I went on holiday for a week, and when I next came into the little office I rent, I found that three cameras had made it their home too. One is square and thin and pinched-looking, and hunches like a crane watching people’s ears as they pass into the courtyard. The other two are like the photo – spherical shiny things squatting in a functional white plastic housing with a small antennae, like a Victorian gentleman’s collar that has been fitted for etheric transmission, or one of Ming the Merciless’ courtiers in a remake that can’t afford the red and gold trimmings.

The office is a ‘co-work space’, one of many that have sprung up in Singapore like mushrooms on a wet morning. When I joined there were three of us, working in our headphones on the top floor of a Joo Chiat shophouse, but now I am the only one left. The owners use the space below to run their other companies, and sometimes I sit above boisterous strategy meetings where they talk about user engagement and targeting audiences while showing each other the results of google searches, but after these moments of entrepreneurial vitality a natural calm reasserts itself, and I’m left with the wooden floors and the soft white noise of the fan.

It’s a bit odd, to be honest, being the only subject of CCTV surveillance. I suppose that’s the hope, that the cameras never capture anyone else, at least until their co-work offer becomes more attractive. I haven’t had to change my behaviour, really, though on hot days when I came in I would unbutton my top shirt and take my shoes off, and now I am reluctant to be caught looking so unbusinesslike. It’s a casual sort of establishment but I wouldn’t like to be thought to be treating the place like my bedroom. So now I am in what Foucault called a “state of conscious and permanent visibility”¹, sitting in my panopticon of one, wondering if the cameras are even turned on, where the inspector might be sitting and whether they might just be an algorithm in a server farm somewhere. It’s a much more efficient arrangement than Bentham originally envisaged, ultimately involving just a single human mind that knows about the internet, a technological update that bears out Foucault’s notion that the power produced through the internalisation of the subject-inspector relation “tends to the non-corporal”, and becomes more profound as it does so. Though I am a little ashamed to be such a perfect example. Tomorrow I will do something outrageous and see if they cancel my contract.

Perhaps I am overthinking this whole thing. After all, even robots have to work somewhere.

The other day I was in Chua Chu Kang station, getting some lunch before jumping on the LRT. There was a display, discreetly sponsored by two organisations I didn’t recognise, of horoscopes for the current year of the Snake. It’s quite common, around the new year, for shopping malls to host this sort of display. There are common themes across each of them, which is reassuring. People born in the year of the Rat, for example, have similar warnings to this one in other displays I’ve seen:

“The Rat should try to avoid crowded places, because your weak physique makes it easy for you to become ill.”

Compared to English horoscopes, these have a more specific turn of phrase. The translation makes it seem unfairly quaint. I like the way that the author’s desire to see the reader in full possession of the facts regarding their future has overcome anything that might look like delicacy. Much less ego-massage than I remember horoscopes offering when I was small.

“This year, the Dragon needs to maintain your work and living environments bright and luminous because dark places will confuse you.”

“However, there will be no family life, and the unhappiness of your significant other will continue to accumulate…The Rabbit may prevent disruptions from vile characters by wearing a pair of glasses of having short hair”

“This year, the Tiger is advised not to place too much wooden furniture at home, and where there is a piano at home, the Tiger must play for at least ten minutes every day, otherwise the excessive ‘Wood’ in the home may cause the Tiger and your family to be susceptible to painful ailments in joints, muscles and nerves.”

“This year, the Monkey’s luck is relatively sensitive and depressing. Avoid attending funerals or visiting places with strong yin energies. Monkey children in particular need special attention.”

“Dogs who live in western and north western parts of Singapore should beware of heart ailments in the morning and it is best to wake up after 8am”

“The Snake should keep a low profile when handling matters, so as to avoid attracting vile characters that aim to thwart your efforts when you handle matters too overtly or too flagrantly…the left side of the Snake’s body is prone to injuries or rheumatism…the Snake needs to take special care of your kidneys and urinary tract this year, and drink more plain water”

I’m a Snake. I need to watch out. In another public horoscope I read that I need to wear more wood colours. I’m wearing green and brown, and the floor here is painted floorboards.

“When wearing new clothes, the Horse should cut a small hole in the pocket or the corner of the new clothes to prevent mysterious financial losses”
I would have thought anyone with holes in their pockets might expect to experience financial losses, but perhaps that’s exactly the connection people are being asked to make here. Maybe it’s a reminder to buy a wallet and keep your receipts.

I wonder what sort of purpose is served by having such specific details feature in so broad a future scope? Perhaps they’re just examples of how a particular stance towards the world might manifest itself, a more detailed and helpful version of those self-help books that recommend more abstract positions to take up.

I saw some other sorts of futures sharing the same space. Here’s one future offered by a sign by the escalator down to the food court:

It’s about risk, and helping people ensure that a bad possible future – one with a mangled flip-flop – doesn’t come to pass. In that way, it seems kin to the horoscopes standing next to it, though it arose from a different technological context.

Another technique for managing undesirable futures was in the corridor by the trains:

They’re selling insurance – specifically, offering protection against rising medical costs. This has more in common with the escalator advice, I think, certainly in terms of its history as a product of the technical management of society. It’s a bit more proactive than some of the advice offered by the horoscopes – perhaps you could draw a line from those that goes through the sign warning about the edges of the moving stairs and ends up at this specific technique for managing the future. But in some senses they’re still related, I think: the certificate might hold a sort of propitiatory or talismanic quality for the person who bought it, in the same way as the little model gourd they might hang from their handphone. Spending some money now to increase your chances later. I suppose there’s more appetite for that sort of thinking in religion over here – where I come from selling indulgences was looked on quite badly. But maybe it is here too, and I only see the people who do it anyway.

The future turned up here too:

What’s interesting is that it’s the materials’ future that’s being discussed, with the drinks containers and newspaper aspiring to be more complex things, and the reader enlisted to help them achieve this dream. To be there seems to be a class narrative in there as well, with the mundane items that feature in the hands of the proletariat here all wanting to be part of a more middle-class life – books and wine-glasses and computers, at least. Though the wine bottle might already be in there. Perhaps they just want to be more permanently embedded in that life. We can help them become fixed, not transitory, which is the sort of future security we might all approve of.

On the way out of the LRT I saw this sign, advertising an opportunity to talk to government representatives about development plans in the district:

The notice shares space with two other kinds of future-facing activity, both less material perhaps than the land use discussion. There’s a qigong group offering to arrest bone loss, and another government-sponsored group promoting potential new friendships.

This last picture seems a bit less explicitly related to the future, perhaps, but for me it seemed to resonate with a general background concern with climate change, part of the same sort of thinking that urges people standing by the printer in offices to ‘think GREEN!!’. It has a polar bear swimming, not standing on anything, and some ice – I assumed it would have been put up in a public place as part of this general exhortation to think about rising sea levels. Perhaps it’s just a picture of a polar bear enjoying a swim.

What all of these have in common, for me, is that they demonstrate some of the ways in which a concern with the future is written into and discernible within everyday spaces. They point to the possibility of reading futures, of providing evidence for some sort of archeology of the future, and that makes them interesting for anyone who wants to see how abstract futures have real effects in the present. Like me.

It’s nearly 2013. 2012 was a pretty good year, all things considered. I’ve got an awful lot to be grateful for. I hope 2013 turns out the same way.

I’m making resolutions. There’s a few personal ones I won’t trouble you with (be nicer, think about other people, run more). One thing that bothered me this year, though, was not getting much done, and I think a small part of that was worrying too much about the rest of the internet.

Specifically, worrying about keeping up with Twitter and Facebook. Both of them make me anxious, for different reasons, and I can’t work out how to use them in a healthy sort of way. I want to use them both to stay connected to people and to learn more about things, but I end up worrying about etiquette and keeping up with everything that appears in my stream. I don’t want a stream. I want a pond, with edges. I can handle a pond.

And I don’t know how to file things I read on the Internet. I used to put everything in Delicious, and ignore it. Later, I moved to Pinboard, which I still use, sort of. More recently, worrying about how dependent I am on the cloud, I bought Devonthink, and started using that to keep things I found online, but I constantly feel as though I’m using it wrong. I used Evernote for five minutes, but it’s too busy and I have to update it before I can save anything. Academic papers I save in Mendeley, eventually, when I’ve moved them from my ‘To_Read’ folder. Mendeley is wonderful, but it doesn’t suit everything. Maybe I just worry too much.

So, anyway, my resolution this year is to make this site more central to how I live on the internet. It feels like doing that would help me write more, worry less and have somewhere to put all my internet stuff that works better. In some ways it’s a response to Anil Dash’s Web We Lost post, and Warren Ellis’ wondering if we’ve got to the end of the first stage of the social web, though it might be just be that I want to be somewhere where I don’t have to worry about being the product, or having to agree terms of service, or look at adverts. 2013: blog more, make it simpler. Happy New Year!

“Deep above our heads, branches reaching far across interstellar space, grows the Moon Blossom Tree. When the solar wind blows, its branches shake and thousands of cosmic petals gently float to earth, landing in drifts and patches across our home. The tree is home to space caterpillars, who eat the petals and grow into astral butterflies: when the wind blows, how will they find food to eat while the petals grow back?

Fortunately, when the petals have fallen to Earth they can be found. Mobile phones let players see things from the Moon Blossom world, and so they can be used by players to look for petals and to see the caterpillars. People who find these petals can send them back to a particular caterpillar and watch it grow. When it becomes a butterfly, perhaps it’ll remember the person who helped it grow up, and say hello as it flies past.”

This was the basis of a game I wanted to make in 2006, exploring the new location-based possibilities and casual game behaviours that were beginning to emerge. People would have been able to see augmented reality petals lying around them, on their way to work or school, by the door of their cafe, going home from the pub, tiny piles of glowing cosmic debris nestled in amongst the cigarette ends and drinks cartons collected in the gutter. The main play activity was collecting petals – different meteorological events would offer different types of petals, each offering their caterpillar recipients different capabilities. The rare ones could be traded, the duplicates given to friends, the seasonal ones shared online: some sort of petal economy would have emerged, which was interesting to me, and all the time people would be helping and nurturing rather than destroying or colonising. Of course it all seems a bit dated now (in one of the proposals I submitted I notice the line “Nokia has stated that GPS will be standard on all future phones”) and in many ways the social behaviours I wanted to explore have changed. Asking how mobile game play might fit into everyday life is less relevant when people shape everyday life around mobile use. And now that connection speeds and video displays are more sophisticated, most people I see plugged in on the MRT are just watching TV shows, anyway.

But still. It would have been lovely, a little slice of poetry and care in peoples’ lives, and last week I met someone who might have been keen to make it. So you can imagine how much my heart sank when I saw posters for “iButterfly” around Singapore. iButterfly is “a location based gamification coupon redemption mobile application that utilize GPS, Motion Sensor & Augemented Reality technology, which makes discounts and coupons become FUN!” You can get free crisps from Cheers stores and 10% off noodles at Yoshinoya. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of people in Singapore seem to find discounts and coupons a lot of fun already, the app has a nice gestural interface for waving a net to catch butterflies, and it’s nice that there’s a coherent role for your device in the story – it’s a net now. But I don’t think there’s room for two mobile location-based butterfly-focused activities in Singapore. Especially when one is about caring and thinking about the world outside Singapore, and the other gets you free stuff.

A few days ago a friend and I were in the chemist’s, where we had a go on a device that measures weight and bioimpedance to provide various facts and figures about weight, percentage of body fat and so on. The feature that caught my attention was the machine’s ability to show us what the demonstrator kept calling our “real” age – a figure that supposedly reflects the stresses and wear caused by poor diet and other inappropriate lifestyle choices. Of course for both of us it was much higher than our calendar ages. I think what was being measured was our metabolic age, though it wasn’t till afterwards that we thought of that. At the time it felt as though a hidden ageing schedule was being revealed to us through this technological interface, a schedule that made me want to run to the shelves behind me and buy everything I could to make up for the ten years I’d just had taken from me.

Perhaps that was the idea: perhaps the machine is part of an industrial medical complex that exists to foment the sort of doubt and fear in people that makes them susceptible to anti-ageing advertising. But what it put me in mind of first was the Brain Training games on the Nintendo DS, and their idea of “Brain Age”. Your performance in a set of cognitive tasks – mental arithmetic, pattern-matching, language processing – is recorded and your progress measured through your changing “Brain Age”. When I started I was pretty poor, with a correspondingly ancient Brain Age, but practice led to an apparent rejuvenation and I achieved a Brain Age of twenty-one, the lowest, at which point of course I put it away and haven’t looked at it since. I certainly got much better at the tasks I practised, which you might expect, but I don’t think my brain is younger than me. Of course it isn’t: it’s some kind of metaphor. It might make sense to say of someone, “their cognitive ability is closer to an average twenty-five year-old’s than to someone their own age: it’s as if their brain is twenty-five, not thirty-five”. But the notion of Brain Age omits the “as if”, in the same way that we do if we find ourselves saying, “she has the skin of a twenty year-old”. The difference between this sort of everyday speech and the presentation of “brain age” or “real age” is that there’s some work being done – through promotional materials and user interfaces – to reify what ought properly to be considered metaphorical.

What these two things have in common is that through this linguistic action they dissociate part of you from yourself and offer an alternative chronology for that part. The body sensor divides you from your biology and claims to reveal the alternative timeline that your body is following: the Brain Training software purports to show you the different time that your brain lives by (and goes a step further in helping you intervene positively). It’s interesting that the aim in Brain Training is not to reunite the two timelines but to preserve a difference between the brain’s age and your calendar age. I imagine that the makers of the body sensor would think that people use it similarly to support efforts to appear younger than their calendar age. I would prefer to have a brain the same age as me than to be stuck again with my inexperienced, hasty twenty-one-year-old brain, though I can’t honestly say I wouldn’t want to repair the damage done to lungs and skin by the last ten years.

Anyway, what these alternative biological chronologies reminded me of was Nick Lee and Johanna Motzkau’s notion of ‘biosocial imaginations’, the many ways of conceptualising relations between biological processes and social contexts. One example they suggest is the adjustment of human life processes to improve educational outcomes, a biosocial imagination they describe as “tweaking” (and one that is instantiated in the use of nutritional supplements to improve cognitive functions and exam performance in children). Perhaps what I’m thinking of as “alternative biological chronologies” might be thought of as another biosocial imagination.

Two key features of these alternative bio-chronologies are that they are revealed through some sort of technological mediation (standing on a body sensor, or interacting with brain training software), and that they arise from a linguistic omission, treating a metaphor in a literal sense. The primary feature, of course, is that they aren’t true – that is, they aren’t consistent with the way we commonly understand time acting in relation to matter. Time can’t move faster or slower for different parts of the same material entity, at least not in an everday sort of way.

I mention this last point not because being factually grounded is a particularly important aspect of any biosocial imagination, but to contrast these bio-chronologies with another technologically-mediated timescale that has a personal resonance. I was recently fitted with a set of dental braces, which change the location of various teeth within my mouth through a process of bone remodelling, in which the pressure on individual teeth causes bone on the load-bearing side to be broken down, and new bone to be formed on the other side. The effect of this is for teeth to slowly shuffle their way through the jaw into new positions. It’s like drawing a spoon through soup, but much, much slower.

I hadn’t considered my bones to be like liquid, capable of having teeth dragged through them. But now I have a reminder that while I spend my time at the same rate as before, inside my mouth a process is unfolding on a very different timescale. Inside my mouth is slow time.

You could think of this as an alternative bio-chronology, one revealed through technological intervention. But it seems different to the two examples above because there doesn’t seem to be any tension with my calendar age. It isn’t offering an alternative chronology, I suppose, just a different perspective on the same one I was using. Seconds are still seconds and years are still years in there, but what’s achieved is on a different scale to what happens elsewhere in my body. Perhaps this difference is because what this chronology concerns is a process, not an entity: understanding the process of “moving teeth a small way” only makes sense when considered on this slower time, rather than everyday time, and it doesn’t involve disassociating any part of me from myself. Considering it a ‘biosocial imagination’ seems inappropriate as well, somehow – it’s only me involved, not a network of producers and technologists and marketers and consumers worried about ageing. So it’s a different thing, and one that’s more meaningful, to me.

In a way, thinking about this other chronology makes me feel more myself, as if I’m more aware of the processes that constitute and embody me, rather than giving me the feeling that parts of me have been living a secret hidden life, as the first two examples do. I prefer the idea of being all the same age. But I also like knowing that the processes that constitute me extend different distances into my future. My present is sort of smeared and blurred, and made up of things that happen on different scales, and that means that everyone else’s is too.