Einsteinian physics apparently tells us to conceive spacetime as a single concept rather than space and time as distinct. Even so, it seems to be the case that we can choose to travel in space in a way that we cannot do in time. The human sensory experience of spacetime is, at first glance, one in which there are at least practical differences between space and time as concepts.
Storm Arwen, which swept down the UK from the north on Friday 26 November 2021 gave me an opportunity to look again at the experience of space and time. Winds gusting at 150km/h and more from an atyical direction (gales usually come from the southwest) blew trees down near powerlines, and hundreds of thousands of people, including me, lost electricity for several days. The trees’ suicidal protest against the ecocyborg saw them entangling themselves in wires, posts and transformers throughout Scotland, but especially in the northeast.
The loss of electricity meant different things for different people, but for me: no lighting, heating, hot water, cooker, internet, television, or mobile phone signal. Burning wood in the open fireplace provided a little heat, and we could toast crumpets on the fire. Candles provided a little light in the long nights of the late Scottish autumn. The Storm had taken us back in time over a hundred years, to when houses had no electricity.
While the ecocyborg frantically repairs itself to restore what we might laughably (given its unrecognizability to our ancestors) call ‘normality’, it doesn’t need to take a storm to travel back (and hence also forward) in time in similar ways. Mobile phone signal coverage on various bands means you can travel in space and go back to a time when you couldn’t stream films on a mobile phone, further back to when you could barely use the internet, or further still to when communication of any kind with a mobile phone was not possible.
Travel further in space, and you can reach times when households in the UK typically had no electricity. For millions of people, mainly in the Global South, life without electricity is just life. Access to safe drinking water is also a daily reality for one in three people globally, while two thirds of children aged 3-17 have no internet access at home. Hence, from a sensory experience perspective as humans, we can travel to the future and to the past simply by moving in space over the surface of the planet.
Clearly, people have lived, and do live, their whole lives without facilities that I take for granted, and find myself struggling when they are taken away. The technology permeating our everyday environments changes who we are, what we do, and what we expect. It shifts our skillset and adjusts our thinking. We are physically and mentally different as a result of technology in comparison with a counterfactual world where that technology is absent. Technology, through supposedly empowering us, also changes us: it is not, then, our pre-technology selves that are empowered; that self ‘dies’. Rather, it is our post-technology selves that are empowered – who that self is, is a function not only of the pre-technology self, but also of the technology itself, and in ways we do not control.
At some point, we may find ourselves in a position whereby the pre-technology self cannot be rediscovered. For example, if we did not have a fireplace in our house, or anywhere outside where a fire could be lit, or indeed anything to burn, or if lighting fires were illegal, then we could not ‘rediscover’ selves that used fire rather than electricity to keep warm and cook food; the skills and knowledge would eventually be lost. This critical threshold is the transition to cyborghood, and we become entirely dependent on the ecocyborg to maintain us. We are simulacra, being simulated on the ecocyborg.
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 