The Future is Totally Crazy

I also wrote a new article for The Brutalitarian, during an accidental caffeine and pseudoepinephrine frenzy.

Don't worry, I did go back and edit it later.

But, the article is still a thick circus of time-travel, Internet/informational riffing, Kantian metaphysics, and Science Fact/Fantasy.

It all started when @greatdismal, (who I guess is some guy who writes SF books), posted a flurry of updates about atemporality. It got me all in a tizzy, because I have this little twitch about time and history (yes I am the sort of person that has a twitch about time and history). It has a lot to do with politics and post-structural theory, but to cut off the story of my theoretical life, let's just say I have a certain feeling that the world would be a much better place if we all thought about time more in terms of Bergson's concept of "duration", rather than according to a humanistic timeline of history. More feeling, less fascism.

Anyway, you may say I'm a loony, anarchist metaphysician, but I'm not the only one.

So, reading Mssr. Gibson's tweets got me all a-thinking, and I had to go read the second section of Bergson's Time and Free-Will again. Which naturally, got me thinking of Kant by way of Deleuze. (Both of Deleuze's essays about Bergson and Kant respectively, are very highly reccomended. By someone, probably. By someone with an interest in blowing your mind.)

Now, I was planning one of my "positivity" posts about Kant's metaphysical exposition of time, because it's pretty cool, and one of those things I keep returning to in philosophy, case in point. But because I was also thinking about cyber-space, and because I am always, always thinking about the Internet (help me. please, somebody help me) I put away that blog post for a minute, and started thinking about cyber-time.

At this point, I was already on my second cup of coffee, and then had a bout of sneezes, which sent me to the medicine cabinet.

The rest, as they say, is totally cognized cyber-time.

But this article is actually pretty good. Yes, it is bizarre how 5000 words can land in a flurry of three hours, and yes, it will probably not appeal to anyone not interested in the metaphysics of time and cognition, and yes, I had to go back and do a significant amount of editing upon the realization I had used the word "consciousness" over fifty times in six pages. But, I already did all that editing! Now it's pretty tight. If I added a little Bergson and made the language a bit more academic, I would totally turn this in as a course paper.

But seeing as the only course I'm currently enrolled in is, "A Literature Tinker's Guide to the Ever-Increasing Spiral of Crackpotism", (my average is currently a C+) I have instead uploaded it to the Internet.

Basically, the gist is, although the timeline of history is a perfectly good metaphor for our temporal understanding of the world, the Internet and a capacity for abstract thinking we will simply abbreviate as "SF" is allowing us to get more towards the root of our intuitions of time-relations--and as such, we are now, bit by bit, being able to violate that temporal timeline in what we might, according to the metaphor, call "time-travel".

LOL

So, there you have it. Crackpot Metaphysics Ltd, free for you on the Internet.