm watching how long it takes different areas to call a quarantine, travel bans, to see if shelves are emptying with supplies. My threat index in terms of continuity of business, family, if all of a sudden, I can't conduct business, then I will head out to a nice staycation at one of the facilities, probably Larry's because it's biologically fortified. And I'll bring my team and we'll have fun in a triple-A facility and watch movies and go to the water park and have a great time. And I won't have to worry about that because I have that facility.

Pretty soon [I'll be back in]. This coronavirus actually annoyed me because it's supercharged the buying market and put a run on spaces. I'll make my way out in the next few weeks. Now I have to do it a little quicker because all of a sudden this entire facility sold out in a week. Whenever there is a problem, let's say a massive earthquake in California, the people that had this on their mind, they have the means, they make a move. They start buying. This scare has a lot of people on the phone making orders. It made me speed up my plans.

All of these things need to be operated, they need to be manned. If you really get into a critical situation, you're going to need hands, you need people to do these jobs. You can't do it all by yourself.

I can't get too far in the inner protocol but I'll tell you this: there is a lockdown protocol where everybody will learn a job and a skill and there will be a rotation where it'll be quarterly or semi-annually. Jobs will be rotated so everyone in the facility will learn every job. And it only makes sense in a survivability situation. So everybody would learn in case something happens, not just one person who would know how to do everything. There's no pecking order. It's a very different attitude-very family-oriented where everybody understands-if you go to that place on a lockdown situation, you understand it's serious. And everyone's there for the same people. That pulls everybody together in a way that only crises can unite.

When you see the facilities, you'll understand. You might go stir crazy, but no more stir crazy than if you were in a five-star hotel. It's got every amenity, water parks, movie theaters; there are screens that project an image of wherever it is you want to be. They use the NASA protocol so you don't go stir crazy: how high the ceilings need to be, what you need to see looking out your window, things like that.

I've spent excess of $1 million. I don't see it as spending, I see it as investing. The unit I purchased first, I believe [was] right over $1 million. The resale on that is $4 million. These facilities, the level that we're talking about, are a commodity. It doesn't matter how wealthy you are, you can buy beachfront property, a ranch, a jet, but there's only so many of these. You just can't say I want a hardened facility and build it. It's very difficult, you have to have someone who knows what they're talking about [who] knows the contractors, all of the systems and controls that it takes for something like this. It's an investment and it's a really cool thing to own.

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Inside the Survivalist Bunker Where Some Wealthy People Hope to Ride Out Coronavirus

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A pandemic, like any other crisis, has a way of exposing the chasm between the haves and have-nots, and perhaps the deepest trench right now is the one between the one percenters self-quarantining in dramatic and expensive fashion-and the rest of humanity.

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Naomi Klein on disaster capitalism in the context of COVID 19

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Naomi Klein on disaster capitalism in the context of COVID 19

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The coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too. Experts warn that some people who suspect they may be sick with the virus, also known as COVID-19, are going about their daily routines, either because their jobs do not provide paid time off because of systemic failures in our privatized health care system.

Most of us aren't exactly sure what to do or who to listen to. President Donald Trump has contradicted recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and these mixed messages have narrowed our window of time to mitigate harm from the highly contagious virus.

These are the perfect conditions for governments and the global elite to implement political agendas that would otherwise be met with great opposition if we weren't all so disoriented. This chain of events isn't unique to the crisis sparked by the coronavirus; it's the blueprint politicians and governments have been following for decades known as the "shock doctrine," a term coined by activist and author Naomi Klein in a 2007 book of the same name.

History is a chronicle of "shocks"-the shocks of wars, natural disasters, and economic crises-and their aftermath. This aftermath is characterized by " disaster capitalism," calculated, free-market "solutions" to crises that exploit and exacerbate existing inequalities.

Klein says we're already seeing disaster capitalism play out on the national stage: In response to the coronavirus, Trump has proposed a $700 billion stimulus package that would include cuts to payroll taxes (which would devastate Social Security) and provide assistance to industries that will lose business as a result of the pandemic.

"They're not doing this because they think it's the most effective way to alleviate suffering during a pandemic-they have these ideas lying around that they now see an opportunity to implement," Klein said.

VICE spoke to Klein about how the "shock" of coronavirus is giving way to the chain of events she outlined more than a decade ago in The Shock Doctrine.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Let's start with the basics. What is disaster capitalism? What is its relationship to the "shock doctrine"?
The way I define disaster capitalism is really straightforward: It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises. Disaster profiteering and war profiteering isn't a new concept, but it really deepened under the Bush administration after 9/11, when the administration declared this sort of never-ending security crisis, and simultaneously privatized it and outsourced it-this included the domestic, privatized security state, as well as the [privatized] invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "shock doctrine" is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else. In moments of crisis, people tend to focus on the daily emergencies of surviving that crisis, whatever it is, and tend to put too much trust in those in power. We take our eyes off the ball a little bit in moments of crisis.
Where does that political strategy come from? How do you trace its history in American politics?
The shock-doctrine strategy was as a response to the original New Deal under FDR. [Economist] Milton Friedman believes everything went wrong in America under the New Deal: As a response to the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, a much more activist government emerged in the country, which made it its mission to directly solve the economic crisis of the day by creating government employment and offering direct relief.

If you're a hard-core free-market economist, you understand that when markets fail it lends itself to progressive change much more organically than it does the kind of deregulatory policies that favor large corporations. So the shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge. Political and economic elites understand that moments of crisis is their chance to push through their wish list of unpopular policies that further polarize wealth in this country and around the world.

Right now we have multiple crises happening: a pandemic, a lack of infrastructure to manage it, and the crashing stock market. Can you outline how each of these components fit into the schema you outline in The Shock Doctrine ?

The shock really is the virus itself. And it has been managed in a way that is maximizing confusion and minimizing protection. I don't think that's a conspiracy, that's just the way the U.S. government and Trump have utterly mismanaged this crisis. Trump has so far treated this not as a public health crisis but as a crisis of perception, and a potential problem for his reelection.

The shock doctrine was developed as a way to prevent crises from giving way to organic moments where progressive policies emerge.

It's the worst-case scenario, especially combined with the fact that the U.S. doesn't have a national health care program and its protections for workers are abysmal. This combination of forces has delivered a maximum shock. It's going to be exploited to bail out industries that are at the heart of most extreme crises that we face, like the climate crisis: the airline industry, the gas and oil industry, the cruise industry -they want to prop all of this up.
How have we seen this play out before?
In The Shock Doctrine I talk about how this happened after Hurricane Katrina. Washington think tanks like the Heritage Foundation met and came up with a wish list of "pro-free market" solutions to Katrina. We can be sure that exactly the same kinds of meetings will happen now- in fact, the person who chaired the Katrina group was Mike Pence. In 2008, you saw this play out in the original [bank] bail out, where countries wrote these blank checks to banks, which eventually added up to many trillions of dollars. But the real cost of that came in the form of economic austerity [later cuts to social services]. So it's not just about what's going on right now, but how they're going to pay for it down the road when the bill for all of this comes due.
Is there anything people can do to mitigate the harm of disaster capitalism we're already seeing in the response to the coronavirus? Are we in a better or worse position than we were during Hurricane Katrina or the last global recession?
When we're tested by crisis we either regress and fall apart, or we grow up, and find reserves of strengths and compassion we didn't know we were capable of. This will be one of those tests. The reason I have some hope that we might choose to evolve is that-unlike in 2008-we have such an actual political alternative that is proposing a different kind of response to the crisis that gets at the root causes behind our vulnerability, and a larger political movement that supports it.

This is what all of the work around the Green New Deal has been about: preparing for a moment like this. We just can't lose our courage; we have to fight harder than ever before for universal health care, universal child care, paid sick leave-it's all intimately connected.
If our governments and the global elite are going to exploit this crisis for their own ends, what can people do to take care of each other?
"'I'll take care of me and my own, we can get the best insurance there is, and if you don't have good insurance it's probably your fault, that's not my problem": This is what this sort of winners-take-all economy does to our brains. What a moment of crisis like this unveils is our porousness to one another. We're seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

We might think we'll be safe if we have good health care, but if the person making our food, or delivering our food, or packing our boxes doesn't have health care and can't afford to get tested-let alone stay home from work because they don't have paid sick leave-we won't be safe. If we don't take care of each other, none of us is cared for. We are enmeshed.

We're seeing in real time that we are so much more interconnected to one another than our quite brutal economic system would have us believe.

Different ways of organizing society light up different parts of ourselves. If you're in a system you know isn't taking care of people and isn't distributing resources in an equitable way, then the hoarding part of you is going to be lit up. So be aware of that and think about how, instead of hoarding and thinking about how you can take care of yourself and your family, you can pivot to sharing with your neighbors and checking in on the people who are most vulnerable.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.

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Naomi Klein on Coronavirus and Disaster Capitalism

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The coronavirus is officially a global pandemic that has so far infected 10 times more people than SARS did. Schools, university systems, museums, and theaters across the U.S. are shutting down, and soon, entire cities may be too.

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Book I mentioned in the class about storytelling for the future: Donna Haraway, 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

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Book I mentioned in the class about storytelling for the future: Donna Haraway, 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

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Available here as PDFs.

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Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

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In the midst of spiraling ecological devastation, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway offers provocative new ways to reconfigure our relations to th

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A podcast with Lepselter about the alien abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill

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A podcast with Lepselter about the alien abduction story of Barney and Betty Hill

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Think of an alien abduction. Humanoid creatures. Medical experiments. Missing time. Hypnosis. But years before The X-Files, that narrative was largely unknown until Betty and Barney Hill went public about their alien abduction.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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From Outer Space from Imaginary Worlds on Podchaser, aired Wednesday, 30th October 2019. Think of an alien abduction. Humanoid creatures. Medical experiments. Missing time. Hypnosis. But years before The X-Files, that narrative was largely unknown until Betty and Barney Hill went public about their...

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5G and COVID conspiracy theories: a reaction to an uncanny danger?

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5G and COVID conspiracy theories: a reaction to an uncanny danger?

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Viral: The 5G Conspiracy Theory by @BBC Stories - BBC

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Many films represent the fear of alien abduction. This is a very famous one

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Many films represent the fear of alien abduction. This is a very famous one

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND - Official Trailer

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A collaborative film with migrants and about the future in Italy

https://boap.uib.no/index.php/jaf/article/view/2757/2796

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Thinking non-linearity with science-fiction: Christopher Nolan's film Tenet

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Thinking non-linearity with science-fiction: Christopher Nolan's film Tenet

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ETHNOKINO KEYNOTE: Prof.Dr.Shahram Khosravi on the "Unvisible"

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Prof.Dr. Shahram Khosravi's keynote at the ETHNOKINO on the 14th of November, took place at the Kino in der Reitschule in collaboration with the University of Bern, Switzerland.

www.ethnokino.com 

The Unvisible – Somewhere in Plato’s Euthyphro we read Socrates saying: ‘A thing is not seen because it is visible but on the contrary it is visible because it is seen’. The other is actively unseen. Rather than being invisible, the other is unvisible: exposed to a conscious act of unseeing, excluding, and left out. The other is not unseen because she is invisible, conversely she is invisible because she is unseen; in other word unvisibilized.
 
 
Bio: 
Shahram Khosravi is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. His research interests include anthropology of Iran and the Middle East, migration, forced displacement, and border studies.  Khosravi is the author of the books: Young and Defiant in Tehran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2008); The Illegal Traveler: an auto-ethnography of borders, Palgrave (2010); Precarious Lives: Waiting and Hope in Iran, University of Pennsylvania Press (2017) and After Deportation: Ethnographic Perspectives, Palgrave (2017, edited volume). He has been an active writer in international press and has also written fiction. Currently he is working on an art book on Waiting.

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Die vergessenen Kinder von Moria | WDR Doku

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ETHNOKINO KEYNOTE / PROF.DR.SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI "THE UNVISIBLE"

Shahram Khosravi Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University has delivered a powerful and moving keynote speech at our ETHNOKINO's 6th season of ethnographic films, during the gala screening of Global Science Film Festival. He addressed bordering practices rather than borders, and spoke of the right to opacity as a civilian act of resistance. Rather than the need to understand the other as a colonial demand he highlights how the colonial defines the other; as less, stateless, documentless, the lessnessness disqualifying the many from participation as political actors. He highlights a politics of the impossibility of seeing the other in her full visibility and in her humanity. Only death, qualifies the border transgressors to be visible , and of those survivors always to be punished. He speaks of decolonizing the gaze which is not a neutral act -predetermined by hierarchies, he calls anthropologists to undiscipline and reposition themselves in the ways they use terminologies, concepts and in the ways they (un)see the world, he warns not to fall into the potential trap of victimizing victimhood. Depicted in Jean Paul Sartre's short play "Hell is the other people" and yet border crossing is a "refusal to be refused".

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ETHNOKINO KEYNOTE / PROF.DR.SHAHRAM KHOSRAVI "THE UNVISIBLE" Shahram Khosravi Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University has delivered a powerful and moving keynote speech at our ETHNOKINO's 6th season of ethnographic films, during the gala screening of Global Science Film Festival. He addressed bordering practices rather than borders, and spoke of the right to opacity as a civilian act of resistance.

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New ways of doing ethnography 2: Multimodal anthropology

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New ways of doing ethnography 2: Multimodal anthropology

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See also sensorial anthropology and non-representative anthropology

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Coedited by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill (Towson University) The following is an excerpt from "Multimodality: An Invitation": This section used to be called Visual Anthropology. Its new name-Multimodal Anthropologies-reflects changes in the media ecologies we engage as anthropologists, changes that have broadened our perspective to include other forms of media practice, while remaining inclusive of visual anthropology.

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Interested in new ways of doing anthropology? There is multimodal anthropology, but search also for sensorial or non-representative anthropology

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Coedited by Samuel Collins, Matthew Durington, and Harjant Gill (Towson University) The following is an excerpt from "Multimodality: An Invitation": This section used to be called Visual Anthropology. Its new name-Multimodal Anthropologies-reflects changes in the media ecologies we engage as anthropologists, changes that have broadened our perspective to include other forms of media practice, while remaining inclusive of visual anthropology.

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A World Sociology screencast outlining and evaluating Modernisation Theory. Aimed at A level students

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A poem for Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who started the Volta Delta Project

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A poem for Ghana's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who started the Volta Delta Project

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This month (April 2021) will mark the 49th anniversary of the death of Kwame Nkrumah, the revolutionary leader of Ghanaian independence and visionary advocate of the Pan-African movement.

As President, Nkrumah oversaw Ghana's rapid industrial development and invested in national educational facilities. He played a key role in the development of the Organisation of African Unity (now the African Union). However, the establishment of a one party state and his opposition to tribal loyalties triggered violent reactions from various factions and Nkrumah survived at least five assassination attempts before being ousted in a military coup on 24th February 1966.

The eulogy that follows is by Ghanaian poet Adjei Agyei-Baah.

Man of the Millennium

They blinded him
For his vision(1)
And crippled him
For his movement
They removed his chair
When he stood up
And clipped his wings from flying high
To tear through the cloak
Of injustice and oppression.

They sealed his mouth
From sending brotherly messages of unity
And made him die in a barren land(2)
Where he once sprinkled some seeds of hope.

They saw his brain too big
To be housed in his smallish skull
But could not deny him a place of honor:
"African's man of the millennium"

And now his ghost stands on guard
Humbly watching and waiting
As his mighty works
Have become hunters
Haunting the visionless!

Here is the poem in Twi:

Mfie Mpem Mmienu Nipatitire

Ofiraa n'ani wɔ n'anisoadehunu nti
na obubuu n'aprɛ wɔ n'anamɔntuo mu
na ɔhwan n'ase akonwa
wɔ berɛ a ɔtiaa ne nan akyi
na ɔsan nso kaa ne ntanban fam
sɛnea ɔrentumi ntu nkɔsunsan
ntɛnkyea ne nkoasom mu ntoma a
na wɔde afira abibiman.

Na ɔpam n'ano
sɛnea ɛbɛyɛ na ɔrentumi ɛne abibiman
nkaeɛ no ntumi nto kɛsɛ
maa no wui wɔ asaase pradaa bi so a
ɔkɔɔ wɔn mmoa wɔ berɛ bi a atwam.

Na wɔhunuu sɛ na ɔkuta adwene kɛseɛ
a na ɛboro ne ti ketewa kwankoraa soɔ
nanso wɔantumi anka n'abodin anhyɛ:
"abibirem barima kokoɔdurufoɔ".

Na saa berɛyi ne saman gyina atweneɛ
a ɔretwɛn na ɔrehwɛ nneɛma
berɛ a ne nsa ano nnwuma
abɛyɛ ahonini a ɛrehunahuna nea ɔnni
anisoadehunu.

by Adjei Agyei-Baah

Footnotes

Bio
Adjei Agyei-Baah is a lecturer, poet, editor and translator at the University of Ghana School of Continuing and Distance Education, Kumasi Campus who teaches Academic Writing and Literature in English related courses. He is the co-founder Africa Haiku Network and Poetry Foundation Ghana, and currently serves as the managing coeditor of The Mamba, Africa's first international haiku journal. He is widely anthologized and won several international awards. Adjei is an author of four haiku/senryu poetry collections: Afriku (2016), Ghana 21 Haiku (2018), Piece of My Fart (2018) and Trio of Windows (co-published, , 2018). Adjei is currently PhD student at the University of Waikato, New Zealand researching into teachers experiences of teaching Literature in English in Ghana.

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This month (April 2021) will mark the 49th anniversary of the death of Kwame Nkrumah, the revolutionary leader of Ghanaian independence and visionary advocate of the Pan-African movement. As President, Nkrumah oversaw Ghana's rapid industrial development and invested in national educational facilities.

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Modern time of capitalism and its institutions

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Modern time of capitalism and its institutions

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Some examples of shamanism in business corporations

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Some examples of shamanism in business corporations

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https://shamanicceo.com/the-shamanic-ceo/

https://www.ceotodaymagazine.com/2019/07/sarah-negus-a-modern-day-shaman-for-the-corporate-world/

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/new-york/articles/michael-ventura-ceo-and-shaman-believes-success-begins-with-empathy/

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Consensus (Direct Democracy @ Occupy Wall Street)

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What is more useful for strengthening environmental activism in Switzerland? Prefiguration or figuration?

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What is more useful for strengthening environmental activism in Switzerland? Prefiguration or figuration?

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What is Prefigurative Politics? | Red Plateaus

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Anarchists such as David Graeber and Cindy Milstein have used the term "prefigurative politics" to describe the anarchist principle that the ways we organize in the present should reflect the sort of society we hope to create in the future. Yet the concept of prefiguration is drawn from a Christian theology that presumes a future salvation so certain that it radiates backward through time, generating its own precursors. Many Marxists, too, see history as the inevitable unfolding of an ordained process-a sort of secular second coming of Christian millenarianism. Most anarchists, by contrast, take nothing for granted about the future, especially in today's context of ecological collapse -so it may behoove us to revisit the concept of prefigurative politics to see whether it still serves our needs today. We are pleased to present the following text by Uri Gordon, in which he rigorously explores the origins of the concept of prefiguration and its emergence in anarchist discourse.

"ΕΙΜΑΣΤΕ ΕΙΚΟΝΑ ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΜΕΛΛΟΝ" (We are an image from the future)

"Prefigurative politics" is commonly used to express a radical ethos of unity between means and ends. Less attention has been given to the peculiar way of imagining time that this concept invokes. On the one hand, there is the familiar ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, in which the fight against domination is connected to the immediate construction of social alternatives. On the other hand, however, this concept is based on "prefiguration"-a temporal framing, drawn from Christian theology, in which the future is thought to radiate backwards on its past.

Where does this idea come from? Is the idea of projection from the future necessary to maintain unity between means and ends? Or should the terminology of prefiguration be abandoned on account of the false reassurances it offers?

First, Gordon uncovers the theology of prefiguration, tracing it from the Church Fathers to politicized resurfacings in the Diggers and the New Left. He argues that this temporal framing is indeed connected to a mental "process of reassurance," common among many revolutionaries who drew confidence from the notion that they were realizing a pre-ordained historical path. Second, he offers the first systematic review of means-ends unity, as expressed in the anarchist tradition. Here, Gordon argues that in contrast to "prefiguration," such expressions were framed in terms of a generative temporal framing, in which the present influences the future, and not the other way around. The third and final part argues that the idea of prefiguration-even if not taken literally-may nevertheless serve as an echo of false reassurance. This may conveniently sidestep a generative disposition towards the future, now that traditional promises of revolutionary transformation are replaced with prospects of eco- and industrial collapse. In closing, Gordon suggests replacing the concept of "prefigurative politics" with "concrete utopia"-an idea that lacks reassurance, but can offer hope even in the face of anxiety and catastrophe.

The following text involves a somewhat abstract discussion of ideas and their histories, but a discussion that has a bearing on our struggles and the attitudes we bring to them. At best, readers will be able to take a fresh look at their disposition towards the future as it relates to their current actions.
An extended academic version of this piece is available here. For their helpful comments, thanks go to Ben Franks, Francis Dupuis-Déri, and audience members at the House of Bugaboo and the Sydney Anarchist Bookfair, where earlier versions were presented.

The term "prefigurative politics" did not emerge among activists. It was introduced by two social theorists: Carl Boggs, who published two articles in 1977 referring to a prefigurative tradition, model, or task, and Wini Breines, who reformulated the term two years later as "prefigurative politics" in her discussion of the New Left. The concept's recent popularity reflects attention to the radical end of the alter-globalization protests of the early 2000s. Unlike the trade unions, NGOs, and political parties who also participated in these protests, radical groups rejected top-down organization, lobbying, and programs aimed at the seizure of state power. Instead, they promoted anti-hierarchical and anti-capitalist practices: decentralized organization in affinity groups and networks; decision-making by consensus; voluntary and non-profit undertakings; lower consumption; and an effort to identify and counteract regimes of domination and discrimination such as patriarchy, racism, and homophobia in activists' own lives and interactions. "Prefigurative politics" is typically associated with these practices and orientations-not with any temporal framing.

Many authors who discuss these practices do so in ethical terms, without temporal implications. In such discussions, the idea of "ends" is understood in terms of goods and values (as in, "an end in itself"), rather than as a potential future state of society (as in, "an end result"). Benjamin Franks, for example, emphasizes the intrinsic value of means, contrasting this to the instrumental or "consequentialist" valuation found among authoritarian vanguards. Gabriel Kuhn also uses ethical rather than temporal language in associating prefigurative politics with "the belief that the establishment of an egalitarian society enabling free individual development is dependent on political actors implementing the essential values of such a society immediately, in their ways of organizing, living, and fighting." Finally, Cindy Milstein's ethical statement is explicitly dissociated from the future:

"We're not putting off the good society until some distant future but attempting to carve out room for it in the here and now, however tentative and contorted... consistency of means and ends implies an ethical approach to politics. How we act now is how we want others to begin to act, too. We try to model a notion of goodness even as we fight for it."

Still, a temporal sense of prefiguration does surface in some statements, which directly relate current practices to a possible future. Brian Tokar defines the concept of prefiguration as "the idea that a transformative social movement must necessarily anticipate the ways and means of the hoped-for new society." In their book Anti-Capitalist Britain, John Carter and Dave Morland write that it is "a strategy that is an embryonic representation of an anarchist social future." Finally, using terms that are very significant to our discussion, sociologist Steven Buehler defines prefigurative politics as a strategy in which "pursuit of utopian goals is recursively built into the movement's daily operation and organizational style."

These statements introduce terminology that goes well beyond the ethical: anticipation, hope, maturation, recursion, representation, utopia. To begin unpacking this future-orientation, I would like to expose the roots of the idea of prefiguration, which may not be familiar to activists using the term.

The prefigurative idea entered the Western imagination through Christian biblical interpretation. Since its beginnings, Christian theology has approached the Hebrew bible as an Old Testament "having a shadow of good things to come" (Heb10:1). Stripped of its normative and national character, the Hebrew bible's Christianized significance lies in its foreshadowing of the Gospel, such that, in the words of Cardinal de Lubac, "Christ appears to us preceded by the shadows and the figures which he himself had cast on Jewish history." Thus Paul the Apostle says that Adam was "a figure [τύπος, typos] of him that was to come" (Rom 5:15), and that the trials of the Israelites in the wilderness "became examples [τύποι, typoi] for us" (1Cor.10:6). In his seminal essay on the term "figura," literary scholar Erich Auerbach identified Tertullian (c.160-225CE) as the earliest Church Father to develop Paul's occasional references to prefiguration into a systematic approach to the interpretation of scripture, known today as Typology. Thus, among many other examples, in Adversus Marcionem, Tertullian treats Moses's naming of Joshua (Num. 13:16) as "a figure of things to come" [ figura futurorum fuisse], linking Joshua to his namesake, Jesus of Nazareth, and Joshua's leadership of the Israelites to Jesus' leadership of the "second people"-the Christians-into the "promised land... of eternal life."

According to Auerbach, "from the fourth century on, the usage of the word figura and of the method of interpretation connected with it are fully developed in nearly all the Latin Church writers." The earliest usage I could find of the specific term "prefigure" is in the Latin translation of Against Heresies by Irenaeus (made around 380 CE). Here, he writes that "the first testament... exhibited a type [ typum] of heavenly things... prefiguring [ præfigurans] the images of those things which exist in the Church." Soon after, St. Jerome (347-420) centered his 53rd Epistle (to Paulinus, De studi Scripturarum) on how Christ is "predestined and prefigured [ prædestinatus autem, et præfiguratus] in the Law and the Prophets." Thus, Deuteronomy is a "prefiguration of evangelical law [ Evangelicae legis praefiguratio]", and Jonah "calls the world to repent, his shipwreck prefiguring the Passion of the Lord" [ passionem Domini præfigurans]. Many other examples use different terminology, from Joshua's lay of the land "describing the celestial spiritual kingdom of Jerusalem," to Esther who "in the figure of the Church [ in Ecclesiae typo] liberates her people from danger."

It was St. Augustine of Hyppo (354-430), however, who "developed this idea... profoundly and completely" according to Auerbach. Auerbach gives many examples, to which we may add Augustine's statements in that Cain, "founder of the earthly city... signifies the Jews who killed Christ the shepherd of men, which Abel the shepherd of sheep was prefiguring [ præfigurabat]"; and that "the kingdom of Saul... was the shadow of a kingdom yet to come" and therefore David passed over the opportunity to slay Saul (1 Sam 24.1-7) "for the sake of what it was prefiguring" [ propter illud, quod præfigurabat].

Prefiguration, then, is a recursive temporal framing in which events at one time are interpreted as a figure pointing to its fulfillment in later events, with the figure cast in the model of the fulfillment. In the statements just reviewed, the interpretation is backward-looking: both the figure and its fulfillment (i.e. Old Testaments events and the events of the Gospel) precede the interpretation. In the same retrospective way, we could say that Paul's statements "prefigured" the fuller accounts of typology in Jerome and Augustine. However, prefiguration can also be forward-looking, with current events said to prefigure future ones. This prospective sense is the one in which John the Baptist anticipates "he that comes after me" (Matthew 3:11)-announcing his own prefiguration of Jesus. Equally important to the Christian scheme, such prospective prefiguration is carried over to notions of End Times, with each figure-fulfillment pair pointing to a third, final fulfillment and completion in the Second Coming. In this light, argues Auerbach,

"the history of no epoch even has the practical self-sufficiency which... [in the modern view] resides in the accomplished fact... the event is enacted according to an ideal model which is a prototype situated in the future and thus far only promised... every future model, though incomplete as history, is already fulfilled in God and has existed from all eternity in his providence."

Given how central this temporal framing was to the Christian worldview, it is not surprising that oppositional movements in medieval and early modern Europe often used prefigurative language. A case in point is Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers' leader, for whom prefiguration became the cornerstone of a complete revolutionary theology. In his 1649 pamphlet The True Levellers Standard Advanced, Winstanley explicitly justifies the Diggers' direct action strategy-expropriating formerly-common lands and withholding of wage labor-in terms of its supposed fulfillment of biblical prophecy. Winstanley believed that the Kingdom of God could be brought into being, not through divine intervention, but through human action-by establishing an equal society in his own time. Instead of a literal Second Coming, he expected the final rising of the "Spirit of Christ, which is the Spirit of universal Community and Freedom" to take place in the persons of those who "lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury." Therefore, he declares, "they that are resolved to work and eat together, making the Earth a Common Treasury, doth joyn hands with Christ, to lift up the Creation from Bondage, and restores all things from the Curse." Later on, Winstanley uses his own typology in addressing concerns about repression and hardship:

"And we are assured, that in the strength of this Spirit that hath manifested himself to us, we shall not be startled, neither at Prison nor Death... For by this work we are assured... that Bondage shall be removed, Tears wiped away, and all poor People by their righteous Labours shall be relieved, and freed from Poverty and Straits; For in this work of Restoration there will be no begger in Israel: For surely, if there was no Begger in literal Israel, there shall be no Begger in Spiritual Israel the Anti-type, much more."

Winstanley's final statement (which does not, in fact, refer directly to scripture, but to an observation he himself made frequently in his writings) describes the work of the Diggers as a fulfillment of an Old Testament figure. In the terms defined above, Winstanley's prefiguration is backward-looking, albeit in the present perfect tense. The Diggers and their actions are not a figure, but the fulfillment of the "Spiritual Israel" prefigured in the Bible. As we shall see, however, an explicitly forward-looking use of prefiguration is also a feature of the revolutionary imagination.

In the meantime, however, I would like to argue that Winstanley's prefigurative thinking is an example of the "process of reassurance," identified by historian Reinhard Koselleck among numerous "groups of activists who wished to... be part of a history moving under its own momentum, where one only aided this forward motion." In his essay On the Disposability of History, Koselleck describes the process of reassurance as "a means of strengthening the will to hurry the advent of the planned future." This certainly applies to Winstanley's assurance that the Diggers' actions are the foretold fulfillment of biblical figures. It is a framing that, according to Koselleck, "serves... as a relief-one's will becomes the executor of transpersonal events-and as a legitimation which enables one to act in good conscience."

I would like to point to a resurfacing of this process of reassurance in Andre Gorz's " The Way Forward," published in the New Left Review shortly after the French uprising of 1968. This article stands out because its use of prefiguration predates Boggs by almost a decade, while strikingly integrating the term into an authoritarian Marxist framework. This gives us a unique opportunity to examine a secular and political version of prefigurative reasoning in isolation from the anarchistic ethical strategy which the term normally refers to. Indeed, Gorz employs familiar stereotypes of anarchism as "relying on mass spontaneity, seeing insurrection as the royal road to revolution" and as "the theory of all or nothing according to which the revolution must be a quasi-instantaneous act." Arguing also against "the immediate construction of socialism and of communism," Gorz calls for a "Guevarist" strategy, in which the revolutionary vanguard becomes an educator of the masses. The vanguard party "prefigures the proletarian State, and reflects for the working class its capacity to be a ruling class." In Gorz's scheme, means do not prefigure ultimate ends, but other means. Rather than prefiguring a "post-revolutionary society," the party's "central organs, by their cohesion and capacity for political analysis, will prefigure the central power of the transitional period."

Gorz's repeated use of prefiguration cannot be dismissed as mere literary flourish. It relies, no less than Winstanley's theological framing, on a universal point of view that bridges past, present, and future within an unfolding plan. In his case, this is the orthodox Marxist revolutionary program. His framing is clearly forward-looking, with a present figure looking towards its future fulfillment. The desirable role of the vanguard in the present is thus worked out backwards from the endgame in which it seizes state power. Only the grand narrative grounding this program, with its specific account of class and party, can offer a clear enough image of the future (the workers' state) to form a model for the present. Only a revolutionary scenario that is a "given" can make such symbolic projection from the future intelligible. This is not to endorse ambitious claims about a messianic streak at the heart of Marxism. The point is that in this prefigurative scheme, the one possible-if not guaranteed-path towards revolution is already decided.

Even more importantly, Gorz uses prefiguration as an almost-transparent conceit. The educative role Gorz describes is supposed to strengthen the workers' movement and lead it to fulfill its potential. Why not place such a process of education within a generative temporal framing, developing forward in time without recursive projection from an imagined future endgame? Gorz wants the party to educate by modeling the given image of its victory, hurrying on the development of class consciousness. In other words, the prefigurative language is openly intended to activate a process of reassurance among the working class.

As we shall see later on, it is the absence of reassurance that prefiguration now papers over. For now, though, I would like to look more closely at the generative temporal framings which have accompanied the ethos of means-ends unity. These appear earliest and most consistently in the anarchist tradition, which none of the originators of the concept "prefigurative politics" served very well.

Carl Boggs published his article " Marxism, Prefigurative Communism, and the Problem of Workers' Control" in the ten-year double issue of Radical America, a magazine started in 1967 by Paul Bhule and members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but which "long outlived its seedbed" to become "an eclectic left publication, bound to no single strategy and certainly to no organization." The article's primary interest is in council insurgencies in Russia, Italy, and Germany between 1917-1920, and it defines the term "prefigurative" as "the embodiment, within the ongoing political practice of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal."

Boggs's definition above may be called a formal definition, limited to the very correspondence between ultimate goal and ongoing practice, while remaining silent on their actual content. Contrast this to his statements in the article he published in the academic journal Theory and Society the same year, "Revolutionary Process, Political Strategy and the Dilemma of Power." Here, he refers to the prefigurative task as one "which expresses the ultimate ends of the revolutionary process itself: popular self-emancipation, collective social and authority relations, socialist democracy." Here, instead, is a substantive definition, which unlike the formal one gives particular value-content to both practices and goals. A substantive definition is also used by Wini Breines, in her paper first presented at the 1979 annual meetings of the American Sociological Association, revised for publication in Social Problems and later expanded into her book Community and Organization in the New Left, 1962-1968. Brienes, who credits Boggs, defines prefigurative politics as the "attempt to embody personal and anti-hierarchical values... to develop the seeds of liberation and the new society (prior to and in the process of revolution) through notions of participatory democracy grounded in [non-capitalist and communitarian] counter-institutions."

Notice that the formal definition leaves prefigurative politics open to association with widely varied practices, from the courts-in-waiting of crown pretenders to parliamentary shadow cabinets to white nationalist groups who "prefigure" Aryan dominance. What bridges the formal and substantive definitions, however, is a particular political context. This is the opposition to authoritarian variants of Marxism, whose ends and means do not correspond in this way. On its opponents' account, while authoritarian Marxism does posit a stateless communist society as its end-goal-in Lenin's own words, one "without force, without coercion, without subordination"-it proceeds via top-down structures and the seizure of state power. There is no correspondence between means and ends, and revolutionary organization and action are approached instrumentally. This critique and the alternative now identified with "prefigurative politics" were first worked out, not by the New Left, but by anarchists starting a century earlier.

Brienes credits anarchism and radical pacifism as the "real forerunners" of the New Left, but does not go beyond naming Paul Goodman and Murray Bookchin as influential representatives. In his article for Theory and Society, Boggs dedicates all of one page to the anarchist contribution, dismissing it as having merely "emerged in response to organized Marxism... flailing away helplessly from the outside," "trapped in its own spontaneism" and "preoccupation with small face-to-face 'organic' institutions." In Radical America, while acknowledging that the prefigurative tradition "begins with the nineteenth century anarchists," he outdoes himself (and Gorz) in alleging that the anarchists "scorned politics," showed "contempt for 'theory' and 'organization' in any form" and were "basically romantic and utopian," looking "to an idyllic past rooted in a primitive collectivism"-all without a shard of evidence. What is more, having first commended prefigurative strategy for viewing "statism and authoritarianism as special obstacles to be overturned," Boggs seems to recoil from the consequences of his own argument, and almost immediately refers to prefigurative structures as "a nucleus of a future socialist state," while praising Councilism for not "contemptuously dismiss[ing]" the "contestation for state power." While recent writers on prefigurative politics have done more to acknowledge its indebtedness to anarchism, what follows is a systematic examination of key utterances on means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. As we shall now see, these consistently used a generative temporal framing, as opposed to recursive prefiguration.

The formative conflict between the authoritarian and libertarian factions in the First International came to a head after the fall of the Paris Commune of 1871. When the closed General Council of the International resolved that workers must form their own political parties, anarchists held a counter-conference at Sonvilier (Bernese Jura). They produced a circular that defined the counter-program of the social revolution as "'Emancipation of the workers by the workers themselves,' free of all directing authority, even should that authority be elected and endorsed by the workers." The Circular closes:

The society of the future should be nothing other than the universalization of the organization with which the International will have endowed itself. We must, therefore, be careful to ensure that this organization comes as close as possible to our ideal. How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning towards authority and dictatorship.

This argument, with its embryonic metaphor, refers to what today might be called a "path dependency" between revolutionary practices and results. The road one travels determines the destination one reaches. Choices about revolutionary organization (top-down or bottom-up) end up determining both the form of the revolution (seizure of state power or abolition of the state) and its end result (modified hierarchical structures or free communism). Note that, although connected to "principles," the Circular's argument from path dependency actually justifies means-ends correspondence in instrumental terms. The seizure of state power is not rejected solely on ethical grounds, despite being deemed an effective revolutionary means. Rather, it is rejected as ineffective, since it does not result in a classless society but in dictatorship.

In the same year, Bakunin also insisted that the International should organize "from the bottom up, beginning with the social life of the masses and their real aspirations" and "not by forcing the natural life of the masses into the straitjacket of the State." This led him to praise the Communards' disinterest in seizing state power:

"Our friends, the Paris socialists, believed that revolution could neither be made nor brought to its full development except by the spontaneous and continued action of the masses, the groups and the associations of the people... [society] can and should reorganize itself, not from the top down according to an ideal plan dressed up by wise men or scholars nor by decrees promulgated by some dictatorial power or even by a national assembly... [but] from the bottom up, by the free association or federation of workers."

By "spontaneous," Bakunin does not mean impulsive or improvised, but self-directed and voluntary. Such social reorganization, carried out directly at the grassroots, is therefore opposed to artificial top-down structures, which maintain the same alienation of power against which revolutionaries are struggling. Like the Jura anarchists, in calling for immediate social reorganization, Bakunin is thinking about the long-term effects of present actions and structures, and the choices that become locked-in once a certain path is taken. By extending and defending their own bottom-up forms of organization, revolutionary masses can directly achieve some of their objectives. In instrumental terms, such organization not only avoids the pitfalls of authoritarianism and bureaucracy, but also creates a stronger social base for strikes and insurrections.

This emphasis on immediate implementation would later become part of the central anarchist concept of direct action. This concept goes beyond disruptive tactics to a wider principle of action without intermediaries. Through direct action, a group or individual uses their own power to prevent an injustice or fulfill their desires, as opposed to appealing to an external agent to do so for them. Kropotkin thus called on workers to expropriate productive resources and infrastructures, as "the first step towards a reorganization of our production on Socialist principles." While Kropotkin had a mass uprising in mind, more localized examples of direct expropriation include land and factory occupations, urban squatting, and digital piracy. With equal importance, direct action includes immediate reconstruction of social roles and relationships, to the extent possible. The expansion, deepening, and defense of equality and non-domination achieves its aims immediately, just as a mass trespass directly stops fracking. In both cases, the achievement may be temporary or fragile, but it does not involve intermediaries. There is an evident parallel between this wider sense of direct action and current movements' preference for "prefigurative politics" over lobbying, litigation, and party politics. At stake in all cases-disruption, expropriation, and reconstruction-is the non-alienation of collective power and a rejection of the politics of representation.

The aftermath of the October revolution vindicated anarchists' warnings about means and ends, occasioning Emma Goldman's landmark statement in her Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia. Concluding her memoir, Goldman asserts that "No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the means used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the purposes to be achieved":

All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

This is again a statement of path dependency. Notice, however, the abundance of temporal allusions in these final passages (original emphases):

To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future...Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone... the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. Revolution is the mirror of the coming day; it is the child that is to be the Man of To-morrow.

Like the embryonic metaphor in the Sonvilier Circular, Goldman's account of means gelling into ends has the present generating the future. With the possible exception of the mirror metaphor, this is a generative temporal framing situated in forward-looking time, without recursion. Revolutionaries' visions for the future are themselves things of the present-drawn from current mental experiences and discursive exchanges. More importantly, the interpretation of the present is self-contained, dependent on ethical values rather than on a promised or imagined prototype. Maturation is not guaranteed (the child "is to be," not "will be"). Yet what is already accomplished has the "practical self-sufficiency" which Auerbach associates with the modern view.

This is shown to be a major difference, rather than a matter of mere phrasing, when we consider how lived ethics have an experimental and novel quality, which undercuts the possibility of recursive reasoning. Rejecting the assured blueprints of utopian socialists and Soviet planners alike, anarchists have tended to privilege repeated, concrete experiences of social struggle which give rise to unexpected forms of collective power and solidarity. Goldman thus describes revolution as "first and foremost, the transvaluator, the bearer of new values. It is the great teacher of the new ethics, inspiring man with a new concept of life." She employs the Nietzschean term "transvaluation" ( Umwertung) without mentioning the philosopher's name, yet it is clear that she took from Nietzsche an attitude that embraces radical open-endedness in the creation of new social visions and practices. The emergence of relationships transcending domination is an uncertain process, playful as well as dangerous. However, this implies that the ends expressed in practice undergo constant re-evaluation. Such an open-ended politics makes it hard to sustain any fixed notion of a "future accomplishment," rendering it too unstable to coherently act as a source of recursive prefiguration. Such a partial indeterminacy of ends only makes sense within a generative temporal framing, in which the future is seen as the unknown product of the affordances and contingencies that will have preceded it.

So far, we have seen that the temporal framings accompanying anarchist accounts of ethical strategy have been generative rather than prefigurative in the temporal sense, seeking to shape an as-yet-unknown future out of the present. Its experimental nature pulls such a framing away from the "process of reassurance," and towards a more modest view of future-oriented designs. However, if non-hierarchical social relations are to be extended and defended with neither the assurances of historical momentum, nor a full determinacy of ends, what remains of activist imaginations of the future?

One response-"perhaps nothing"-marks a recent strand in activist expression that attempts to absorb revolutionary accomplishment entirely into current ethical practices, dissociating it from the future altogether. To take a few illustrative examples:

The revolution exists in every moment of our lives... in the present, not in some mythic possible future. -" Monkey," 1999

It is crucial that we seek change not in the name of some doctrine or grand cause, but on behalf of ourselves, so that we will be able to live more meaningful lives... rather than direct our struggle towards world-historical changes which we will not live to witness. - CrimethInc., 2000

The revolution is now, and we must let the desires we have about the future manifest themselves in the here and now as best as we can. When we start doing that, we stop fighting for some abstract condition for the future and instead start fighting to see those desires realized in the present... as a flowering of one's self-determined existence - Hodgson, 2003

Approvingly, anarchist geographer Simon Springer theorizes such outlooks as a micro-political anarchism, which rejects "end-state politics," prefers "permanent insurrection" to "final revolution," and "abandons any pretext of achieving a completely free and harmonious society in the future and instead focuses on the immediacies of anarchist praxis and a prefigurative politics of direct action in the present." Furthermore, in such expressions the very desire to inhabit non-dominating social settings is often presented as the main motivation for constructing them. In such statements, individual liberation and social struggle each supplying the other's motivation. Recalling the slogan also attributed to Goldman -"If I can't dance, it's not my revolution"-this approach to anarchist practice turns away from a politics of self-sacrifice towards a politics of self-realization and revolutionary lifestyle.

The turn to the present has often raised controversy, being described as a symptom of activist networks becoming mere cultural scenes, abandoning revolutionary politics for self-seeking pursuits. Another critique has been that the short-term focus on both cultural reproduction and confrontational tactics neglects movement-building and class solidarity. My own critique is a bit different. I would like to argue that such expressions of "presentism," in their eagerness to avoid a Leninist deferral of revolutionary ends, also conveniently sidestep the consequences of a generative temporal framing. While the statements above dismiss the future as "distant," "mythical," or "abstract," no threat to lived ethical practice is actually posed by imagining long-term social scenarios, or thinking generations ahead. Instead, I would suggest that presentism covers for a reluctance to confront the absent promise of revolutionary accomplishment, as well as the bleak prospects that become evident once activists approach the future generatively.

For transformative movements, the imagination of the future is no longer structured by traditional revolutionary expectations. A century or more ago, anarchists like Bakunin who had experienced the revolutions of 1848 and 1871 could still [expect](bit.ly/2oziXdd0 that "when the hour of the People's Revolution strikes again" it would raise the "simultaneous revolutionary alliance and action of all the people of the civilized world" against reaction. Kropotkin too was convinced that "a great revolution is growing up in Europe" which would see "a rapid modification of outgrown economical and political institutions" and "a displacement of wealth and political power," over a short period "lasting for several years." Such expectations did not require an appeal to historical inevitability; they were based on an instinctive understanding of cycles of contention, and an appreciation-too high, in hindsight-of the generative power of mass movements invested in their material and cultural base. Today, however, even such a guarded promise of revolution in advanced capitalist countries seems far-fetched. The past century has continued to see democratic and socialist political revolutions, as well as military coups and civil wars, but none have achieved a classless society. The tremendous growth in states' military and surveillance powers, the continuing appeal of nationalism, and the understanding that there is no keystone center of power open to definitive attack, have also rendered such optimistic expectations obsolete.

Even more crucially, any generative disposition towards the future must now account for industrial civilization's transgression of multiple planetary tipping points, as global resource-use continues to grow unabated. Hence, any expectations for social change must be projected into a future shaped by runaway climate change, energy depletion, ecosystem collapse, inequality, deprivation, and conflict. My argument is that prefigurative language may offer false comfort in the absence of revolutionary promise, papering over the awareness of converging planetary crises. The affective space attached to disposition towards the future, long vacated by reassurance and even expectant optimism, is now filled with anxiety, frustration, and guilt. "Prefigurative" terminology sidesteps this crisis by avoiding an explicit disposition towards the future while at the same time hinting, however vaguely, at the reassurance that the accomplished future is already radiating backwards on activists' actions today.

Readers can decide for themselves whether I am on to something here, or whether I am overthinking. Either way, the urgent task in this area would seem to be a reworking of generative framings to account for protracted, uneven, and irreversible collapse.

But if the term "prefigurative politics" should indeed be abandoned, what could replace it? A focus on substance, as in "anti-hierarchical politics," could certainly go quite far. But can means-ends unity and ethical practice be framed even more productively, in a way that (a) suggests generative, rather than recursive temporality and (b) encourages an attitude other than reassurance, which can still sustain the confrontation with converging crises? In closing, I would like to offer initial thoughts on one possible way to address this question, drawing on Ernst Bloch's concept of "concrete utopia."

In his greatest work, The Principle of Hope, Bloch charts a utopian and non-authoritarian variation on Marxist thought. He looks beyond "utopia" as a literary description of a model society to what he calls the "positive utopian function" of imaginings that "extend, in an anticipating way, existing material into the future possibilities of being different and better." The anchoring in present reality separates such imaginings from what Bloch calls "abstract utopianism," which ranges from social blueprints to personal daydreams. This is because concrete utopianism "does not play around and get lost in an Empty-Possible, but psychologically anticipates a Real-Possible." Theological prefiguration and its lingering resonances clearly belong in the abstract category. In distinction, Bloch's "not-yet" faces all possible future states of the real world, while drawing hope from the tendencies and latencies of a self-transforming present. As a result, he writes, concrete-utopian impulses correspond not to fantasy, but to hope and action:

Utopian function as the comprehended activity of the expectant emotion, of the hope-premonition, maintains the alliance with all that is still morning like in the world. Utopian function understands what is exploding, because it is this itself in a very condensed way: its Ratio is the unweakened Ratio of a militant optimism. Therefore: the act-content of hope is, as a consciously illuminated, knowingly elucidated content, the positive utopian function.

Bloch's temporal framing of concrete utopianism is generative. It is a thought-behavior that "contains within it the forward surge of an achievement which can be anticipated." To be sure, Bloch maintains fealty to the Marxist tradition and some attachment to its determinacy can be felt in his account of concrete utopia. True to colors, he puts his erudite gloss on the obligatory dismissal of anarchism, personified in Stirner and Proudhon's "petit-bourgeois" sensibilities and in Bakunin's "complete monomania of hatred of authority." Alongside its individualism, Bloch asserts, the anarchist image of freedom is "a bit of future in the future, for which no present prerequisites exist anywhere at all," while "certain anarchic themes" are "already to be found in Marxism, sensibly enough not as present postulates but as prophecies and conclusions." Here Bloch does himself a true disservice by failing to link his concrete utopia to what Boggs would later call the "prefigurative tradition" of anarchism and councilism. Even more than the mental act-content of hope, it is the construction of living alternatives that concretely expresses the positive utopian function. With Marxist prejudices at arm's length, however, a "politics of concrete utopia" might indeed replace "prefigurative politics" as a colorful descriptor for means-ends unity.

While the idea of concrete utopia successfully binds ethical practice to a generative temporal framing, Bloch's attached principle of hope, drawn from the not-yet, requires further modification. What becomes of this principle, once anticipation addresses itself not only to the fruition of concrete-utopian efforts, but also to the inevitable consequences of industrial and neoliberal over-reach? A promising answer may be found in the ideas of "anxious" and "catastrophic" hope, elaborated by Bürge Abiral in her work with practical sustainability activists in Turkey. Unsurprisingly, activists promoting community sustainability, bioremediation, energy transition, and permaculture system design are among the most attuned to prognoses of collapse. Abiral thus associates the idea of "anxious hope" with the grain of anxiety always attending the "belief that small actions matter... that it is not too late to act."

Instead of being an opposite of hope, anxiety is a companion to it. This hope rests on thin ice. The desired results attached to hope, and the effects that are hoped for may never materialize, and the permaculturists are well aware of it... Instead of driving permaculturists to despair, the anxiety that they feel about the future accompanies their hopeful condition and all the more pushes them to act in the present.

Coexisting with anxious hope is catastrophic hope, an affect that "combines a catastrophic vision of the future with the conviction that good things will continue to happen despite and because of approaching disasters." Catastrophic hope serves as a fallback, providing succor even as it attends to worst-case scenarios short of extinction. Such hope can look forward to the adoption of radical alternatives out of the urgency and necessity of a decaying world, and to the revolutionary openings these may involve. Taken together, anxious and catastrophic forms of hope suggest promising alternatives to the temptations of reassurance, prefiguration, and denial.

Hope is in what we do: Occupy the Farm in 2012.

Concepts travel accidental paths. "Left" and "Right" are obvious examples of how pure contingency has shaped our political vocabulary. A concept often becomes institutionalized, not because of its inherent richness or explanatory power, but only because of its emergence or appropriation in a certain context and at a certain time, with the ensuing irreversible process of dissemination and repetition across writers. This is also the case with prefigurative politics. In an email conversation, Boggs attested to me that he arrived at the term on his own, inspired at the time by the ideas of Gramsci and Bookchin, but unaware of its use by the Church Fathers or by Gorz. But even if we grant that the term has reached social movements through a broken line of transmission, its temporal resonance remains preserved in its literal pre-fix, and continues to raise troubling questions for those who employ the term.

Following the ethnologist Jane Guyer's influential discussion of temporal framings as an area in which individuals and groups seek intelligibility, this piece has tried to examine what she called the "still-lingering and newly emergent entailments and dissonances that escape their terms of reference" in the concept of prefigurative politics. In exposing the term's background, I have sought to wrest lived ethical practice out of the ghostly hand of recursive temporality. To reconceive such practice in terms of concrete utopia allows us to better capture its generative framing in the anarchist tradition, while casting off the confusing theological ideas of recursion attached to the term "prefiguration." The approach I have offered seeks to confront a toxic future despite the absence of revolutionary promise, drawing on the anxious and catastrophic hope that accompany efforts to build spaces of freedom, equality and solidarity. Facing forward, we have only one another to rely on.

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Prefigurative Politics, Catastrophe, and Hope

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Anarchists such as David Graeber and Cindy Milstein have used the term "prefigurative politics" to describe the anarchist principle that the ways we organize in the present should reflect the sort of society we hope to create in the future.

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New forms of ethnographic collaborations: Film

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New forms of ethnographic collaborations: Film

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"It was tomorrow" A film on migrants and the future in Italy by Alessandra d'Onofri

https://boap.uib.no/index.php/jaf/article/view/2757/2796

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Laura Bear explaining her research on austerity in North-Eastern India

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Laura Bear explaining her research on austerity in North-Eastern India

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How does austerity affect society and the environment? | LSE Research | Professor Laura Bear

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Collective volume for further reading on magic and capitalism

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Collective volume for further reading on magic and capitalism

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This volume of essays examines the ways in which magical practices are found in different aspects of contemporary capitalist societies. From contract law to science, by way of finance, business, marketing, advertising, cultural production, and the political economy in general, each chapter argues that the kind of magic studied by anthropologists in less developed societies - shamanism, sorcery, enchantment, the occult - is not only alive and well, but flourishing in the midst of so-called 'modernity'.

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Did Archie Comics (that's us) really publish a story in 1997 about Betty attending virtual school in the year 2021?

The answer: Yes.

The source: Us. Archie Comics.

You may have seen the viral post on , or Reddit. And you're probably thinking, "Wow, is this real?!"

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The 6-page story, originally titled "Betty in High School 2021 A.D." was written by George Gladir, with art by Stan Goldberg, Mike Esposito, Bill Yoshida, and Barry Grossman. In this story we find Betty and her friends in Riverdale dealing with the struggles of virtual home schooling!

When this story was reprinted in 2015, the year in the title was changed to "2104 AD" (probably because we didn't have flying cars yet) but rest assured, the original story was published in 1997 and eerily predicted elements of virtual home schooling now commonly found across the world!

Keep scrolling to read the complete story to see how Archie and friends adapt to virtual school and if you want more classic Archie Comics, visit our web store and start shopping and u se the code "2021" to save 40% percent on your next order.*

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Did a classic Archie Comics story predict virtual schooling in 2021? Yes. - Archie Comics

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Did Archie Comics (that's us) really publish a story in 1997 about Betty attending virtual school in the year 2021? The answer: Yes. The source: Us. Archie Comics. You may have seen the viral post on , or Reddit. And you're probably thinking, "Wow, is this real?!"

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Sun Ra movie 1974 "The Space is the Place": Afrofuturism as future-tricking

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Sun Ra movie 1974 "The Space is the Place": Afrofuturism as future-tricking

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Space is the Place (Uncut Version, 1974) - Sun Ra

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Bifo: Let's imagine the virus as the starting point for possibilities that were unthinkable before

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Bifo: Let's imagine the virus as the starting point for possibilities that were unthinkable before

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You are the crown of creation

And you've got no place to go

( Jefferson Airplane)

"The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system. Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word."

(William Burroughs: The ticket that exploded)
February 21st
At Bologna airport, back from Lisbon, an unexpected scene: white overalls and yellow helmet, two people approach the incoming passengers and point a white pistol at their forehead to take the body temperature.

A premonition: are we going to pass through to a new threshold in the process of techno-psychotic mutation?
February 28th
The noisy city is silent, the schools are closed, the theatres closed. No students around, no tourists. Travel agencies are cancelling entire regions from the map.

The recent convulsions of the planetary body have provoked a collapse that obliges the organism to stop, slow down, desert the crowded places and the frantic dally negotiations?

It may be that this shock is the way out that we have so far been unable to find: a psycho-epidemic, a linguistic virus that grows out from a physical virus and mingles with it.

The collapse of the planetary body is the consequence of a biological virus that provokes a (not so) lethal affection, but mainly it is the effect of a viral agent whose action is unknown: neither the immune system nor medical science know anything about the agent. The unknown stops the machine, the biological agent turns into an info-virus, and the info-virus unchains a psychotic reaction.

A semiotic virus in the psychosphere has blocked the abstract functioning of the system, by removing bodies.
March 2nd
William Burroughs employs the figure of the virus as a force hovering between an evolving being and mere replicator. This way he questions the conventional definitions of living and non-living. The bio-virus is a living organism that emanates non-living entities (info-virus) that in turn act on the psychosphere.

A semiotic virus in the psychosphere is blocking the abstract functioning of the machine as bodies are slowing down their movements, and renouncing action at last. So, humans relax their pretence to govern the world, and swim passively in the flow of time. Nothingness swallows one thing after the other, and the anxiety of keeping the world together, that was keeping the world together, relaxes.

There is no panic, no fear, only silence. In the past twenty years, we have rebelled but to no avail, we have nervously mobilised our energies to no avail. So let's stop.

How long will this psychotic fixation that we call coronavirus last? Experts say that springtime will kill the virus, but as far as we know it may boost it. We know almost nothing about the virus, how can we know what temperature it prefers?

The point is not how lethal the virus is. The effect of the virus is not linked to the number of people it kills.

The effect of the virus lies in the relational paralysis it is spreading.

The world economy has been stagnating for years, but we have been unable to recognise it, to accept it, to deal positively with the secular stagnation.

Now the semiotic virus, and the psycho reset that it is bringing about, is helping us in the transition towards immobility.

Can you understand that?
March 3rd
How does the organism react after three decades of hyper-stimulation, ceaseless tension, war for survival and natural selection, how does the social body unable to get free from the addiction that transforms life into permanent stress react? How does the planetary body react, how does the interconnected mind react?

In the second part of 2019, the planetary body entered into a sort of spasm. A convulsion from Hong Kong to Barcelona, Santiago, Quito, Beirut, riots everywhere. The rebellion had no unifiable objectives, and the different riots did not converge towards a common goal. The mind was unable to direct the diverse drives, so the fever grew until the end of the year.

Then Trump killed Soleimani, an act for the jubilation of that murderous people.

Millions of desperate Iranians marched in the streets crying, howling, promising a clamorous revenge. Nothing happened. The Iranian army launched a bomb in the courtyard, and, panicking, the artillery downed a civil airplane. Trump won everything, God is evidently with him: Americans get excited when they see blood, and killers are their heroes.

Nazi-Trumpism and increasing nervous stimulation for everybody. End of story?

Then came the surprise, the unpredictable overturning: the implosion.

After the convulsion, the hyper-excited organism that is humankind has finally been hit by a collapse: a sort of gerontomachia killing mostly octogenarians, has blocked the frantic global machine of the accumulation economy.

Capitalism is an axiomatics: it is based on an indemonstrable hypothesis: that boundless growth is possible and necessary. This presupposition makes accumulation possible, and value extraction mandatory. All the logical and economical concatenations are consistent with that axiom, and nothing can be conceived outside of it. No political way out from the capital axiomatics, no language can say what is outside language, and there is no possibility of destroying the system, as every linguistic process is deploying inside an axiomatics that makes extra-systemic enunciations unworkable.

The only way out is death, as Baudrillard intuited. It is only after death that life will be possible again. After the death of the system the extra-systemic organisms will be allowed to start a new life. provided that they survive, of course, and this is not certain.

The coming recession can kill us, can provoke violent conflicts, epidemics of racism and war. It's good to know this. We are no prepared to think the stagnation as a long-lasting condition, we are not prepared to think frugality, sharing, we are no prepared to dissociate pleasure from consumption.
March 4th
For decades we have been unable to find a way out from the corpse of capitalism, but the shock following the convulsion gives way to a psychological deflation. In order to counter the stagnation and to relaunch profits, capitalism has forced us into constant competition, and has worked us to the bone in exchange for ever-decreasing salaries. Now the virus is deflating the bubble of acceleration. Maybe facing a common invisible enemy will generate nostalgia for social solidarity.

It has been clear in the last decade that stagnation is the future of the world economy, but capital was pushing us to run faster and faster, for the sake of the absolute dogma of Growth. Revolution was unthinkable, as subjectivity was confused, depressed, and the political brain was unable to govern the chaotic complexity of social reality in the networked age.

The virus is paving the way to a subject-less revolution, a purely implosive revolution based on passivity and surrender. Let's surrender. All of a sudden this slogan takes a subversive sound: stop excitement, stop the useless anxiety that is a worsening quality of life.

Literally: nothing can be done anymore. So, let's do nothing.

It seems unlikely that the social organism will recover from this semio-psychotic virus, and the capitalist economy seems doomed.
March 5th
First signs of yelling of the financial system, the economists remark that - differently than in 2008 - the Central Bank and other financial institutions have no tools for relaunching the system.

For the first time the collapse did not come from financial or strictly economic factors: the crisis comes from the body's collapse. The mind has decided to slow down the rhythm, and the general demobilisation is a symptom of surrendering. An effect and also a cause.

The very biological function has entered in passivity mode, for reasons that have nothing to do with conscious will and a political project. Tired of processing neuro-stimuli that are more and more complex, humiliated by impotence in front of the omnipotent techno-financial automaton, the mind has lowered the tension. Psycho-deflation.
March 6th
I know that one can assert the contrary of what I have said: meeting the ethno-nationalist rage, neoliberalism needs to upgrade the process of total abstraction of life. The virus is obliging everybody to stay home, but the merchandise keeps circulating. Bio-political control of populations and restrictions on mobility can help techno-capitalism to get free from social resistance.

According to Srecko Horvat:

"This is the political danger of coronavirus: a global health crisis that suits both the ethno-nationalist goal of fortified borders and racial exclusivity, and the aim of ending the free movement of peoples (especially those from developing nations) but ensuring that the flow of goods and capital remains unchecked. At present, the rising pandemic of fear is more dangerous than the virus itself. The apocalyptic imagery in the media hides the deepening relationship between the far-right and the capitalist economy. And in the same way that a virus needs a living cell to replicate, so will capitalism adapt to the new biopolitics of the 21st century. Coronavirus has already impacted on the global economy, but it won't stop the never-ending circulation and accumulation of capital. If anything, we might soon be facing a darker, and even more dangerous form of capitalism, one that relies on the stronger control and purification of populations."

However, I think that this realistic hypothesis is not realistic enough. Horvat does not consider the subjective side of the collapse and the long lasting effects of the psycho-deflation in terms of economic stagnation.

Capitalism survived the financial collapse of 2008 because the conditions of the collapse were all inside the abstract relation between language, finance and the economy. But it may not survive the collapse that comes from epidemics, here an extra-systemic factor enters the fray.
March 7th
My scientific friend Alex writes from Toronto: "all the computing centres of the world are engaged to find the antidote to coronavirus. [Tonight] I dreamt of the final battle between natural bioviruses and artificial info-virus. In any case the human is not in the game. Apparently."

The biovirus proliferates in the stressed body of the mankind: seems that the lungs are the weak point. In the past few years the respiratory affections spread all over, thanks to the irrespirable air.

Meeting the media system and connecting with the semiotic net, the virus has transferred its debilitating power to the nervous system, to the collective brain.

The health system has been weakened by the cuts to the public spending, imposed by the financial system. The number of general practitioners has decreased, at least in Italy. So now the problem is that there are not intensive care units.

Enter the automaton, and the global computing machine is hunting the formula: counter the biovirus with the info-virus.

Meanwhile energy is withdrawing from the social body and politics is exposing its impotence: will has no grasp on the replicating info-virus.
March 8th
Today I have been obliged to cancel a dinner planned with my brother and sisters. Old people like us are in danger. In Italy the average age of people who die for the virus is 81.

I understand that I am living in a sort of double bind: if I do not cancel the dinner I might be the bearer of the physical virus that may kill brother, who suffers from diabetes. If I cancel the dinner I become a spreader of the psycho-virus, the virus of fear and of isolation.

For the first time I ask myself: what if this nightmare lasts long?
March 11th
The stock market is crashing everywhere. In Milan it is down 17 points, the deepest drop ever.
March 12th
All of Italy is quarantined. The virus is running faster than the measures of containment. I put the sanitary mask on, take the bike to buy newspapers. Kiosks are open, and pharmacies, and food markets. The tobacconist is open. I buy rolling papers to smoke hash during the night. But hash is running low in my small box. Soon I'll run out of dope, and the young pushers have disappeared from the streets.

Trump has used the expression: "foreign virus".

All viruses are foreign, but the president has not read William Burroughs.
March 13th
Workers are on strike because, despite the general quarantine, they must go to factories and work on the assembly line with no sanitary mask and no safety distance.

Nobody can say what will happen next in one month, or six months.

It may be a techno-totalitarian state is the future. In Black Earth Timothy Snyder explains that there is no better condition for the emergence of totalitarian regimes than situations of extreme danger, in which survival is at stake for all.

AIDS prepared virtualisation by spreading fear of bodily contact. Now we might step to a condition of permanent isolation: the new generation might internalise the terror of the other's body.

Terror is when the Imaginary is totally prevailing on the Imagination.

But here we find the possible split: we might come out from the nightmare by the imagination of a possibility that yesterday was unthinkable: frugality, reduction of work time, equality, abandon of the paradigm of growth, investment of the social resources into research, education, health and pleasure.

We cannot know how we'll come out from the pandemics whose conditions have been prepared by the neoliberal cut to public health, by the pollution of air and the exploitation of nervous energies.

We might come out from it in a condition of extreme loneliness and aggressiveness. But we might also come out with the desire for embracing, caressing and for laziness.

The virus is a condition for a mental jump that no politica preaching could produce. Equality is back, at the centre of the scene.

Let's imagine that it is the starting point of the coming time.

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You are the crown of creation And you've got no place to go ( Jefferson Airplane) "The word is now a virus. The flu virus may have once been a healthy lung cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system.

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For people hoping to travel after the crisis passes, Pinterest helps them envision a future that feels impossible to imagine right now.

Getty

Name a travel hack, and Pinterest has seen every variation of it: Keep your bobby pins in empty Tic Tac containers and your Q-tips in old pill bottles. Put a belt inside your shirt collar and rolled-up socks inside your shoes. If you're looking for "25 Things to Do Before Any International Flight" or "10 Genius Ways to Save Money Traveling Europe," the aspirational site has answers.

Overwhelmingly popular with women, especially moms, Pinterest is best known as a user-sourced repository for recipes, DIY projects, lifestyle tips, beauty tutorials, and travel advice. Where Instagram mostly traffics in images of implausible perfection, Pinterest posts tend to offer instructions for achieving those aesthetics. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic has rendered travel and many leisure activities all but impossible, the site has taken on another function: helping people navigate their ambient anxieties.

Like millions of Americans, Angelé Anderfuren was forced to call off a trip she'd been looking forward to for months. She and her family, who live in Arizona, were set to go to Vancouver in June before the COVID-19 crisis struck. In the grand scheme of changes caused by the pandemic, canceled vacations are a minor inconvenience. But for most people, the deferral of nonessential travel-whether to another neighborhood or another country-signifies a major destabilization of normal life, alongside the never-ending news cycle, financial uncertainty, and " plague dread." Which is why Anderfuren and many Pinterest users like her have come to see the site as a welcome window into life after the pandemic. It's a comforting and collaborative way to envision and organize a future that feels harder to imagine than ever.

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"Whenever I'm feeling anxious, the best thing I can do is to plan something," Anderfuren, a lecturer at Northern Arizona University, told me. "At some point, I will get to Vancouver. Right now ... I can travel around the world-on Pinterest," she said with a laugh. Though the trip is off for now, Anderfuren said that she's continuing to save-or pin, in the site's parlance-items to the board that she had originally used to plan the vacation, because the exercise keeps her grounded. She picked Vancouver in part because she's a huge fan of The X-Files, which was primarily filmed in the area. "People have made Google Maps, and they've pinned all the different locations of the places [where] things are shot for different shows," Anderfuren told me of her Vancouver finds. Her 13-year-old daughter, a Nancy Drew obsessive, got excited after hearing that the CW adaptation had been shot there too.

Perhaps surprisingly, pinning has become a quarantine activity for the household. Because they're not in school, Anderfuren's children are spending some of their newfound free time adding their own itinerary ideas to the vacation board. Though the landscape of Arizona allows Anderfuren and her family to retreat to nature relatively often, they largely stay at home; Pinterest is just one way they're dealing with the stresses of social distancing.

It makes sense that Pinterest's aspiration-oriented audience would be primed to use the platform amid such unprecedented global isolation. Kiara Diaz, a 19-year-old college student in Florida, has been on Pinterest for only four months, but in light of current events, she says that the site's travel community has helped her stay optimistic about the remainder of 2020. "You have so much time to look at your boards, plan online, and look at the stuff and save money for what you wanna do in the future," she told me of quarantine.

Diaz continues to pin travel posts to keep focused on the joy that she imagines returning to later. While waiting out the lengthy travel hiatus, Diaz is planning bigger than she otherwise might have, hoping to realize the lofty vacation dreams she had discussed with family members before the pandemic. For example, she and her mother had always talked about going to Greece together, and she and her brother had been wanting to visit Japan. So far, one Pinterest-suggested item has made it onto the latter agenda: "I'm a huge Mario Kart fan, and they have a real-life thing where you can go and go-kart," she said.

Similar to Diaz, the U.K.-based travel blogger Imani Adeyemo has found some of her most interesting travel ideas on Pinterest. (When we chatted, she mentioned learning about snow monkeys in Japan and the best times to see the northern lights in Iceland.) Also like Diaz, Adeyemo has started to rethink how she uses Pinterest as a future-planning tool. Before the coronavirus hit, Adeyemo had robust plans to visit the United States. Now, with that trip indefinitely postponed, and in light of strict social-distancing measures, she's reconsidering whether her earlier travel ambitions were ambitious enough. "In this kind of situation you [want to] go for paradise-type places ... bucket-list places," Adeyemo said of vacation planning during a pandemic. She knows it'll take her a long time to save up for any post-quarantine journeys, but her new goals point to how forced isolation can drive people to seek out grandeur.

In a broader sense, Pinterest offers a reprieve from some of social media's more noxious trends. The site's ethos of self-improvement has long made it an ideal space for travelers uninterested in the more polished, and sometimes performative, vacation recaps common on Instagram and YouTube. That comparative serenity has become especially appealing to Adeyemo in recent weeks. "It's a stressful time, but I think Pinterest is a bit of relief from that," she said, noting that Instagram has more of a competitive atmosphere for travel bloggers.

True to form, some of Instagram's travel influencers have taken to staging elaborate "fauxcations" on their pages. Others are sharing old photos and posing quarantine-inspired questions to maintain engagement. While some Pinterest accounts gain large followings and earn money from their content, a larger segment of people use it with relative anonymity. They share tips that emphasize affordability and the more holistic benefits of travel. In a reflection of the times, guides to virtual travel that frame escapism in accessible terms have become popular.

Even the act of drumming up excitement for a post-pandemic trip can be therapeutic, because it gives our brains something concrete to focus on. That enthusiasm is also the part of travel that's most within our control, even if external circumstances change. Crucially, being able to look ahead to positive experiences helps break up the monotony of everyday life. ( Studies have found that pre-trip anticipation can be the most enjoyable part of a vacation.) As the travel columnist Stephanie Rosenbloom wrote for The New York Times, "[One] advantage to delving into relevant books and photos before a trip is that it provides novelty as an antidote to everyday routines ... Counteracting adaptation increases happiness."

Pinterest has been concretely useful in other ways too: Compared with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, the site takes a more active role in curbing harassment, highlighting health resources, and banning harmful misinformation. When users search for anything directly related to the coronavirus, for example, they're directed to a page that lists guidelines from the World Health Organization. People attempting to cash in on pandemic anxiety with unrelated or dangerous posts have a harder time doing so on Pinterest. Like the Tumblr of years past, Pinterest also features a notable volume of posts -many personal in nature-specifically about mental-health issues, which have generally high engagement rates.

Unlike watching television or movies, browsing and repinning posts on Pinterest is an interactive pastime. And, visually, the platform encourages a calming sense of order. For people dreaming of taking flight after the crisis is over, planning an itinerary can be a productive form of distraction. Even if users such as Anderfuren don't follow through on all the recommendations that they accumulate, there's still satisfaction in having collected them. The curation itself is a small act of creation.

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The Strange Pleasure of Planning a Post-Pandemic Vacation

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For people hoping to travel after the crisis passes, Pinterest helps them envision a future that feels impossible to imagine right now. Name a travel hack, and Pinterest has seen every variation of it: Keep your bobby pins in empty Tic Tac containers and your Q-tips in old pill bottles.

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Blog posts of ethnographic fiction that enact future tricking https://americanethnologist.org/features/pandemic-diaries/post-covid-fantasies

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Future orientations in times of COVID 19

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Future orientations in times of COVID 19

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Interview with Andrew Lakoff about COVID 19, May 2020

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Interview with Andrew Lakoff about COVID 19, May 2020

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As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, Americans have been hearing a lot about an obscure but vast federal trove of emergency supplies, the Strategic National Stockpile.

Much of the discussion concerns its shortcomings. Hospitals and first responders have faced dire shortages of critical equipment such as ventilators and protective masks. It is clear that the national stockpile does not have nearly enough of such supplies to meet the present need.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of things in the stockpile that aren't particularly helpful right now - botulism antitoxin, for instance, and millions of doses of smallpox vaccine. As a scholar who focuses on the role of expert knowledge in addressing an uncertain future, I have long been interested in how decisions are made about what to put into the Strategic National Stockpile.

The question of what to store in case of an emergency points to a broader issue: how security and health officials decide which threats are most urgent to prepare for. This is a matter of collective judgment rather than technical calculation.

Figuring out what to prepare for

The overall contents of the national stockpile are classified, as are its locations. But some details are available in journalistic accounts and governmental reports, including the existence of at least six large warehouses scattered in different parts of the country. It was managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before being transferred to the assistant secretary for preparedness and response in the Department of Health and Human Services in 2018.

The Strategic National Stockpile was established in 1999, as health and security officials in the Clinton administration became increasingly worried about the massive stocks of anthrax and smallpox that the Soviet Union had accumulated. As the Soviet government collapsed and the Cold War ended, it was not clear where all those weaponized pathogens had gone - or who had them. For this reason, much of the Strategic National Stockpile consists of boxes and vials of countermeasures to address potential bioweapon attacks.

In 2001, a policy planning exercise called "Dark Winter," conducted by a group of public officials at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, simulated a devastating smallpox attack on the United States. According to the scenario, developed by a D.C.-based biosecurity think tank, a shortage of smallpox vaccine led to widespread civil unrest and political breakdown. Participants were not able to contain the simulated outbreak using existing public health and policy measures.

In the aftermath of the exercise, officials added enough smallpox vaccine to the Strategic National Stockpile to be able to inoculate the entire U.S. population. The assumption was that to avoid the breakdown seen in "Dark Winter," the country would need to have sufficient vaccine available in advance of a future smallpox attack.

James Gathany/CDC/Wikimedia Commons

New concerns arise

But security officials were also concerned about other potential threats. To respond in the event of a chemical attack, the stockpile accumulated 2,000 packages of nerve agent antidote.

To address the threat of an anthrax attack, it acquired stocks of a novel anthrax vaccine procured from a biotechnology company under a US$1.5 billion contract with the government's Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.

In the mid-2000s, planners began to focus on the possibility that the highly virulent H5N1 bird flu would mutate to become easily transmissible among humans. They added millions of doses of antiviral drugs - effective for flu, but not the coronavirus - and influenza vaccine to the stockpile.

Much of the effort and money - an annual budget of around $600 million - involved in maintaining the Strategic National Stockpile is devoted to ensuring that these biomedical countermeasures are stored properly and kept up-to-date.

Unknowns remain

As a result of all those efforts, the Strategic National Stockpile built up over the last 20 years was well-prepared for a range of possible threats - just not for the event that actually occurred.

One lesson is that stockpiling is not just a matter of storing large quantities of supplies and equipment; it also requires considering the larger question of which dangers are most pressing to address. Exercises and simulations can tell security planners where vulnerabilities lie in the present, but they cannot reveal what will actually occur in the future.

Given the current emphasis on maintaining limited inventories and carefully calibrated supply chains designed to deliver things only when they are needed, it may seem antiquated to store large amounts of supplies to remain available over an indefinite time horizon.

In fact, this type of government stockpiling of essential supplies is rooted in the era of industrial mobilization for total war, when nations' entire economies were converted to support a massive war effort.

AP Photo

Waging an uncertain war

The term "stockpile" did not come into common use until the ramp-up to World War II.

As part of its industrial mobilization effort, the U.S. government began storing large quantities of "critical and strategic materials " - basic industrial ingredients like copper, tungsten and rubber - in anticipation of a cut-off of foreign supplies. After the war, government stockpiling expanded to include supplies necessary for the maintenance of civilian life, such as electrical generators, oil, food and medicine.

During the Cold War, the U.S. maintained an extensive medical stockpile designed for use in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. By 1955, the civil defense medical stockpile contained 9 million doses of penicillin, 33 million capsules of broad-spectrum antibiotics, 2 million sets for collecting and transfusing whole blood, 132,000 radiological monitoring instruments, and over 25 million doses of vaccines and antitoxins for controlling communicable diseases and defending against biological warfare.

These supplies were located in 32 storage sites around the country, in small communities located within four hours' drive of major cities.

However, as weapons became more powerful, the public grew increasingly skeptical that nuclear war could be survived. As a result, congressional support for maintaining the stockpile diminished.

By the late 1960s, over $100 million in unused medical supplies were gradually deteriorating in storage facilities around the country. The federal government disposed of its entire medical stockpile and closed down the program in 1974.

It was not until the late 1990s, in the face of the newly perceived threat of bioterrorism, that the U.S. government returned to the technique of stockpiling medical supplies for a future calamity.

Today, the Strategic National Stockpile is designed to protect the population against a wide range of potential threats - but does not have enough of what is needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.

This points to the limitations of stockpiling as a measure of security. Stockpiled supplies inevitably degrade or become obsolete; the maintenance of a stockpile is continually subject to budgetary struggles, in part because it is impossible to know whether its supplies will ever be needed. The stockpile is assembled in preparation for a particular imagined future, but the actual future rarely turns out as anticipated.

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Coronavirus: Strategic National Stockpile was ready, but not for this

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As the COVID-19 crisis unfolds, Americans have been hearing a lot about an obscure but vast federal trove of emergency supplies, the Strategic National Stockpile. Much of the discussion concerns its shortcomings. Hospitals and first responders have faced dire shortages of critical equipment such as ventilators and protective masks.

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If you are curious about comparing pandemic responses across the world

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If you are curious about comparing pandemic responses across the world

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Coronavirus continues to spread worldwide with more than 120 million confirmed cases across 190 countries and two million deaths as of mid-March 2021. For nearly a year, governments and societies have been turned inwards to fight an invisible enemy, exposing competing structures, vulnerabilities, and political priorities. The pandemic has also given rise to an 'infodemic' of narratives and counter-narratives about what kinds of states are inherently better suited to combatting the virus.

This Interactive explores how more than 100 countries with publicly available and comparable data on the virus have managed the pandemic in the 43 weeks following their hundredth confirmed case of COVID-19, using data available to 13 March 2021. Countries have been sorted into broad categories - by regions, political systems, population size, and economic development - to determine whether significant variations exist between different types of states in the handling of the pandemic.

Some countries have managed the pandemic better than others - but most countries outcompeted each other only by degrees of underperformance. The severity of the pandemic in many countries has also changed significantly over time, with infections surging again in many places that had apparent success in suppressing initial outbreaks.

No single type of country emerged the unanimous winner in the period examined. Variations between individual countries were far more substantial than those between broad categories of countries. Nor did a single theory convincingly explain the differences observed in national outcomes, despite some health measures proving far more effective than others.

However, certain structural factors appear to be more closely associated with positive outcomes. For example, smaller countries (with populations of fewer than 10 million people) proved more agile than the majority of their larger counterparts in handling the health emergency for most of 2020.

On the other hand, levels of economic development or differences in political systems between countries had less of an impact on outcomes than often assumed or publicised. There may be some truth in the argument put forward by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama that the dividing line in effective crisis response has not been regime type, "but whether citizens trust their leaders, and whether those leaders preside over a competent and effective state". In general, countries with smaller populations, cohesive societies, and capable institutions have a comparative advantage in dealing with a global crisis such as a pandemic.

Systemic factors alone - a society's regional provenance, political system, economic development, or size - cannot account fully for the differences observed in global crisis responses. The results point to some of the strengths and vulnerabilities stemming from the way different countries are set up to deal with a public policy challenge of this scale. But policy choices and political circumstances of the day appear to be just as important in shaping national responses to the pandemic.

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Coronavirus continues to spread worldwide with more than 120 million confirmed cases across 190 countries and two million deaths as of mid-March 2021. For nearly a year, governments and societies have been turned inwards to fight an invisible enemy, exposing competing structures, vulnerabilities, and political priorities.

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Intersecting Crises | American Ethnological Society

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An earthen embankment breached by saline floodwaters following cyclone Amphan in Lahiripur village in the West Bengal Sundarbans. Photo by Ayan Ghosh. (India)

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What COVID vaccination campaign may say about the global present past and future.

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What COVID vaccination campaign may say about the global present past and future.

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ast year, European and North American countries managed to ignore warnings of a highly contagious pandemic - dragging their feet in setting protocols in place, delaying mandatory mask-wearing, and giving mostly miserly handouts to the millions struggling to survive in lockdown. Though the virus originated in China, not the west, western countries imagined that the virus would not touch them in quite the same way: Europe and the US entertained the fantasy that they alone were the captains of a more sophisticated political and bureaucratic system that could not only withstand a global pandemic but also remain largely immune to its threats. This year, these same countries have managed to outdo themselves by vacating their role on the international stage - hoarding vaccines and practicing only the most expedient, shallow pretenses of vaccine diplomacy. The wealthiest western nations have wiped their hands clean of any responsibility to slow a pandemic they helped magnify and spread.

Rich countries with 14% of the world's population have secured 53% of the best vaccines. Almost all of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines will go to rich countries. The Moderna vaccine will go to rich countries exclusively; it is not even being offered to the poor. In fact, nine out of 10 people in poor countries may never be vaccinated at all. Washington is sitting on vaccines, making sure no one gets any while the US needs them. The European Union has exported 34m doses to, of all places, Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong - countries that have no problem sourcing or paying for vaccines. In fact, the EU sent about 9m doses to the UK, a country which, no longer in the EU, also has what amounts in practice to an export ban of its own, official denials notwithstanding.

It's unlikely that Moderna's chief executives feel badly about the unvaccinated poor. The company forecasts sales of over $18bn for 2021, pushing Moderna into profit for the first time since its founding 11 years ago. Pfizer hasn't done too badly either; they're expecting a cool $15bn in sales.

The wealthiest western nations have wiped their hands of any responsibility to slow a pandemic they helped spread

South Africa, Africa's worst-hit country, is buying Oxford's AstraZeneca vaccine at nearly two and a half times the per-unit price of European countries. AstraZeneca's French division told the press in November 2020 that it was capping the price per dose at €2.50, but somehow European countries are buying doses below the cap and African countries far above it. Canada has bought more doses per head than anyone else - enough doses to vaccinate every single Canadian five times over. But the entire continent of Africa - home to 1.3 billion people - has been allocated a total of 300m doses. As of the last week of January, in all of sub-Saharan Africa, only 25 vaccines had been administered. Twenty-five. The director general of the World Health Organization warned that the world was on the brink of a "catastrophic moral failure". But the west has passed the brink a long time ago.

Israel, administering over 150,000 doses of vaccine a day in the dawn of the new year, leading the world in vaccine rollout, is pointedly, purposefully, not vaccinating the Palestinian people it occupies. When asked about it, the Israeli health minister sniffed that Israel had no legal obligation to vaccinate Palestinians. What then were the obligations of the Palestinians, he asked, to look after dolphins in the Mediterranean? It is a statement too stupid - too cruel - to answer. Yes, you have an obligation to the people you occupy; yes, you have an obligation to "the sea". Israel wants to gift its surplus supply of Moderna vaccines to countries that moved their embassies to Jerusalem (or have promised to), such as Hungary, the Czech Republic and Honduras. A virus, for some, is manna. Let the Palestinians die.

While western countries were barging ahead, stockpiling vaccine doses for themselves, China and Russia were practicing vaccine diplomacy. China offered free doses of their vaccines to 13 countries; between the two of them, China and Russia have supplied more than 800m doses to 41 countries.No one imagines they do this out of charity, but it's a clear, resounding sign of the changing world order. Eight hundred million to the EU's paltry 34m. The US and UK have given nothing at all. This petty vaccine nationalism is irreparably damaging the west, betraying their claims to magnanimity, inclusive global leadership and concern for global health.

Covid-19 vaccines arrive at Harare international airport in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is one of a dozen African countries to receive donated vaccines from China. Photograph: Tafadzwa Ufumeli/Getty Images

Covid-19 has brought us new models: Vietnam, New Zealand, Iceland, Rwanda - smaller countries, striving countries, poorer countries. Those countries protected their populations, they set protocols in motion, they saved lives. Until July 2020, according to the New York Times, Vietnam, a nation of 97 million people, was the largest country in the world to have not confirmed a single fatality from the coronavirus. By November 2020, it had registered just over 1,000 cases. On the other hand, a year into the pandemic, half a million Americans have died from Covid-19, more Americans than died in combat in the first and second world wars and the Vietnam war combined. Yet, even as its country suffered and struggled, the mighty power still found time to bomb Syria. Joe Biden doesn't herald a new start in American politics; he is a continuation of destructive, reckless American power. Trump, Biden and Obama are all guardians of a power that has no funds for healthcare, no cash for stimulus checks, but is rich in bombs and weaponry, flush with money for war.

One-third of US military personnel have refused to take the Covid vaccine, hesitant and suspicious. It is a special irony that the very organisation that had no doubts about invented weapons of mass destruction is grappling with skepticism about a vaccine. The same organisation that didn't evince any trepidation over the specialised brutalities of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo is now paralysed by the ethical quandaries of the anti-vaxxer movement. The soldiers of the largest, most sophisticated military in the world choose not to do anything at all while hundreds of millions of people in the non-western world don't have the luxury to question a potentially lifesaving vaccine - it's not even being offered to them.

It was the hyper-capitalists who spread the plague, got rich off the vaccine, and now will heal comfortably, first in the queue for the best vaccines that they don't even want. The poor who struggled to eat and survive, lockdown after lockdown, will wait in line and die. Covid-19 will destroy many things, but hopefully too the broken scaffolding of our moral imagination.

Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani author of fiction and nonfiction. Her novel The Runaways was published last year by Verso Books

This article was amended on 17 March 2021 to add qualification to mention of a UK vaccines export ban.

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The world's richest countries are hoarding vaccines. This is morally indefensible | Fatima Bhutto

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ast year, European and North American countries managed to ignore warnings of a highly contagious pandemic - dragging their feet in setting protocols in place, delaying mandatory mask-wearing, and giving mostly miserly handouts to the millions struggling to survive in lockdown.

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Temporalities of the future: knowledge and affect

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Temporalities of the future: knowledge and affect

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Starting here with first insights into affect theory

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Starting here with first insights into affect theory

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Introduction to Affect Theory: Brian Massumi & Eve Sedgwick

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Recent explaination of the yield curve, helps understand Zaloom's piece.

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Recent explaination of the yield curve, helps understand Zaloom's piece.

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How The Yield Curve Predicted Every Recession For The Past 50 Years

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About 3-dimensional non-Euclidian conceptions of time (and space)

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About 3-dimensional non-Euclidian conceptions of time (and space)

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Would Alien (Non-Euclidean) Geometry Break Our Brains?

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Painting: Morning of the Motherland, Fyodor Shurpin, 1948

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Painting: Morning of the Motherland, Fyodor Shurpin, 1948

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The painting exemplifies the futural aspect of Ssorin-Chaikov's article:

The painting "depicts a mature and distinguished Stalin with graying hair, seasoned by the trials of war. He stands in a field at daybreak bathed in sunlight and dressed in a resplendent white uniform, his coat draped casually over one arm. Behind him, the sprawling landscape bears witness to his achievements: smoke billows from factory chimneys, transmission towers string electrical wires into the countryside, and agricultural machinery drudges industriously across the freshly plowed land. This leader, however, is not content with merely surveying his previous successes. His gaze extends beyond the picture frame and into the direction of the morning sunlight. Shurpin’s image, therefore, not only celebrates industrialization, electrification, and collectivization, but also alludes to the country’s continued development, promising an even brighter future for the Soviet people."
Source: https://postwar.hausderkunst.de/en/artworks-artists/artworks/the-morning-of-our-motherland-der-morgen-unseres-vaterlandes

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565

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Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565

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A great talk explaining the interference between past, present and future through quanten physics

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A great talk explaining the interference between past, present and future through quanten physics

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Karen Barad: Troubling Time/s, Undoing the Future

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Waiting - Shahram Khosravi & Dagmawi Yimer

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You are struggling with the heavy theoretical load of this week's compulsory reading? . Don't worry, there will be time for questions and discussion.

Here is some extra audio and video material that may help you understand how these two texts connect

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Audio of the short story "The ones who walk away from Omelas" by Ursula Le Guin, cited in Povinelli 2008

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Audio of the short story "The ones who walk away from Omelas" by Ursula Le Guin, cited in Povinelli 2008

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The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. le Guin by glumshoe

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Modernity and Speed: Talk by Sociologist Hartmut Rosa on Acceleration

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Modernity and Speed: Talk by Sociologist Hartmut Rosa on Acceleration

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LSE Events | Professor Hartmut Rosa | Do We Really Live in an Acceleration Society?

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Article by Felix Ringel "Coronavirus: how the pandemic has changed our perception of time"

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Article by Felix Ringel "Coronavirus: how the pandemic has changed our perception of time"

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The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed our lives. Take something as fundamental as our experiences of space: our mobility has become severely restricted - reduced to jogs or walks a few kilometres around our homes. Perhaps less obviously, the lockdown has also affected our experiences of time.

As an anthropologist of time, I investigate how human beings relate to time, particularly during crises. The current crisis, like many others, could be seen to deprive us of our " temporal agency " - the ability to structure, manage and manipulate our experience of time. For example, many of us will have already lost track of time, wondering which day of the week it is. It feels a bit as if time has come to a standstill.

The most important feature of our experiences of time during crisis is what anthropologist Jane Guyer termed " enforced presentism ": a feeling of being stuck in the present, combined with the inability to plan ahead. We currently don't know when we can see our loved ones again, or when we can go on holiday. More severely, many of us don't know when we'll go back to work - or indeed if we have a job to go back to. In the midst of this crisis, it is hard to imagine a future that looks different than the present.

Tricking time

So how do we cope? I argue that this crisis has prompted us to be more creative with our relations to time. Most of us are even " tricking time" to some extent, as Roxana Moroşanu and I termed it in a recent paper. We speed up and slow down, bend and restructure time in many different ways.

"Corona time" in fact consists of many different times, such as the "time of lockdown", "quarantine time" or "home office time". We have learnt to inhabit these new presents. These lessons are deeply personal and differ in each household. Still, they speak of an experience shared worldwide.

Over the last few months, you will have deployed many temporal strategies yourself. This might include the construction of new rhythms and temporal structures. Daily exercises, weekly family Zoom meetings, a 6pm glass of wine or weekend cake baking all mark the passage of time. And home schooling has demanded new schedules - not to mention endless persuasion.

The clock of capitalism

For many, this feeling of stuckness is not new. Those who cannot keep up with the ever accelerating global flows of money, ideas, commodities and people often feel left behind. Critics of capitalism have therefore argued we need a slowing down of time.

In my work on postindustrial cities, I have studied our relationship with the future in times of economic crises. These crises are part and parcel of capitalism, as Marx told us more than 150 years ago. After the second world war, however, welfare states largely kept economic crises at bay.

But the 1980s neoliberal reforms of capitalism resulted in a dismantling of the welfare state. National governments stopped fathoming five-year plans. Just-in-time production and new technological developments, such as the internet, led to an unprecedented acceleration of time.

Temporally, neoliberalism has put humanity into crisis mode for several decades already. Without job security and in ever changing markets, many of us struggle to plan ahead - getting stuck in the present. The way to beat this stuckness is to "muddle through", or as the British more heroically say, "keep calm and carry on".

Many postindustrial cities, such as those in Wales and north-east England, have lost a take on their collective prospects. After years of industrial boom and high employment rates, many inhabitants now feel their towns have "no future". The dismantling of local industries, such as mining, has led to high unemployment and unforeseen levels of migration out of the areas. The young and well-educated move away in search for jobs, while those who stay behind witness the slow decline of their hometown.

To overcome a lack of foresight and enforced presentism, their urban governments have had to reclaim the future planning rather than just responding to events. Despite ongoing decline, they have had to ask themselves: how do we want our city to look, say, in five years time?

Reclaiming the future

This applies to our current situation, too. Now is the time to think ahead about how life should look like in the post-COVID-19 future - we need to trick time further than for our personal households. Although a vaccine or proper treatment for COVID-19 is still not in sight, we have to try to shake the feeling of being trapped in the present. We now need to engage with the emerging politics of time, which will determine our near future.

For example, we will soon see different attempts at declaring an end to the pandemic, based on, for example, low numbers of new infections, and we should carefully assess them. We will also have to ask more fundamental questions about when this crisis is over: how can we solve the ongoing climate crisis? How can we prevent social inequalities in an unforeseen economic recession? How can we prevent another pandemic? The politics of time will also be crucial retrospectively: Have governments acted quickly enough?

Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism's temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth.

Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future - even when we feel stuck in the present.

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Coronavirus: how the pandemic has changed our perception of time

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The COVID-19 pandemic has completely changed our lives. Take something as fundamental as our experiences of space: our mobility has become severely restricted - reduced to jogs or walks a few kilometres around our homes. Perhaps less obviously, the lockdown has also affected our experiences of time.

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Talk on Futurability by Franco Bifo Berardi

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Talk on Futurability by Franco Bifo Berardi

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Franco Bifo Berardi on "futurability" at The Influencers 2015 (part 1 of 2)

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What happens to political thought, practice, and imagination when they lose hold on “the future”? The future is a great and empowering myth, but few believe it any longer: the future is unpredictable. Contradictory evidences of present and upcoming scenarios are well known and yet their consistency is often null, dissipated in the schemes of financial capitals and the never ending flows of meaningless content over ubiquitous communication media.

http://theinfluencers.org/en/franco-bifo-berardi

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A different approach: Futures anthropology, a talk by Sarah Pink

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A different approach: Futures anthropology, a talk by Sarah Pink

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Prof Dr Sarah Pink: Futures anthropology, emerging technology and anticipating experience