The timedrift is over. It's just now again, folks.
Timedrifters start their story with the day the drift happened to them. That was September 2, 2019 in the future/past. As I was not there in that beginning, I’m going to start with the end of the time drift. Or, as I like to call it, yesterday.
Yesterday had been the unfortunate focus of all my whenevers. As a kid, this date was a distant storm that people spoke of with horrible fascination. Would time again jump back fifty-two years? We just had to wait and see. And yesterday evening we waited and saw.
* * *
Nothing happened. Time kept on going. You knew that, because I’m still here.
* * *
Yesterday was insane. We were seriously terrified, all us realtimer afterkinders in the room. We were born after 1967. Another time drift would simply annihilate us. For all we knew, the moment will come, and we will vanish. Never even born, but still alive in our parents’ memories. They would go back in 1967 yet again. Some days they would mourn our non-existence. Not a whole lot of consolation for us.
As for us, our beings would end in an instant. And that instant will happen later today. We see the clock, the count-down has begun. That’s honest terror.
I imagine some residue of trauma, a need for therapy down the road. At the time, at that actual moment, we were all holding hands, making eye contact, and loving one another. You can imagine the relief when the moment came and went.
When I was growing up, my parents were firm on this point: September 2, 2019 would be just another day in my future. No reason to be afraid. But then, they had already been through the previous September 2, 2019, and they ended up in 1967. They have no reason to be afraid.
That outcome would be forbidden to me and mine. At our wedding, Scott and I both vowed to live as fully and love as completely as we could until this particular September 2, and beyond, if that came to be.
When our children were born, this date loomed larger and closer, like a shroud over their future. We could not free them from this feeling. The entire planet found a singular attention to this future instant. The period at the end of everyone’s sentence.
My whole family, Scott, Laura, Louis, and I traveled to Colombo, Sri Lanka, and then, by train, up to Kandy. Kandy is Nimali’s hometown, where she and “aunt” Sophie have now semi-retired. Their adult daughter, Anjali, became our main local guide. Anjali’s fiancé, Arjun, is with his parents today. Like millions of others across the planet, they had put off their wedding until after September 2, just in case. Millions of others had moved their weddings up, just in case. Anjali’s sister, Dayani, was in Colombo to be with their grandparents, their ammachi and appachchi.
My “uncle” David and his wife Lis, their daughter Anna, and her husband Tony, and their young son Andrew, had flown in a few days before us. My four grandparents, Donna and Jeffrey Stapleton, and Amy and Ralph Dobbins, remained in Timberville, Washington, not quite up for the long plane ride. Same with Sophie’s family, who are doing Time Day in Texas. Nimali’s brother’s family stayed in nearby Badulla, where he has official business.
On the train up to Kandy, Dad reminded me that I promised to do my own “report” on my experiences in the new-now. This is it, Jeremy.
* * *
Kandy
Kandy seemed an appropriately special place for this particular day: lovely hill-side town, great friends, comfy B&B near to Sophie and Nimali’s house. Here, the timedrift moment happens at dinner time, not in the middle of the night.
The question was: will I be around for dessert? Nobody knew.
For the past few days, the timedrifters wandered off in twos and threes. Anjali was tasked with leading us “young ones” on tourist site-seeing missions to the Botanical Gardens and the Temple of the Tooth. I asked Mom what was up.
She said they could not resist preloading their expectations for another trip back to 1967. What would they do differently? How can life continue to have meaning if it’s one long circle that always ends up back in childhood? They don’t want to alarm or annoy us realtimers by conversations about a future we would never know.
* * *
The final moment is imminent and also immanent. Hours and then minutes from now. The timedrifters spent much of Nimali’s classic Ceylonese dinner reliving their prior September 2, 2019 day, and their latest timedrifter gossip. Big news… Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison were seen together playing golf at Pebble Beach. Who cares? The rest of us at dinner pretended to listen.
Air traffic across the world has been grounded for an hour. Same with cars and busses. Trains, even bicycles. We all sat still, expectant. The grandfather clock in the dining room ticked away. Its big hand moved in visible increments.
For the past week, Dad kept saying that this would be a non-event. The drift was a one-time anomaly: a special type of a closed time-life curve. The other timedrifters all agreed, which make it seem like they were doing their best to keep us from totally freaking out.
Sophie had the radio tuned to a news station, where a litany of global reports reflected a planetary pause in normal life. One thing about this Time Day; we are all in it together.
Anjali decided to video the last five minutes of the time quake. This video will now join millions of others up on the web, probably on OurMedia, the top internet video sharing service.
She circled around the long dining room table, her phone camera picking up our faces. At first, our parents were bantering with one another, even laughing. The rest of us looked like we had been held captive and were forced to watch someone microwave kittens.
A sallow terror widened our eyes as we listened to the radio countdown. We held hands around the table, motionless. It could have been a horror movie seance scene. When the countdown hit one minute, even the timedrifters drew quiet.
Tick tock. Tick tock. The clock announced its time as the radio countdown approached zero, and then moved to plus numbers again. Anjali whooped and turned the camera back on her face.
“And that’s the way it is,” she said and pushed stop.
Since the precise moment was unknown, we sat in suspense, our curry cooling on our plates, until another fifteen minutes elapsed. The radio announcer came on and proclaimed that the time drift had ended and we were back to normal planetary spacetime.
The world did not end. Nobody vanished. The time drift is now over. Done. History.
Whew!
We are all realtimers now. Our collective tomorrows lie in the unknown future, where they belong.
Dessert was scrumptious. Rice pudding and pistachio ice cream. Laughter and tears. Good tears. We needed them to wash away our tension. Not enough, so we got up and walked, almost ran, into town, where thousands were gathered in an impromptu festival of life on the temple square.
* * *
So we continue. Life moves on. Our kids will grow up into a society only partly distorted by that singular time-warp event. All of their friends and most of their friends’ parents are real-timers, like them, like me.
I really do not appreciate all the “thought leader” ex-timedrifters still speculating in print how they would have forged an even better world given another shot at it. Dude… your “shot at it” would come at the expense of me and my husband and kids and almost everyone I know, who would vanish in the process. So please, New Yorker and The Atlantic, stop printing that shit. I told my dad if The Next Wave published one of these stories, I’d cancel my subscription. He reminded me that he stopped being the chief editor decades ago.
Timedrifters love to ramble on about how much better things are now than before. Dad talks a lot about how we’ve dodged global climate change. The way he tells this, it sounds like the plot to a bad science fiction horror flick, where greedy humans ignored obvious findings about the impacts of living beyond the planetary carrying capacity. Oceans will rise, droughts will wither the crops, super-heated days will kill millions. It was all in the science. But did we care? Not a bit.
By the time I was in grade school, we had already given up most gas-powered cars and coal-fired energy. The planet was healing. So we were told. It’s like all those atomic weapons that got dismantled in the 1980s. Atomic bombs: that’s a sci-fi movie theme that had some legs. I loved the remake of Doctor Strangelove.
OK, now is better, but not for everyone. At the start, realtimers had to live their young adult lives in competition with siblings, friends, and strangers who already had an extra half-century of experience.
Take the 1984 Olympics. Something like eighty-nine percent of the medals went to young timedrifter athletes, who had also medaled in future/past Olympics. It seemed equally predictable and unfair.
If you are a realtimer, it’s bad enough looking around and seeing that you are competing with the best athletes in your age group, but then you see Carl Lewis, say, or Evelyn Ashford, or whomever, and you realize they’ve not only done this before, but did it several times over. They are your age. Kind of. And they are even better than before, since they’ve eliminated the training mistakes from their previous lives.
On the other side, the pressure on these famous athletes to outperform their prior lives is horrible. How do you expect to match four or five gold medals in one Olympic game? In 1988, the Olympics considered doing twin events, with only realtimers in one of them. It was maybe the best bad idea anyone had heard about. Who wants to get a gold medal with a big asterisk attached?
* * *
Jeremy wants this to be about me, about how my life in the wake of the timedrift unfolded. He knows I have no way to compare these years to the duplicate time block that he and my mom know. Mine is a realtimer perspective.
Growing up in Berkeley, I was subjected to a series of “experimental” educational environments, each designed to replace the formal classroom experience with multi-level peer learning and cooperative parenting. Our timedrifter parents knew something was seriously wrong with traditional “school” as an environment for learning and socializing. We did a good amount of gardening, art, and music too.
I didn’t know we were in a learning experiment until college. It was just school, and good fun. Well, in eighth grade things got weird, as they will. Growing up is its own peculiar experiment. Try to avoid it, and it catches up with a vengeance later on. The point is to get through the eighth-grade emotional circus and move on.
Being a Stapleton, I was nudged, happily, I can admit, into cooperative association governance intervention. I also took a gap year before college and spent this with “aunt” Sophie and Nimali in Sri Lanka. I shadowed their coop governance work, and checked out all the old Buddhist temple sites.
I did a SocialSystems degree at Reed, where “uncle” David had gone, years back. He wrote me a recommendation letter they could not refuse. Like everyone else at Reed, I had my share of rainy weekend afternoon sleep-ins with boyfriends, and the occasional girlfriend. Also, more serious relationships, each of which was intense, but not intended to be long-term. We were too intellectually energetic to get entangled. Real connection would happen later, once we’d mastered our chosen occupation.
Graduate school was the default future, but I was more interested in getting down to work. I took a job with a regenerative agriculture cooperative in Boulder, Colorado, as their community manager. It felt great to be out in the world, to be on my own.
Scott and I met in Boulder when the National Science Foundation hosted an environmental data conference in their atmospheric science lab up on the Mesa. Actually we met at The Foundry, a big bar downtown on Broadway.
Sexy Scotty sweet-talked me with his new early-warning tornado models. And his hazel eyes. Scott was born in 1971 and got an geosciences degree from Princeton, and a masters in environmental management from UC Santa Barbara.
I’m told I grew up in a culture with its “edges smoothed out.” David’s words. All those timedrifters, who’d been there before, came back and got rid of most of the conflictual bumps and hostility potholes in the society.
For the rest of history, humans were overgrown children attempting to get it right, or else do it wrong with some vengeance. But sucking at doing either. The last half-century was unique. You can say that again. My classes at Reed gave me a great appreciation for this fact.
I joined the staff of the North American Center for Cooperative Governance in Asheville, North Carolina. Coops don’t like to change. They prefer to justget better at doing the same old obsolete practices. We put a stop to that by tracking local positive deviance practices from around the planet. These offer novel solutions for active governance and technology implementation. The Center published new governance hacks every quarter, and tracked their implementation.
Scott has a career job here with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), looking at atmospheric climate data. Our son, Louis, is in his last year in high school. Our daughter, Laura, is a junior at Bard College.
Like I said, a lot of edges are smoothed out in our daily lives. For one thing, it’s really hard to be actually poor in Asheville; as in unhoused and hungry poor. There is no dark hole at the base of the economy into which the unfortunate or the maligned or the mistaken get tossed. The new-now US traded a couple thousand billionaires for fifty million children who get to eat each day, and have a roof over their head.
We’ve got a guaranteed income, tax-paid health insurance, free community college education, and an available fabric of cooperative employment, housing, parenting, manufacturing, and consumption coop associations. Many of these coops originally used technology provided by the Stapleton Trust.
The time drift could not have come at a better time to save us from the worst of times. At least that’s what I learned. It also saved sociology—and the other social sciences—from their own histories. I know this because I did my senior thesis on it at Reed.
David was in the middle of this rebooting, so he can tell it better than I can. He talks about the “infinite game,” the fact that we sapiens are physically and socially embedded in the long arc of biological life and human society.
He makes the point that all humans are born anew on this big round rock. Curious creatures, we struggle to grasp the complex systems—natural and social—into which we were born. Mostly we fail to grasp enough, even the cleverest of us. That’s the infinite game’s revenge. We all try to win that game on our terms, and it just changes the rules and the field of play. Then it laughs at us.
For once in recorded history, a billion young humans were not set down anew on the Earth. They woke up old and young. They stood on a half-century of experience and viewed the world through knowing eyes.
While I am closest to the project my dad and his friends promoted to spread technology across the globe, another planetary project, which was started in England, spread the idea of “slack” as an intentional feature of the economy.
It turns out that intentional economic slack is the best indicator around for human flourishing. The Kalahari desert folk practiced this for a hundred-thousand years. Then someone invented the marketplace for necessary commodities. It made these scarce and put us all to work competing for them.
Intentional slack is a cultural outcome. There are a lot of assumptions, shared values, and social norms. You gotta work at it before it works for you.
We’ve built in a bunch of agreements about the value of personal choice and alternative life-paths, and also the virtues of sharing and reuse, and of simplicity and abundance. David played a part in this with his book, Mend, Don’t Spend. The idea of basing economic decisions on a shared culture seems obvious, but I’ve read that, in the future/past, they tried to create a culture based on the idea of a “market economy.” How weird is that?
Intentional slack in the economy also values personal time and the caring economy—those tasks we all do to help raise our kids, tend to our elders, and be kind to each other—instead of the wasteful accumulation of stuff. It is necessarily local. We work with our neighbors to keep this culture alive. In turn, it helps us all flourish.
A lot of the practices we normalize now in our daily lives started in the Wellspring Coops. These associations created experiences that made the outside world seem arbitrary and cruel by comparison. So, we worked with the city, and the county, and then the state to braid these same norms into daily habits for governments and companies. Most other places have done the same, although there are some “rogue” nations that back the old-school, taut, market-driven economy. We don’t buy from them.
Not going to lecture here about all the issues and benefits of intentional slack in the economy. I just want to say that, for me, the best part of living in this economy is how flexible my time is. I get time off to be with my family, to explore my talents, to follow my curiosity, and find moments of joy in the day. It makes me a better mom, and a more available partner. In lots of ways and times.
My mom once told me that, in the future/past, marriages failed mostly because the partners were too busy elsewhere. The economy was so taut that work became the primary activity. Marriage partners became strangers. They barely knew each other. “Love is a muscle,” she said, “you need to exercise it every day.” And we do.
For me and my intimate family,—Scott, Louis, and Laura—life rolls on at its quiet, quotidian pace. Our housing coop is also a social space. Our little house is perfect. We love the monthly dances and seasonal parties. Scott plays the piano, and I attempt to sing. It’s simple, and fucking pleasant. If you are looking for drama, read someone else’s report.
We are tight with our chosen family: those dozen or so friends in the coop with whom we share the care duties for our kids and elders. Our kids get to play together, grandparents receive kind attention, and we find time to be adults.
I’ve been at the coop governance research job here for nearly twenty years. I have more work travel now than when the kids were little. It’s always exciting visiting new cities and their coops. Scott’s research job at NOAA is rewarding. Plenty of real science to dive into. There is always something new to investigate. He says the satellite data gets better every year.
Back to David’s point; the time drift is a once-in-a-civilization event. For the first time in written history, he’d say, we are not, each of us, hostage to the social systems and cultural logics we were born into. A billion timedrifteres arrived with fifty-two billion years of additional experiences and knowledge.
The unprecedented collective experience that timedrifters brought to their lives created an enormous cognitive surplus of everyday practical knowledge. Some call it an ocean of wisdom. Cynics say it’s just a massive amount of shared avoidance; when you know how things got fucked up before, you do it differently this time. Since the great majority of “different” outcomes tend to be less fucked up, we are better off. Either description works.
* * *
My Reed professors made the point that the social sciences didn’t change because of the work of a dozen boffins drinking single-malt whiskey in their college digs and spinning out new theories. No, the work grew out of hundreds of studies of thousands of experimental social and cultural practices led by millions of ordinary people trying to escape the lives they lived before.
Dozens of these home-grown experiments displayed true positive deviance: real solutions discovered by local communities themselves. This is a topic my dad keeps bringing up. This time, he’s right.
These practices supported changes that greatly improved the lives, the economies, and the civil societies of communities and polities around the globe. We’ve implemented several of these into our cooperative governance work. Today, Wellspring Coops are the most democratically run associations on the planet. I can honestly report that Coops have changed how governments run all across the planet. First we got really good at governing ourselves.
Coop members then exported this governance acumen to their local civil society. Take elections. Internal coop elections used ranked-choice voting and added candidates selected by a lottery. Early on in the new-now, these practices migrated to city elections, and later to state level elections.
* * *
The 2020 presidential election will be the first time this voting technique will be in place at the national level. It’s simple. The two political parties get their candidates, and then more candidates are selected at random to form a list of seven, which gets narrowed down to two for the general election. You need to pass an online “civil society and political practices” class to get into the lottery.
All seven finalists take a two month intensive in-person practicum on the presidency. So they could be more qualified to serve than the political party choices. With only public funding allowed, all candidates have the same finances. I’m hoping we elect the first president pulled from the general population through a lottery. There’s democracy in action for you.
There are still wars out there. A lot of nations had their boundaries arbitrarily formed back when they were colonies. Old land- or water claims give rise to new violence. Greed and envy show up in support of populist demagogues. The Middle East is still a contested zone. Not sure there’s any solution for that one. Well, apart from the end of the nation-state. I went through a lot of Reed dormitory conversations about this topic.
The cold-war proxy battles of the future/past didn’t happen here. So a few million deaths were avoided. At the same time, the birthrate in nearly every nation is way down. Here in North Carolina, our population growth is about a quarter of what it was in the future/past. That means we have better housing availability, lower unemployment, and less traffic. Not nearly as much crime now. So I’ve been told, like over-and-over-again. I know we’ve got it good. I’ve also traveled around enough to understand just how good we have it.
* * *
Dad said the reports should also include something that we find disappointing or alarming about the new now. This is a real timedrifter question. You probably think I’m disappointed about not being a timedrifter. That’s not so. I find comfort belonging to the rest of humanity, all thousands of centuries of us folks, who never woke up younger.
My main disappointment is philosophical. With all this extra knowledge floating around, you’d think someone would have figured out how consciousness works. How the brain connects to the mind. How to spend a single day with meaning and joy. I guess the imagination doesn’t improve over time. In fact, it may be the opposite.
Those who came back are still informed by the life they once had. I bet their dreams are filled with a past that never happened. They are oddly reserved, not wanting to touch those experiences that turned out badly before. But maybe they need to explore a few of these same roads, and go further this time. Really put the “new” in the new now.
The new now is like an editing copy of an already written novel. On the plus side, these edits make for a better read. On the down side, we don’t get to start from a blank page and go somewhere marvelous. I want more surprise than this life of quietude can give me.
* * *
I’ve got nothing unusual to report. Life is as it goes. Scott and I both work a full three-day week. We started with the minimum six weeks of vacation, and are now up to nine weeks. Our housing-coop owned house, where we’ve lived for some years now, is a short walk from downtown Asheville.
We don’t own a car. We belong to an electric car sharing group. So we can drive locally or do road trips. We just sign up for a free time. The city has an e-bike rental service we use when the weather permits, and, of course, there’s also Asheville Rides Transit buses.
Scott and I cherish our guaranteed monthly income. When I was in college, it paid my rent. Today, mine goes into supporting local non-profits, or for vacations or home repair. Scott uses his to buy AsheCash, our local currency. We use that at the farmer’s market, at cafes, taverns, and theaters. We’ve been lucky with our health. Laura broke her arm skiing a few years ago, and Scott tore his knee up playing ultimate frisbee with his coworkers. All this was covered by our national health insurance.
Louis is in the final year of a combined-grade public high school near our house. Next Spring he gets to teach a short class in his favorite topic: graphic novels as literature. He spent a lot of the summer preparing for this.
After graduation in the Spring, Louis is taking time away from school. He wants to get some work skills first, and might never do college. With all the content on the web, and new AI-enhanced teaching apps, you can take most college courses independently, anywhere on the globe. Many of these courses include badges that prove you’ve finished them. Mom and Dad found a producer coop in Oakland that does interactive game programming. Louis will be headed out there to join this next summer. We will be empty nesters here in Asheville.
* * *
I’m not sure why Dad asked me to write this report. Like all realtimers, I’ve only lived the one life I have. There are thousands of timedrifter biographies intrinsically more interesting than mine. They got a “do over.” So their perspectives are in stereo. I’ve been avoiding that literature for decades. I do not need another “prexposé,” or whatever their future/past “tell-all” stories are called now. I also don’t need any more TV sit-coms where the neighbor timedrifters are super annoying know-it-alls.
Many archaeologists figure that a similar time drift caused the sudden global invention of written language, four thousand years ago. Millions of the pre-literate timedrifters figured they needed some new way to record all of their “wisdom.” I would add that their realtimer audiences probably got so fucking annoyed that they refused to listen anymore.
* * *
In closing, I want to end with a salute to all the timedrifters out there.
You didn’t ask to come back. I’m sure it was a massive, consequential event for each of you. Life is full of choices. You made hard choices that opened up a lot of easier ones for us. The privilege we acquired by your efforts was not based on money, property or family, but on kindness and understanding. We realtimers inherited cultures enriched by your wisdom, all around the Earth.
Enough of you cared about the future of the planet to invest your lives—your extra half century—toward the goal of a new and better world, or nation, or state, or town. Maybe you just wanted a better marriage. All this “better” adds up, and I appreciate growing up in its wake. The timedrifter generation crafted the culture I live by. It’s a good one. I hope I’ve passed this on to my kids.
Mom and Dad, Sarah and Jeremy, you’ve been great parents. It’s taken you more than a hundred years of living to finally begin to know what it will be like to get old. It’s our turn to care for you. We will be here for you on this next phase of your spectacular lives.
“The new now” is over. All of us share the same time going forward.
* * *