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Jeremy here. Since I’ve been wrestling with the logic of pre-knowing a future, I’m going to let you in on some insights. Give me ten minutes to sort out this global temporal anomaly for you. Then I’ll start my own story.
For decades, maybe centuries, politicians have been blathering about building a “new tomorrow.” Tomorrow has always been “new,” in the sense of open and unknowable. But it wasn’t until we shared fifty-two years of an old-tomorrow that we could give this “new tomorrow” vision real colors and solid form.
The actual world we inhabit is flatly recalcitrant to most attempts at wholesale “new and better” endeavors to change it. It’s a hideously complex, emergent social landscape, filled with its own internal contradictions and ambiguities. But this world hasn’t faced a billion people desperate for change. Until now. Something needs to give, and we are a one-billion-person strange attractor that can push this planet into a new social equilibrium.
Fifty-two years of experience in your pocket supplies an appreciation for just how much intuitive spaghetti we will need to throw against the walls of our social ecology before anything sticks. For me, this awareness highlights the need for broadly distributed experimentation and iteration. It show me that our seriously wicked problems will demand collective intelligence and careful probing before we begin to think we have a plan. In fact, we need to flush the idea of “a plan” to solve our problems. Any really new tomorrow will only emerge from millions of small attempts at novel ways to escape what just happened in the future/past. We are the right people at the right time to get this done.
Start with a sad fact: that old tomorrow was, frankly, a total disappointment on all levels for most people. Elon Musk excepted. The future/past turned out to be like that straight-A, high-school, senior-class president who, you discover ten years later, became a meth addict, moved to Florida, and got busted running a pedo ring. Nobody wants a new tomorrow more than a billion folks who remembered the old one, and all the people in it, and everything they diddone.
Everything you diddone is a legacy you face today. If you diddone it, people think you’d likely do it again. Although you haven’t done it yet in this time, you have a demonstrated a personal capability to do what you diddone before. You also have the culpability for your future/past actions, at least in the minds of others who were affected. Like I’ve said, we remember the wounds and forget the caresses. This is one reason why a lot of timedrifters change their name and leave town.
I would guess that, when Bernie Madoff woke up in his New York home in 1967, he did a dance, kissed his bank book, changed his name, cashed out his accounts and disappeared. Mostly, this was self preservation. Dozens of future/past investor/suckers would have gladly crowd-sourced his assassination. He’s out there somewhere figuring the odds for the next grift.
Famous future-felons who are still in primary- and secondary public schools can’t just show up to class the next day with a new name. They can run away, and many did when their classmates revealed their future/past crimes to them. The milk-carton “missing child” photos took on an ominous tone: “Have you seen Jeff Dahmer, seven years old? If you do see him, do not approach. Call the police immediately.” Of course, the real people to watch out for are those timedrifters who diddone it before and never got caught. Now they’re young once more, extra-savvy, and ready for greater carnage.
The largest population cohort on the planet in September 1967 is the “olders.” Together with younglings, these realtimers comprise three-quarters of the population. Olders were simply too old in 1967 to make it alive to 2019. Apart from a few thousand with extreme longevity, folks of a certain age in ’67 were dead by 2019. In 1967, most of them were still too young—between thirty and sixty—to be called “elders.”
The olders, being older, are running things in 1967. They’re the leaders of industry, finance, and governments. They have climbed the crowded ranks of institutional bureaucracies and are in charge of just about everything. They head families, raise children, prepare for retirement, or they’ve achieved advanced age already, lucky them.
Nothing in their long years prepares them for the conversations they now have with their own children, and those of friends, and even random youngsters here in 1967. From that Saturday in August, being older was not what it had been before then in the written history of humanity.
For example, you’d be sitting around out on the front yard, enjoying the afternoon on a national holiday, wife and kids off somewhere. You’re quaffing a few lagers, admiring the clouds, when a snot-nosed, six-year-old neighbor boy comes by, introduces himself, and starts congratulating or commiserating with you about events and decisions you diddone in your future.
You tell him that you’ve already heard it all before, but he’s got his own take on the meaning of the rest of your life. He will not remain quiet, or have the courtesy to act his biological age. He is in full oracle mode. His memory of your future must be told.
He starts with the now-common caveat; of course, he says, your future/past life is not actually the future. It’s just one future. We are building a new one. And yet, knowing about that old future changes everything in the present, so listen up, and listen good. He is eyeing the beer in your cooler with more than curiosity.
Now, you are waiting for it, that inevitable moment when he pulls a Seneca on you. All these youngsters think they’ve got a right to wax philosophical any time they open their gob. And there it is.
He says, “Everything you diddone, all the stuff that will happen in your life, good and bad, is just what fortune has in store for you. It’s all just luck, out of your control. I bet you sold Apple at twenty-five.” Actually, you were recently reminded by your son that you sold Apple in 2002 at a thousandth of its price in 2019, including stock splits. The neighbor boy is still talking as you retrieve another can from the cooler and pretend to listen.
You know better than to ask him a question. That kid standing there in a hand-me-down Howdy Doody t-shirt is not what he appears to be. The little shit probably never sold his Apple shares. He might have read Plato, Socrates, Aquinas, fucking Voltaire. Hell, he might have a PhD in classical philosophy, and authored books about the post-Aristotelians. You keep silent as he finally finishes.
“You see what I mean?” he asks. He glances at the cooler again.
“Absolutely,” you say. You offer him a beer if he will just go away.
“Deal,” he says. You watch him walk up the sidewalk, yank the pull tab off, toss this in the neighbor’s yard, and take a slug from the can. You fear for the future of humankind.
Olders around the planet all face the same kind of profound, immensely useful, and yet unwelcome tales about their future lives. It’s a universal situation. You might be a mid-life hunter-gatherer out in the Kalahari, and young Jacob comes to your fire to remind you of that hunt three years from now where a lion diddone kills your brother. Then he asks for some of your porridge.
Olders today find themselves at an epistemological disadvantage. Their years are all in the past. How can they compete with someone who has a half-century of living in a future, any future? Remember that timedrifters, each and all of us, were fifty-two years older not so very long ago. We were all at the age of these olders today. So there is a well of empathy that can be tapped during conversations about the vagary and fuckery of the modern-day workplace. We know this all too well, and all the physical ailments of aging. You threw your back out? That sucks. We’ve been there. We made chiropractors rich in the future/past.
For example, tomorrow, your older will be back at their job, pretending that they’re running things. That’s a laugh. In the future/past, their company, their job, everything they will work for across decades, diddone got “disrupted” when it failed to “pivot” to some new tech in 1986. Nobody will ever buy their company’s really excellent slide-rules, widgets, or whatnot. Even though 1986 is many years into the future, being forewarned puts all the plans they are making today into question. Compounding this situation, timedrifter former executives are spilling the beans to the press.
The business weeklies and the business sections of daily newspaper syndicates are bursting with tell-all stories. There’s not a whole lot of moral high ground on which to stand when it comes to environmental destruction, workplace safety failures, insider trading, and potential fraud. Future/past executives, now in their teens, are racing to get this information out before their former/future colleagues do so. Better to name than be named.
A federal appeals court in DC ruled unanimously that companies cannot enforce non-disclosure agreements on individuals who had not yet signed these, even if they diddone signed them in the future/past. The Warren Court dismissed an urgent final appeal by a consortium of top Fortune 500 companies. Court clerks let it out that prolonged outright laughter was heard in chambers.
The same legal limbo was true for future/past corporate felonies and civil liabilities. The company could not be held responsible for their future doings. This applied to any future, until this future becomes the present. That protection didn’t help much, since the corporations had, in the future/past, spent large capital sums on the most effective strategies to hide their wrongs. Now the wrongs have surfaced, and these secret future strategies are public, worthless, and horrific PR to boot. All of the big corporate players are, as Warren Buffet willhavesaid, “swimming naked.” And nobody’s cold, wet, shrunken genitals are more exposed than those of the olders in charge right now.
Even death has changed for olders. I’ve mentioned this before, but it needs some emphasis. Nearly every single one of the three billion humans who were alive on the planet Earth in 1967, and who had died before 2019, could depend on someone close to them pulling them aside to tell them the time and circumstances of their death in the future/past. Whether this meant pancreatic cancer in 1969, an improvised explosive device in Fallujah in 2004, or an overdose of fentanyl in 2018, they were put on notice that the ink on the last chapter of their book of life had already dried.
Today, you have a detailed list of all the ways you will sabotage your own health over the next decades: all the booze, the pills, the calories, and the stress that will undo your existence one July day. Your “friends” tell you these details precisely. They put the ball in your court. You’re the one who will be screaming for more demerol as your liver explodes in the hospital ER. If this knowledge fails to motivate you, then you deserve everything that happens to you.
Sure, the medical profession and the life insurance industry had long published statistical estimates of population mortality, but here was your seven-year-old great nephew, Ernie, whispering in your ear that they buried you in 1991 when the flu you caught that February turned into pneumonia. Because your death has not yet happened, you contemplate this tragic news dispassionately at first, but there is nothing more real than death, and it strikes you hard. You go through the whole grieving process—denial through acceptance—except, when you get to acceptance, you find it’s been kicked to the curb, and cold panic is sitting there instead.
And finally, your early departure from the above-ground crowd has deprived you of being one of those timedrifter kids who have a long memory of the future/past, and a solid leg-up on any new venture today. You will never catch up with your timedrifter buddies, who can cluster together for hours and talk about movies and songs that nobody has yet to produce, and about future stock and manufacturing opportunities to exploit. Do not get a group timedrifters drunk, you’ve learned. Someone will start singing “Uptown Funk,” and they won’t stop until it funks you up.
On the happier side, realtimers, including olders, have no melancholy sentimental connection to afterkinders. The only kids they know are those, like themselves, born in the new now. Of course, younglings have their own predicaments. Let’s say you are eight years old and have a twin. On that Saturday, in the bed next to yours, in the room you’ve shared with laughter and tears, your twin sister wakes up fifty years older in her mind. You are now alone in a way you could have never imagined. You’re still reading Green Eggs and Ham. She is reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, yet again.
Even though we are in our own skin, every one of us who came back from 2019 is profoundly out of place. Lives left unfinished, loves lost forever, former children: now ghosts of the future/past, haunt our dreams. Timedrifters will always mourn their lost kith and kin from a future that is no more. A billion life dramas lack their third act. Misfortunes vanished, but so too did fortunes. The former-rich arrived back at the poverty of their youth. Pope Francis woke up a theology student in Buenos Aires.
Over these first months, we have produced an avalanche of conversations. Lacking online social media, timedrifters flocked in person to drug-store soda counters, newly opened fast-food joints, and bowling alleys. Some clustered in churches, and adults also found neighborhood taverns. The youngest ones gathered in the sand boxes of their neighborhood parks. I can imagine the sidewalk cafes of Paris and Rome already packed with timedrifters.
These conversations nourished a new sociability. It’s like everyone had just watched the same, really, really long movie and found themselves outside the theater on the street, eager to remember moments and themes. Questioning everything. Interrogating the present, a “now” we could never again take in as though it just exists. Spinning ideas about new modernities.
We might just get through this. We timedrifters are not against the realtimers. We are, all together, against complacency itself. We do not fit in here. We do not belong. Our presence de-centers the lives of the realtimers. Everyone is off balance, akimbo.The tales we once told ourselves have become unfamiliar. The scars and the tattoos we once wore have vanished, which might make some of us really happy.
This happiness is dampened by the weight of our memories of a future unlived in the new now. Our stories and our schemes are all buttresses against this weight. We are piling up joy and hope in defense of our youth. We are back, we know, in order to fix the fucking world this time around.