viralnet-v4.net

A 2025 Time Capsule and Retro-Fitted Podcast
Co-hosted by Carlin Wing and Tom Leeser

Now|Swerve 2025 part 1

Now|Swerve 2025 part 2

Time has been spent looking for proof in the empirical world that the life we encounter now is different to and better than yesterday. Difference has been and remains our mantra. The aesthetics of technology has been central to this myth—this is the myth of a moving forward, a unilateral directionality that has in its target the abstraction of our freedom to come. This is our future.

—Amanda Beech

In 2020 viralnet-v4.net‘s Now|Swerve podcast hosted a series of conversations with artists, writers and academics that explored what we called, “the swerve of 2020” in relation to the present—the “long now” and an imaginary “post-future”.

I’m once again joined by my colleague Carlin Wing, a renowned artist, educator, and media scholar. Carlin is an assistant professor of Media Studies and Science and Technology at Scripps College in Claremont California and I’m the Director of the Center for Integrated Media + Art and Technology at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).  

The current project is positioned as part memoir and part provocation—a speculative re-investigation into the “long now” and a re-imagined “post-future”. In this updated version, we look back over the past five years and ask, what time is—it?

The current conversation occurred in Los Angeles in February 2025. Within the past five years we experienced rising authoritarianism worldwide—two presidential impeachments—a reactionary and unprecedented storming of the Capital—nationwide demands for social justice—the U.S. Supreme Court’s repeal of a women’s right to choose the healthcare of their choice—amplified violence in the Middle East and—very recently—massive fires in Los Angeles clearly indicating the on-going ecological crisis brought on by climate change.

And of course—Artificial Intelligence, the rise and fall and rise again of cryptocurrency, and global cyber insecurity as technology continues to be the leading socio-political and cultural force directly affecting our lives.

Given all this, we can say that Now|Swerve is now and again! It seems we’re still accelerating, non-stop and navigating without a compass with no clear way home.

In Mark Lilla’s book “The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction” he writes:

“Narratives of progress, regress, and cycles all assume a mechanism by which historical change happens. It might be the natural laws of the cosmos, the dialectical development of the human mind or of economic forces.  Once we understand the mechanism, we are assured of understanding what really happened and what is to come. But what if there is no such mechanism? What if history is subject to sudden eruptions that cannot be explained by any science of temporal tectonics? These are the questions that arise in the face of cataclysms for which no rationalization seems adequate and no consolation seems possible.

So given the context of Lilla’s quote, we return to our original inquiry—“How do we conceive of the future and act in this present, a time of reactionary nostalgia and amplified disruption?

 Tom Leeser, 2025