Saving Time - Part 2

Photo by Dave Sebele

This summary is a long time coming – but as we know from our first discussion on “time” – far from being something universal and fungible, it is a social construct that models and reflects the values that we hold collectively as communities and societies. So, the long story short is that this piece has come when it has come; and perhaps it comes at exactly the moment it is supposed to.

Our first conversation drew inspiration from Jenny Odell’s great book, “Saving Time” as we explored our own understanding of time and tried to unpack the cultural construct we had all adopted and what that meant for us. We shared other conceptions of time that we knew about and examined how our own struggles with “use” and “spending” and “maximization” of time impacted our happiness and notions of success.

Our second conversation picked up from the same place as we considered how much of “time” we’ve lost. That is, how ancient and ancestral conceptions of time have been subsumed by the more dominant western, scientific, efficiency-oriented conception of it; even while acknowledging that vestiges and examples of these alternate understandings still survive and even thrive in different communities.

Indeed, since we began these conversations late last year, I find myself hearing more and more discussions in the mainstream around the ideas of time. Not only are people beginning to see, share, and value other ways of relating to time that still exist in the world, they are also waking up to how impactful our own adopted paradigm is for each of us. Just a couple days ago, one of my favorite shortform podcasts from NPR, Shortwave, aired an episode that looked at the “illusion of time”. It took a physics angle to the question of time, but nevertheless, I love that the mind-bending idea of questioning time is gaining a little traction in our world.

It’s exactly topics like these – fundamental and foundational assumptions that build the world we know – that I think futures thinking is most valuable in unearthing and unlocking.

But what happens when the foundation of futures itself is challenged? When the very conception of time that undergirds our approach is called into question? It’s something that has bugged me about our field for a while – that often in how we talk about the future, how we visualize it, how we explore it, we are embedding a deeply western cultural ethos of linear progress into our work even if some of us strive to explore a multitude of possibilities that might embrace other models. It’s what leads so many “futurists” down a techno-optimist path, what imbues space exploration with such attraction, what causes the continued marginalization of ancestral, indigenous wisdom and experiences.

While the Collective was started with the explicit intention of exploring the meaning and realization of decolonizing futures, Odell’s book gave me pause. Can futures be decolonized? Can we disentangle the field from it’s theoretical and cultural underpinnings of determinism that Wendy Schultz pointed out as dominating the field since the 50s? And if not, what can we do with the “truth” that Odell shares – that “…the people who stand to gain the most from determinism (in others) are typically the people doing the determining”?

In much of my work with folks unfamiliar with futures, I extoll the benefits of being able to take a broader view of time; how with distance from our present we can gain perspective on things that feel all-important now but that are unimportant in the long arc of history. And while that message is often true (and helpful) for many of the corporate fires that people find themselves fighting on a daily basis, it is also a slippery slope that leads to real, lived crises affecting communities today being minimized and ignored.

Odell uses climate change (and the preferred futures of fossil fuel companies that invariably include their existence and importance) but other societal issues serve as equally useful mirrors. Racial injustice, pollution, homelessness, cultural erasure, structural discrimination, forced migrations – problems that need time, energy, investment to solve today but that are often de-emphasized in favor of building a distant future where they might, maybe, no longer exist.

A cynical view is that those doing the determining are doing this on purpose; a more generous(?) view might be that the very nature of expanding our time horizons to more distant futures by definition compresses our present into an ever smaller space. In doing so, the complex, wicked problems that dominate our vision today become smaller and more easily brushed aside. Intentional or not, the diminishment of the problems felt most often by those NOT doing the determining is an almost unavoidable effect of having a longer perspective. Coupled with an inability or unwillingness to adequately examine and value our past, it is not surprising that futures thinking has historically marginalized those who are already most marginalized.

I’ve struggled with all of this for a few months now (and disclaimer: being on this intellectual struggle bus is part of why I’ve procrastinated this summary for so long.) While we clearly need to be bringing far greater variety and diversity of voices into the mix, it is increasingly unclear to me if these efforts can address the core issue: that futures thinking may by definition be reinforcing a conception of the world that is rooted in an inherently inequitable mindset. Or in other words, can fixing how we future actually decolonize the practice of futuring?

I cannot speak for the entire Collective, but I do know that we all gathered because we all futured and valued how different a futures approach feels versus the more dominant, incentive driven, short-term approaches many of us have grown up with. There is power in futures thinking, if even to demonstrate that viable ways of thinking exist beyond what we have been taught. Yet we also all gathered with a feeling that something wasn’t quite well, even with this new approach.

I want to borrow something else from Jenny Odell in considering this dilemma. She explores what time might look like if we thought of it spatially. What if we did the same? Instead of thinking of the future as a function of time, we thought of it as a function of place; that change happens not as time passes, but as we change spaces? In this then, the value of futuring – that of surfacing possibilities that otherwise might not be considered – draws upon not just what is new, but what is old? Not just what is changed, but what remains? Where going “back” is just as valuable as going “forward?” If the conception of time that underpins futures thinking is colonial in nature, what if we decouple this thinking from time itself? Instead, we can root ourselves in the present moment, peering around us at all of the possibilities that have existed and that haven’t yet. It would be, as Jenny Odell might frame it, a more human approach.

“To live in the gap between past and future is quite simply the human condition, even if culturally dominant and politically convenient views of time, history, and the future obscure it from us. Looking mournfully to the future in which something new can never happen, we can’t see ourselves standing in the gap, the only place where anything new is capable of happening.”