Today I'm going to talk about techronologies, which is like the concept that I have of how time and technologies kind of influence each other. And I'm going to specifically talk about predictive temporalities in technocapitalism. So I'm going to look at technocapitalist culture by focusing on like concepts of time or ways of relating to time in prediction and actually echoes a lot of what we've already heard in Jan's talk. Yeah, so but like with the specific aspect of time. So I'm gonna like structure this in like two ways. So first I'm gonna look at like the temporal structures inherent in prediction and how power manifests through them and then in the second part I'm kind of gonna look at how we can approach this or how we can act politically and and therefore I'm going to propose a relational perspective. Is the screen working? No. Yeah, okay. You just turn this around. Yeah. Yeah. If it's easier, I also don't need this. You can project it on top of it. Sorry for all the technical hiccups. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Magic. Very nice. Okay, thank you. Thanks a lot. All right, so, yeah, kind of like to start it off, like why prediction temporalities? Jan already kind of was pointing at this, that if we look at it like historically like in modernity like the concept of this open future replaced this concept of a premodern concept of a determined future. So the future was now open but it was also uncertain. So in the 17th century probability calculus was developed in order to manage this uncertainty of the future and also to prepare in the present. So these technologies are still, like, the root of predictive systems today. And there have also been, like, ways of forecasting, of course, like, for a very, very long time, also before, like, predictive technologies that were maybe, like, in a very, very long time, also before predictive technologies that were maybe in a more divine or religious way, or maybe you want to call it magical, of predicting, but predicting always a predetermined future that was not accessible to us, and was done by practices that were obscured, like these oracles that you didn't really know how they were working. And I think that is also perpetuated in technologies today, this narrative of, we're going to predict the future with a certainty, but how the systems are working is uncertain. That's what Alex Campolo and Kay Crawford call enchanted determinism. So when we talk about technology and time, what often comes up is linear time. So it's this idea of that past is followed by present, is followed by a future. And this resonates a lot with this idea of techno determinism so that society changes linearly and primarily through technology. But it also origins in Christian worldviews of where time has a beginning. So Genesis, the point where God created the world, and an etiological end time of Judgment Day, which is the apocalypse where the world ends and everybody faces the final judgment by God. And that's it that creates this absolute linear time span and this linear narrative of time. But it also origins, as we also heard before, in logics of progress and colonial capitalism. And David Nye has showed this in looking at the North American settler colonialism from the 19th century onward, where he argues that that was not the foundational narrative of an individual or corporation, but this passive narrative of technological progress that was pushing the Westward movement. So as we can see in the picture, it's the telephone line or the railroad that is kind of like pushing this Westward movement. So, thus colonial practices were presented as the inevitable technological progress, like what will inevitably happen, the manifest destiny, so to say. And we also see these narratives of discourses of inevitability of technologies today when we talk about AGI, for example. And what Rashida Phillips also says is that this future, or this domination, was not only about space, but also about time. So the manifest destiny was like physicalizing a future through space and through domination of space, and thereby, by claiming a future, it was also claiming power on a linear temporal axis. And I would argue that tech ideologies, like we've heard before, like test grills, perpetuate these notions, especially when we look at long-termism, for example. So because we heard this before, I'm going to keep it really quick. So, long-termism presents one of the ideologies that is prominently advocated from scholars from Oxford, like, for example, Nick Bostrom and William MacAskill, but also supported by tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. So, long-termism is to focus like a really, really long timeline, like billions of billions of years, and assume that the human population might be much larger in the future, especially if humans colonize space. So therefore, they conclude that it becomes more important to focus on future generations because it will overall help more people in the end. So their focus is on ensuring the largest possible amount of human lives over the largest possible time span, which is like the whole time span of the universe. And the issues are kind of obvious, like they're words from present issues like climate crisis or social injustice that are neglected because they seem unimportant in comparison to the large amount of people living in the future. And I argue that long-termism underpins this linear notion of time, especially in the Christian and colonial sense that I was talking about before. So as I just said, the long-termists also have this idea of an absolute linear time span from, in that case, not from the Big Bang to the Judgment Day, but from the, yeah, from the Big Bang, and not from the Genesis to the Judgment Day, but to this theory of the heat death of the universe, also called the big freeze. And on the other hand, it also, I think, perpetuates this linear time in the colonial sense of technological progress as dominance over space and time. So by focusing, on the one hand, on the very long future, but also on space colonization, David claims power on this temporal axis through the future and through space. So I think what this example of long-termism shows is how notions of Christianity, colonialism, and progress are perpetuated in these tech elites' narratives today, and also highlights the importance on focusing on these temporalities when critically engaging with techno-capitalist culture. But I think that these technologies and narratives don't only entail this notion of linear time, but also circular time. And if you look at it historically, predictions have been most effective in periodic observation, like observation of stars, for example. in periodic observation, like observation of stars, for example. And I argue that circular time distributes power through prediction in three different ways. So by reproducing the past, by producing the future, and through predictive time. So the first example of reproduction of the past is what probably most of you have heard over and over again over the last few years is that predictive models work by using historical data and projecting them onto the future. So thereby they're based on the assumption of repetition, so the assumption that the future will resemble the past and therefore also the assumption that change is statistically unlikely. And I mean, there's many, many examples, probably those of you that are from Austria maybe know like this example of the IMS algorithm, but probably the most famous one is like predictive policing where past police practices are coded into data and then projected into the future, thereby reproducing the past. And this kind of merges this notion of linear and circular time, of projecting on a linear timeline, but also constantly repeating in a circular notion. And the second example I want to talk about is the production of the future, so the systems don't only reproduce the past, but also actively shape the future. So if we think of predictive recommender systems, for example, that the prediction does not work because the system glimpses at a not-yet-there future, but because it also actively produces that future. So I might only buy this smartphone toaster not because I would have bought it anyway, but because it also was recommended to me. So therefore these systems also predict and produce the future influenced by their own prediction which renders them also self-referential and circular in that notion. And the third point I want to talk about is predictive time. It's a term from Sun-Ha Hong in the paper it's called Prediction Without Futures, where he argues that the techno future is maintained not by producing literally accurate predictions of future events, but through ritualized demonstrations of predictive time. So what Hong has argued that it's not really about if these predictions ever come true as long as you keep making them and therefore shape the narrative and orient people's expectations, imaginations, and also actions. And I want to exemplify this with a cut from how Elon Musk has been predicting a self-driving car. It's actually from the podcast from our keynote speaker two days ago. So, yeah. Tesla car next year will probably be 90% capable of autopilot, so 90% of your miles could be on auto. We're probably only a month away from having autonomous driving, at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. at least for highways and for relatively simple roads. I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy. We're still on track for being able to go cross-country from LA to New York by the end of the year fully autonomous. I feel very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla next year. I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year. I mean, it's looking quite likely that it will be next year. Man, I think we'll be better than human by the end of this year. How many times can he get away with saying next year before his cult fans stop believing him? Okay, good question. So the question kind of is, like, how many mispredictions until the narrative loses its credibility, right? But paradoxically, like, Hong argues the other way around, that he says it's not really about these predictions ever coming true, or like that because they're missed, they lose credibility, but actually they function as like familiarizing this narrative and therefore making the techno future, or in this case the self-driving cars, seem as the only inevitable and desirable option. So I think on the one hand, it's funny to also celebrate this misprediction, but I think we also have to be careful to kind of celebrate our unpredictability or whatever. Yeah, so also this example I think shows how linear and circular time merge by constantly projecting on a linear time x, but also repeating that. Which brings me to my first conclusions, which is how does power manifest through these predictive temporalities? And as I've just said, by incorporating linear time, they project visions of a techno-future into people's expectations and imaginations, and circular time familiarizes these visions, and they both influence which technologies and futures are considered inevitable and desirable. This brings me to my next point, which I call the temporal points of legitimation. So the legitimation processes that are active through these predictions. And if we think of the example of Elon Musk, what Hong argues what this is actually doing that are active through these predictions. And if we think of the example of Elon Musk, what Hong argues what this is actually doing is that the future acts as a point of legitimation for present actions today. Because we have this great technology in the future, we have to do this and this now, right? And if we think of predictive systems that work on historical data, there it's actually the other way around, right? It's like the past serves as a legitimation to, for example, continue police practices in the present. So I think that the past and the future both act as temporal points of legitimation for present actions, and I think both of these processes operate by obscuring the present as a site where the actual power distribution takes place. So what I think follows from this is that we have to emphasize on the present as a point for political action and I think Joanna Varon has said this quite nicely in an interview for Ding magazine with Julia Kloiber, so I'm just gonna read this to you. The ancestral is not only in the past, but rather incorporated into our bodies and our territories in the present. The only thing that exists is the now, and through the now, there is a connection with the future, which doesn't actually exist. The only thing that exists is what you want from the future in the now. So in the now, in every single present moment, you are both living the now, breathing your ancestrality, and aspiring to the future. Everything together in the same moment, not linear. That is what I think is problematic, for instance, when AI industry leaders refer to future existential risks of AI. The risk is already happening in the now because they are leading this development. when AI industry leaders refer to future existential risks of AI. The risk is already happening in the now because they are leading this development. And I think what is really interesting about this quote is that on the one hand, it focuses on the now, obviously, like the present tense in this sense, but it also focuses on the actors that are present. And this is what I call the situated present. So it's the present tense in both the temporal sense of the now, where like when the action takes place, but also in the situated sense of the person and the conditions that are present in it. Yeah, and by combining these two, it becomes a question of who imagines which futures under which conditions. And also if we think, for example, of the example of settler colonialism about claiming a future, then it also becomes a question of who remains, is, and was present. So now the question kind of becomes how do we deal with this political issue of futuring? And so we're now in this situated present, or how we've heard on the first day, in this poly-crisis at the crossroads, and it's not really where to go, right? So I think two very popular approaches to the future is either the conservative approach or a progressive approach, but not in a political sense of left or right, but more in the sense of conservative, in the sense of conserving the status quo, conserving the past, and progressive in the sense of repeatedly creating novelty out of nothing and with this imperative for disruption and innovation in this sense of move fast and break things. But I think this binary approach doesn't really get us really far because as I've tried to show is that a lot of binaries are both inherent in these predictions, right? They kind of like perpetuate the power dynamics by incorporating two sides of a binary. So by incorporating linear time and circular time, or by residing on uncertainty and uncertainty on the same time. And also these global systems of globalities, so they also incorporate different scales of globality and locality. So the question is, how do we navigate not finding to this binary when approaching futuring? And finally, this was really coincidentally, but I was rereading Binia Adamczyk's Relational Revolutions at that point, and she focuses on the modes of relationships in between, and that kind of enables her to think beyond these binaries. And she also temporalizes this approach of relations, and I'm also going to read this to you. Relationships emerge in time, form more or less stable plateaus, and then shift again. This not only temporalizes the concept of relationships, but also provides a concrete framework for societal change. Social transformation means shifting relationships. So because she focuses on shifting relationships, she can focus on connecting previously unconnected things in new ways. So it's a novel rearranging of the old, and therefore it's possible to move beyond this merely conservative or progressive approaches to the future. But instead the focus can be on negotiating which relationships to conserve, so which relationships do we want to strengthen, but also which relationships do we want to change or resurrect in the sense of rearranging or shifting relationships. And thus, conserving the past, changing the future, and resurrecting... No, conserving the present, changing the future, and resurrecting the past, the past, present, and future all merge in this process, and futuring becomes a multi-temporal process, and not a linear, not a binary one. And to end on this kind of, I think that this relational approach can not only be a framework, but also a political position, and I think this is especially true in times where tech eludes pursue isolationist approaches to the future. So this is for example Trump's building a wall or Elon Musk's isolationist individual vision of transportation or Peter Thiel's independent floating sea cities or SpaceX mission as detachment from Earth and that's what Brian and Lutti can call future as exodus from co-presence. So I think a relational approach can therefore point at the present exploitative relationships that are actually behind this isolationist politics, because they're not isolationist, they're just based on exploitative relations, but can offer also a counter position to this notion of right-wing isolation by insisting on futures of solidarity-based relationships. And on the last note, I think you can also navigate future as this multi-temporal process of going beyond binary. Yeah, I'll leave it at that. Thank you.