Temporal Justice Manifesto
A call to action from 2035 by Murmurian, Manuel Palafox
The first decades of the 21st century were marked by the datafication of the world. Filling their mouths with enlightened scientific jargon, technological for-profit corporations designed all-reaching digital infrastructures to mediate and record every single social and natural occurrence. Social interactions were reinterpreted as data points for the weaving of a network of digitally recorded relations. By the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, these data collection practices had drawn a map of the global ecosystem of relations to use it as a codex for future prediction and hopefully overcome all future uncertainty: from the unpredictable evolution of the viral spread, the accelerating extinguishing of natural resources, to the onset of armed conflict.
Data collection for conflict prevention was conceived as the newest installment in a series of peace-machines. Technocratic authorities assumed that the stability brought about by automating violence de-escalation techniques and modeling past conflict patterns would inescapably lead to peace. Some of us were aware that the dream of a mathematical and objective tool for automating context interpretation was covertly an attempt to automatize and neatly classify human activity itself; fearing that these algorithms would be too successful carrying out their assigned tasks.
And yet, we never expected that new dimensions for conflict would instead be opened; social relations proved to be too elusive, too conscious of the watching mechanical eyes, so rather than bringing about the promise of overcoming context, datafication begat the great context flood.
When every action is mediated by the past, the present ceases to be a simple transition between past and future, while these two become constantly present. Time travel was achieved not by using vehicles modeled after the physical metaphors of spatial distance — as popular culture had shown us — , but by contracting time to its non-existence.
During the 19th and 20th centuries space was technologically mastered through trains, cars, and planes; shortening distances, bringing people from different nations closer to each other, and thus transforming peacekeeping into an international endeavor. Analogously, during the 2020’s big data and machine learning consolidated the conquest of temporal distances that, unbeknownst to us, had already begun almost two centuries ago with the birth of image-making automation technologies. Today (if that term retains any sense), clocks do mark hours as they pass by, days are still counted with calendars, but as they gradually lost their time tracking connotations, these tools became two more of the many measurements for data collection. Past, present, and future have abandoned the realm of human experience.
Accordingly, peacekeeping went through another cultural shift: war was not reserved to alliances and conflict between territories anymore. Likewise, justice was not to be exclusively exercised within the frame of territorial circumscriptions, but throughout time. After decades of debate, multilateral peacebuilding institutions cannot ignore the pungent presence of past and future any longer, and yet they are still unable to see beyond their alleged victories in territorial conflict contention.
To stop the ever-expanding present, we launched a radical inclusion project: the peoples from all times should be included into peacemaking.
Peace should not be conceived as the prevention of conflict or the perpetuation of present stability anymore, but rather as the recovery and unfolding of the plurality of marginalized voices, tensions, and failures black-boxed within the assumed contextlessness of the present. Estranged from the circumstances they were extracted from; data and numbers determine human agency but cannot speak for themselves.
We aim to make muted data-points speak and show their human face. To uncover the moments of fury, passion, love, and violence carved on the data upon which present-driven institutions have solidified the future. As a mechanical conception of time deprives us from agency, it has also expanded our circle of moral consideration. Temporal justice is the moral imperative that comes with the lived experience of datafication. If we want to recover the possibility of a just tomorrow, we should acknowledge all the past lives and denied futures that were casted away in the name of the perpetual peace of the present.
About the author
Self-described as a time traveler, Manuel is a Datajournalist using Murmur’s datasets to capture snapshots of forgotten pasts. He plays with notions of critical tagging and categorization in his work. In his journalistic work, he retags and dissects existing datasets by adding historically charged categories such as “colonial suffering” and “exploitation,” that can function as contextual variables for dreamweaving algorithms.
Combining data of soil composition of farming land and migratory fluxes in southern Mexico, Manuel reconstructs the stories of land expropriation from indigenous communities dating back to the 19th century and how this has led to extractivist farming practices.
Currently, Manuel is in the process of uploading a dataset of his own to Murmur. This laborious task consists in gathering the faces and dreams of victims of violence against the LGBTQ+ community in Mexico. This data set is made up of, among many other sources, personal diaries, out-of-sight pictures, news reports of murder scenes, and long-forgotten Instagram accounts This dataset can serve as the basis of future imagining.
*This is a companion piece to our Murmur Community project. Read more here:
