Convergent futures: Time mastering in accelerating and decelerating temporalities

Introduction

In recent decades, scholars have widely highlighted the acceleration of contemporary life, both at the individual and collective levels (Glezos, 2012; Rosa, 2013). At the same time, in the current context of climate change and a global post-pandemic, calls for slowing down are intensifying (Torres & Gros, 2022; Vostal, 2019). While acceleration has often been described as a future-oriented temporality, today it seems necessary to decelerate in order to save the future itself. Planning, anticipating, and forecasting represent different attempts to gain more certainty within the dominant forms of life. These efforts to foresight have a common goal: to control the future, to make it predictable and thus manageable. In the context of the discrediting of progress and the control of the future, there is also a demand for a different temporality, which is reflected in the slowing-down theorizing. The question now is: are the accelerating and decelerating temporalities based on different conceptions of the future? Or, on the contrary, do they share a basic orientation?

We want to explore the assumption that acceleration and deceleration are two versions of the same future-oriented mode of time controllability. While acceleration's mode of time mastery is observable on the continuation (and even intensification) of modern forms of social domination over the non-human world (such as unlimited economic and technological growth) and their associated notions of linear progress; deceleration's mode of controllability is defined by an openness to other temporalities, such as the ‘planetary time’ of the Anthropocene, which imply a slowing down of the social rhythms of economic and technological growth, expansionism and extractivism.

In the first part of this article, we will trace the mastery of time as a demand to control the future within the onset of western modernity. We will then show how modern institutions envelop a future-making process, deploying a mastering time. On this basis, we treat the acceleration thesis as a landmark example of the mastery of time. We move on to discuss the alternative temporality of deceleration and its convergence with a modified future orientation and time mastery. We argue that, since deceleration is a transformed version of time mastery and future orientation, the opposite of acceleration is not deceleration, but rather repetition. The article continues by highlighting the possibility of mastering time as a limit for the future: with the demise of the modern narratives of progress and an open future, discourses of saving the future become contested over ‘what’ future world to preserve. The current menace of ‘the end of the world’ then does not necessarily refer to the collapse of the planet Earth, but rather to the future of the world as we know it. Finally, by focusing on this latter aspect, we hope to show that a closer examination of the understanding of the future in acceleration and deceleration theorizations reveals their common temporal perspective on an equivalent image of future. Such a common ground, we propose, limits the possibilities of futures, and it might be overcome by theorizing temporality otherwise. We expect with this article to nurture and sparking such a discussion, paving the way to other temporality assumption, namely, the hinged times.

The mastery of time as a demand for future-making

The history of time is multifaceted. From Ancient Greece to the Renaissance, from the Sumerians to the Incas, time has adopted many forms and understandings. Every epoch and place has its own dominant form of temporality. And ours is no exception. Several scholars have emphasized temporality as a key element in understanding what is characteristic of capitalist (Harootunian, 2017; Postone, 2009; Thompson, 1967), modern (Rosa, 2013) and ‘western’ contemporary history (Hölscher, 1999). In this regard, temporality has been seen as one of the most fruitful domains for grasping what makes capitalism and (western) modernity unique. Philosophy of history's scholars have stressed that the most crucial aspect has been the turning point from a history focused on the past to a history focused on the future (Blumenberg, 1986; Koselleck, 2006; Löwith, 1957). Through scientific, political, and economic revolutions, the period between the 17th and 19th centuries fostered the conditions for a new spirit interested in what is to come. In a broader sense, the ‘new’ gained a hitherto unknown status in comparison to what had already passed. The transition from traditional to modern, from agrarian to capitalist societies, and the clash between the religious and the secular can all be understood in terms of a temporal regime marked by the new status of the future (Torres, 2022, Chapter 4).

Our claim here, however, is not to recall the new status of the future as such, but rather to show how this orientation towards the future becomes, in a sense, a demand for the mastery of time itself. This aspect has not been sufficiently emphasized by social theory, the history of concepts, and critical studies. Our contention is that the exercise of a domain over time it is a key legitimizing aspect to justify the control over the society. When to stand still, what to repeat, when to innovate, what to accelerate, when to decelerate? All these questions presuppose a temporal dynamic that turns possible to control the present and the future. Modulating social rhythms is, therefore, a channel for mastering historical conditions in one direction over others. And this is a truly modern demand that has not vanished in our time.

Our point here is that time is constantly pretended to be mastered, if not in all its aspects, at least in the most relevant ones. Prominent examples of this matter are governments and corporations, which steadily operate by predicting social trends. Likewise, international organizations (IOs) such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) or the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) constantly forecast economic and political trends, which in turn feed public and private debates about what can be expected. ¹ The future is thus seen as a field that can be studied in an assumed scientific way, setting its predictability in very concrete fashions. By defining expectations, IOs contribute to set agendas for governments and highly influential companies. Economically and politically, this implies that the production and decision-making of social processes are oriented towards possible scenarios that organize and reproduce the social spheres according to certain ‘imagined futures’ (Beckert, 2016; Walter, 2025). Imagined futures have been defined as a temporal category in which ‘actors co-produce and enact through future-making practices’ (Wenzel et al., 2020, p. 1443).

The concept of future-making is thus defined by the actions of practitioners in collectively creating imagined futures, rather than by their verbal expressions or stated objectives (Jarzabkowski et al., 2007). The study of future-making has evolved to emphasize ‘the real-time practices through which practitioners collaboratively create a realizable image of the future in the present’ (Thompson & Byrne, 2022, p. 249). In this paradigm, the future is not studied as an entity as such, but rather as a consequence of present decision processes in a network of collective ‘actors’ (organizations, science, data, policy, and business) within a defined set of scenarios. Accordingly, the future is not something that is ‘discovered’, but rather it is delivered from the present, depending crucially on the arrangements made by the institutional and individual actors.

Mastering time by future-making. Foresighting and forecasting temporal regimes

On this ground, modern institutions are tacitly judged based on their ability to predict and to model the future. An overlapping goal on this matter is the accuracy with which they can design a future scenario. Credibility, influencing, and recognition, mirrored in the level of prestige of an IO, are in no small part the result of the capacity to forecasting scenarios more accurately than others. These attempts to master the future are based on the assumption that anticipating is key to the decision-making process of current national policies, transnational companies, experts, and brokers. Due to the increasing rate of dynamism and volatility of social life, modern institutions seek to promote stable conditions for social actors, providing valid information for their decision-making. Since the future is unknown, entrepreneurs, managers, and workers cannot act solely by identifying optimal choices based on past statistical information (rationalism) or by using explicit scripts, rules, and norms (institutionalism) (Thompson & Byrne, 2022). Instead, they actively develop a pool of scenarios, using ‘planned futures’ to address questions of possibility rather than epistemology (Gartner et al., 1992).

As a result, the literature on futures argues that politicians, entrepreneurs, managers, and workers seek to construct credible images in order to shape the future through them (Beckert & Suckert, 2021; Thompson & Byrne, 2022). Imagined futures thus become performative in the present by structuring decisions, relationships, and expectations within and between organizations (Komporozos-Athanasiou, 2020; Oomen et al., 2022). In this sense, political and economic activities such as strategic planning, capital budgeting, technology forecasting, economic estimates, perceptual mapping, and business modelling are all ‘instruments of imagination’ (Beckert, 2016) through which ‘actors create the future and make it visible from a particular perspective in the present’ (Thompson & Byrne, 2022, p. 249).

Using the example of IOs, we highlight that there is no possibility of time mastering without a series of preconditions that set the chances of controlling it. And for this, the metric capacity of current societies is fundamental. Scholars have emphasized the abstraction of time, its objectification, and consequently the time calculability (Birth, 2012; Kern, 1983). Of these three, the last underpins a substantial part of what we call the mastery of time. The mathematization of time is one of the most revolutionary issues that has shaped the modern understanding of temporality. It defines its measurement and thus its management. Through the calculation of time, technologies can structure a highly precise measurement of time, just as clocks, calendars, and a universally coordinated time do. The impact of such time technologies over transport and communication systems was decisive. All the developments in the measurement of time contributed to the coordination of production processes and interactions between communication systems, and to grow a realistic desire to manage vast social spheres: ranging from continuous material extraction, housing and food supply, to birth rates and political-social struggles (i.e. labour rights, gender equality, and ecological futures today).

As a result, the future appears to be changeable and therefore malleable. Why should we take this ‘malleability’ of the future for granted? The current situation has not always been the case. Today, it may seem self-evident that there is a future horizon towards which society can not only orient itself in different ways, but also in very radical, even incompatible, fashions. The time plurality is also a result of the politicization of time and history. The alternatives within the shaping of time reveal the politics behind every choice of what past to continue, what present to care for, and what future to look for. The ‘temporalization of time’ thus articulates the three dimensions of past, present, and future as selections of memory over the present in order to guarantee a designed future. It implies that society and its possible futures can be mastered, making time itself a subject of control. As the psychologist Robert Levine concludes after comparing different cultural temporalities: ‘When the clock is dominant, time becomes a valuable commodity. Clock time cultures take for granted the reality of time as fixed, linear and measurable’ (2006, p. 90). The clock-measurement bond envelops a linear experience of time that can be managed. Time becomes a matter of planning through industrial production, political administration and the coordination of communication and transport. Our contention is that the manageability is the key factor in the claim to control time and thus the future of society. At the level of production, time becomes a commodity in the stages of extraction, processing and distribution, not only under the familiar label of ‘time gain’, but also in the very processes of planning and coordinating (Harvey, 1989). In political terms, time is embedded in life courses and institutional organizations, where politics over the course of life also implies politics over the time of those lives (Torres, 2022, Chapter 2).

In short, mastering time is a way of orienting and guiding society in a given present with a view to achieving a projected future. Far from taking neutral positions on foresight, the discourses on likely futures set them in forms that seem reasonably risky or, on the opposite, desirable, paving the way to future demands of mastering the pace of life. In the next section, we will show how one of the most topical social temporalities is a key figure in the mastery of society's pace, namely the so-called social acceleration phenomenon.

The acceleration society as a milestone in the time mastery

Having identified the central features of the contemporary mastery of time, we now turn to a dominant temporality in current history as one of the privileged heir of the controllability of time, namely the process of social acceleration. Acceleration theorists have widely emphasized the inherent acceleration of capitalist modernity (Agger, 2004; Glezos, 2012; Hassan, 2009). One of their most prominent theorists, Hartmut Rosa, has probably offered the most developed model of the self-propelled logic of acceleration within late capitalist societies. According to Rosa (2013), the economic level promotes the dynamization of technology, which in turn promotes the acceleration of life rhythms, both socially and individually, which in turn triggers the acceleration of the economy, technology, and so forth. The crucial point is that the acceleration dynamic is a mastery of time, because the logic of acceleration is self-propelled by political and economic means. The self-propagating logic sets dynamic stabilization as an increasing social capacity to process novelty and change within stable social structures (Rosa, 2003, 2013). Time thus becomes a manageable dimension under the control of society affordances and its management by ‘rational’ means. Paradoxically, it is only through society's modern belief in human agency and the consequent capacity to model its own reality that acceleration has become an almost uncontestable force. In a reversal reminiscent of T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer's Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002 [1944]), the promise of the domestication of society and its pace becomes a colossal force that thwarts the rational management of nature and human reality. Acceleration is then the engine as well as the vehicle through which the promise of human flourishing cancels itself out.

According to Reinhart Koselleck, a historical acceleration occurs when there are fewer repetitions in the series being compared, and instead, there are more variations that reject the old previous structures. Hence, for the acceleration to exist as a historical phenomenon, it is not enough to refer to the socio-structural elements of the contemporary world, such as technological advances, changes in the regime of work or the growing interconnectedness of communication (Torres, 2024). Acceleration entails the promise of reaching a defined future by mastering the present through the selection of certain pasts. The very modern spirit assumes that the future is the result of ‘our’ choices, modulating the pace of history, making it more flexible and fluid towards improvement. But the belief in agency also rests on the ability to select the past that is relevant to the present future. Koselleck's (2004) well-known thesis on the decline of history as a source of instruction for the present implies not only that the past has lost its former pedagogical status, but also that it can be interpreted in multiple ways. This politicization of the past is a condition for its selectivity. The key point here is that, by selecting time, the accelerating dynamic masters the future in an unprecedented way. It intertwines past, present, and future in a way that makes explicit the control over time through the self-propelled logic of acceleration and the ‘temporalization of time’ mentioned previously.

Yet, acceleration is not the only temporality. It is also accompanied by other social rhythms that do not operate under such hurried logic. One of the most common counterpoints to the impulses of acceleration is deceleration, usually regarded as its flip side (Citton, 2019). In the next section, we will look at the acceleration–deceleration theses in more detail to show their differences and, most importantly, their convergence with respect to the future.

Deceleration's as an alternative temporality?

Another contemporary social temporality, deceleration, while seemingly opposed to social acceleration, represents, albeit in a different key, a figure of modern time mastery. By deceleration we mean the set of contemporary historical, sociological, and economic perspectives that, by criticizing the basic tenets of industrial capitalist modernity (such as endless economic growth, unlimited technological expansion and a linear vision of social progress), put forward visions of society and historical time that necessarily imply the slowing down of social temporalities as a way of avoiding, remedying or mitigating the drawbacks (especially the overstepping of ‘planetary boundaries’ threatening the continuity of life on the planet) of speeding up modernity.

The starting point of the deceleration position is the call for a new time consciousness. The environmental crises that the accelerated temporality of global industrial capitalism has produced (McNeill & Engelke, 2016), would forces us to acknowledge the existence of another macro-temporality that transcends the temporal scope of the human species: the temporality of systemic Earth processes on which the equilibrium and continuity of life depends, and what has been called ‘the planetary’ (Chakrabarty, 2021; Clark & Szerszynski, 2021).

Planetary time challenges the modern narrative of ‘the fabulous exploits of humanity, transforming the Earth in order to master it’ (Latour, 2017b, p. 115). Moreover, it reveals that there has been something contradictory and alienating about modernity's drive for mastery, which has steadily decided blindly to move forward in the face of doubts about the dangers of industrial activity (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2017). Planetary temporality thus would break with conventional modern paradigms for the experience of time, such as the ‘futurist’ or ‘global’ regime of historicity (Beck, 2019). François Hartog has argued for the identification of a new ‘anthropocenic regime of historicity’, defined by a transformation in our relationship to the future (Hartog, 2020, p. 296). Bruno Latour has called this a ‘new climate regime’ in which ‘the physical framework that moderns have taken for granted, the ground on which their history has always played out, has become unstable’ (Latour, 2017b, p. 3). In this anthropocenic regime, time consciousness moves away from the notion of ‘modernity’ and integrates the fact that human history is also embedded in ‘geohistory’ (Latour, 2017b, p. 39). In this new epoch, ‘the “now” of human history has become entangled with the long “now” of geological and biological timescales’ (Bastian & Bayliss, 2022).

The awareness of this ‘new climate regime’ leads to a time consciousness of deceleration. By blurring the distinction between history and geology, the Anthropocene also shows the limits of the manageability of time that the modern project of time controllability entails. The recognition of a planetary temporality implies a logic of deceleration, as the connection between the accelerating cycles of industrial value creation and the current environmental crises (Chakrabarty, 2021, p. 40). A new future horizon emerged demanding a politics of time that would entail a reduction in the speed of social processes of technological development and economic growth. This recognition calls for a radical revision of the ‘human-dominant order’ created by the acceleration after the mid-20th century of the process of capitalist modernization, globalization, and a ‘profound mutation in our relation to the world’ which, if taken seriously, would imply a change in our mode of production (Chakrabarty, 2021, p. 203; Latour, 2017b, p. 8). The encounter with the ‘planetary’ has imposed a new political orientation that would insist on the importance of limits, in contrast to the ‘limitless future’ of economics (Latour, 2017a, p. 120). Such a transformed ‘vision of a civilized human future’ would have to include biodiversity considerations and, moreover, the withdrawal from the current human-dominant order of the Earth – a shift from ‘humancentric sustainability’ to a ‘planet-centric habitability’. Following this discussion, our contention is that we should replace a temporality based on a ‘flat future’ and a voluntaristic deceleration, for a richer time frame that we call ‘hinged’ time: a scope that move forward entangling the past and present currents, that is to say, looking for the future at sight by keeping an eye out on the times of planetary scales – the millennial living species, the remaining mineral reserves, the societies justice long term conquers’.

Hinged times not only refers to the bond among short and long-term temporalities, but also the resulting combinations between cultural temporalities ranging from global south/north, rural/metropolitan, east/west, confessional/secular, or high-tech/analogous distinctions. A hinged times approach will overcome rigid differences between past, present, and future regimes, as well as the spatialized specificities. In early modernity until our days, it has been fruitful to identify the characteristic times with one temporal modality (i.e. future and presentism), but today many temporalities are compelled to coexist and interact in a shrinking world. Hence, a single planetary temporality would be an illusion that would repeat the mistakes of a ‘universal time’. We could defend such a premise if we assume that the time of the Quechua people in the mountains of Peru is the same as that of high-tech brokers in Silicon Valley. Our proposal is to not get stuck with one mandatory temporal dynamic. Hinged times theorize a way to addresses the discomfort of not having a single object of observation. Of course, one way to deal with this would be to look for the ‘structural’ elements, the ‘systemic’ aspects that cut across all or most spheres of the global social world. But that would be a way of covering up the problem. Not only because obliterating differences is normatively problematic, but also because it is epistemologically wrong. We opt to offer another option: times are plural but not impermeable. They share affordances that allow them to start some associations as well as to reject others. Instead to defend strict boundaries, we believe in a boundary-work (Lamont & Molnár, 2002) that might grasp better the ongoing temporal connections. Instead of assuming fixed temporalities, we suggest a layered analysis that allows to combine temporal sources. Our basic assumption is that the time mixing of elderly people in an Andean region related to the media communication temporality might result in a variance of a hinged time of urban young people from Copenhagen in connection with the cultural expectation of leaving parents’ home. And both cases may imply very different adaptations to the linear time, the future ahead, or the speeding up of the society. What we try to bring into attention with these short examples is precisely that the combinations are, on the one hand, potentially unlimited, and, on the other hand, they compose unique hinged times in every situation.

Deceleration as more than a future orientation. The time mastery

Moving back to our reconstruction of the time mastering assumption, we have showed that despite their obvious differences in terms of the rhythms of social change, speeding-up and slowing-down temporalities share a common orientation towards the future, closing the discussion if time can be managed in more than one temporal direction. Moreover, the slowing-down temporality of deceleration still features a form of time controllability, because the response to the climate crisis implies urgent action on an unprecedented scale, perhaps only analogous to the total mobilizations of the two world wars in the former century. Even if deceleration advocates a different relationship to time, one that does not necessarily imply total mastering over the future to the same extent as acceleration, the very confidence that the future (and present) can be transformed by slowing down its pace, shows a close attunement to the modern premise that it is possible to one-directionally control, in a core extent, the outcomes of history.

Yet, at the same time, deceleration entails a very different vision of the controllability of time due to its distance from conventional modernist understandings of historical temporality. First, deceleration's brand of controllability is distinctive because it advances a different conception of human agency, reconstituted in the ‘new climatic regime’ frame. In the Anthropocene, this agency must interact with the ‘planetary agency’ of the non-human: the Earth's own ‘agency’, which diminishes the long-term consequences of purposeful human action. As it has been suggested ‘whatever we do today, the threat will remain with us for centuries, millennia, because the relay of so many irreversible actions, committed by humans, has been taken up by the inertial warming of the sea, the changes in polar albedo, the growing acidity of the oceans’ (Latour, 2017b, p. 39). We are witnessing a shift in controllability, as questions such as ‘who is the subject’ or ‘who is responsible’ for the causes and, more crucially, to be able to fix them, are no longer self-evident. While humans have acquired the capacity to interfere with planetary processes (as cause), they do not necessarily – at least not yet – have the capacity to fix them (as solvers). The fact that humanity has become a geological force suggests that the notion of ‘agency’ associated with modern controllability has collapsed: humanity's geological agency represents something quite new: a paradoxical situation in which agency cannot be unproblematically coupled with controllability anymore (demonstrating perhaps the fictional tie of modern agency with controllability as such). Humanity's geological agency is neither autonomous nor conscious, but that of an impersonal and unconscious geophysical force, the consequence of a more-than-human collective activity. Just as one of the foundations of the social acceleration framework lies on the modern belief in the human subject as capable of modelling its own reality in unlimited ways, so social deceleration is correlated with an overrated conception of the human means.

Second, the kind of controllability that deceleration entails is peculiar because, in contrast to conventional modernist understandings of human autonomy, it is critical of the modern notion of linear progress. Decelerationist positions dissociate the mastery of time from a teleological understanding of progress and suggest an alternative interpretation: the mastery of time as an autonomous modulation of social rhythms. An illustrative case of this socio-political stance that dissociates human autonomy from teleology is the decelerationist project of degrowth. While it is still a future-oriented endeavour, degrowth positions explicitly renounce the identification of human flourishing with limitless economic expansion. In Latour's terms, the interpretation of historical time advocated by degrowth would be closer to the ‘time of terrestrials’ of the Anthropocene than to the ‘time of humans’ of the Holocene, the time of historicist modernity (Latour, 2017b). We can therefore grant that deceleration involves a possible different vision of human agency, one that recognizes the fundamental role of non-human or ‘planetary’ temporalities. As a result of environmental crises, a critical awareness of humanity's situated place in the natural world is rising. Human action is always in a relationship of co-determination with geological and biological planetary processes. The anthropocenic human is still a subject, but, conditioned by the natural system of which she is a part, she is no longer completely sovereign or transcendent over nature, as proposed by teleological versions of modernity.

What Latour and Chakrabarty do not foresee, though, is that the anthropocenic historical temporality of deceleration is based on the awareness of this mutual determination between humanity and the planetary system, resulting from the transformation of modern subjectivity. The anthropocenic understanding of controllability is a response to this double paradox: it was the ‘Great Acceleration’ (McNeill & Engelke, 2016) of the global economy that revealed the geological processes of the planet through the unleashing of environmental crises, but it was in turn this revelation of a truly ‘inhuman’ timescale that increased the sense of urgency to act in response to the crises. As a result of this long-term determination of the future by the consequences of industrial activity, the scope of controllability has inevitably narrowed: we can no longer imagine the future in terms of the certainty of the material progress continuity as it has previously been done. What emerges from this crisis of agency is not its total abandonment, but rather the formulation of a new, ‘chastened’ version of controllability. Since the climate crisis has revealed the uncertainty of human action and the limits of the project of mastery over time, agency must be reinterpreted in terms of a corrected controllability that integrates, among other things, the prospect of potential risks, a ‘precautionary principle’ (Pinto-Bazurco, 2020). In the anthropogenic regime of planetary time, humans still have a role to play, but a fiduciary one. The overdetermination of the future by the climate crisis frames human action but does not cancel it out: it reshapes it, forcing it to consider the interdependence between humanity and the planetary system, and its commitment with this new status will legitimate (or not) its trustee.

Therefore, our claim is that deceleration breaks with the speeding up dynamic of acceleration, while remaining in continuity with the overall logic of the mastery of time. We could even argue that, by dissociating the controllability of time from the unchallengeable force of the self-propelled logic of acceleration (and its powerful tendency to impose itself on social models regardless of cultural or political preferences), deceleration represents an expansion of our understanding of social and temporal control and of the future horizons derived from them, because it affirms the possibility of social choice over forms of production, consumption and social organization. In this sense, deceleration represents a different vision of the social capacity to process change within stable social structures, an alternative to the dynamic stabilization of social acceleration. Deceleration presupposes a vision of the manageability of time that draws the limits of that manageability, the fact that control must coexist with the uncontrollability of planetary processes that transcend the scale of human endeavour. Social deceleration would mean stepping out of both ‘dynamic stabilization’ and ‘frenetic standstill’ (Rosa, 2013), without defeating the future-orientation. Quite the opposite. Seeking to control saving the future itself.

Beyond acceleration/deceleration paces: Novelty versus repetition

Scholarly claims of ‘pluritemporality’ (Fryxell, 2019) or ‘multiple temporalities’ (Jordheim, 2014) have become topical in recent years. According to them, time is not one and homogeneous but culturally determined and individually experienced as diverse. But how can these multiple temporalities be connected? To this question, we have already offer a response with the ‘hinged times’ concept. Next, do they share a common background? For this question, we have to develop another argument further. In the case of acceleration and deceleration, they certainly coexist with different social rhythms. However, as we have exposed, we believe that this initial fact should be nuanced by examining the veracity of a radical divergence. Hence, we will explore now another angle to show that acceleration and deceleration are not per se opposed to each other when we consider their common future orientation.

Plans for deceleration have gained momentum due to the recent pandemic and environmental concerns, but also because of necessary distinctions between social paces differentiated by north/south, west/east, urban/rural, or gender, age, and occupation (Torres & Gros, 2022), as well as some pitfalls of the acceleration theory itself (Vostal, 2021) and the political implications of deceleration (Gardiner, 2017). To date, however, these approaches have tended to treat the deceleration theorizing almost exclusively as the flip side of the acceleration theory. Such an understanding might be useful when it is necessary to point out an alternative to the logic of acceleration, but it is a problematic fence when we want to observe the common structures behind the temporalities of both acceleration and deceleration. In what follows, we offer an alternative reading of the aforementioned dichotomy by emphasizing the link to the past and the future that both temporalities imply. We argue that both acceleration and deceleration, in addition to sharing a convergent future orientation, operate within a more fundamentally divergence of ‘repetition’ and ‘novelty’.

We state that the opposite of acceleration is not necessarily slowing down but rather repetition since the logic of acceleration requires constant innovation and dynamism in several social spheres, particularly those related to science and technology, and economy and culture. The repetition risk relies on the menace that no more expansion or no new trends will feed the economic and cultural spheres. The consequences of consumption stagnation and cultural inertia are the most significant counterforces for an acceleratory logic. Therefore, repetition is in this regard coupled with standstill in all relevant social domains. Stagnation and slowing down share certainly some features: they do not increase the consumption levels steadily, they modulate the pace of living, and they crucially decelerate the overall acceleratory logic. Yet repetition is more radical. In fact, a social process can occur hand in hand with repetition by increasing its pace, but the basic assumption of steady innovation, novelties, and change does not take place without a break with the iteration of the ‘old'. In our jargon, repetition is the recurrence of the past appealing directly against the basic spirit of fostering the ‘new’. Acceleration is put at risk if the constant innovation suddenly stops. In fact, acceleration relies even more on systemic innovation and is less affected by fluctuating speeds than by a lack of incessant movement accompanied by steady ‘novelties’. Accounts of a variety of topics illustrate this current social fact: ranging from the futility of the social media content to scholars’ publications, technical devices updates, or family and partners’ refigurations, the contemporary societies are marked by an adolescent spirit: ‘Ok. So, what is next?’. It could be argued that the efforts to decelerate also operate within the logic of systemic innovation, insofar as the recognition of different temporalities and social rhythms can make room for other future horizons, thus remaining the future open.

The future of acceleration, in sum, converges with the future of deceleration. Although the two approaches are qualitatively different in their goals and certainly in their social rhythms, the divergence of their speeds does not necessarily mean that they are based on different understandings of the future. Acceleration operates under the future horizon by virtue of its basic structure of ‘pushing forward’. Yet, as in the logic of acceleration, in deceleration, the future is a temporal dimension that can and should be controlled. Even if it is oriented towards environmental protection and a post-growth society, the basic mindset of controlling time does not disappear in deceleration – it is only chastened. We contend that the convergent future shared by acceleration and deceleration is based on this fundamental assumption of the mastery of time, which cuts across both indistinctly. The difference, though, it does not rely solely in their pace. We also affirm that they posit a divergent esteem in contingency and recursivity. To put it bluntly, while acceleration rejects stagnation in favour of dynamism, deceleration claims for reducing and keeping things. While acceleration looks for new market trends, tech innovation, and flowing cultural values; deceleration concerns about the steady consumption, the lack of durable norms, the increasing demands on energy and mining that endanger the possibility of any future. In a nutshell, while acceleration is more open to (fenced) contingency, deceleration is closer to recursivity. And these different paths suppose a more radical difference than their evident paces.

From this point, we can now consider how the mastery of time becomes a self-imposed boundary for the conception of the future itself.

The mastery of time as future closure

The concept of the future has its own history. It is even possible to trace its ‘discovery’ and to account for its historicity and modern centrality (Hölscher, 1999). Its centrality has also been contested due to new historical configurations (Hartog, 2016) or with regard to its assumptions (Simon, 2021). Be that as it may, it is still reasonable to acknowledge that the future was not only a crucial temporality in the emergence of modern western societies, but that it remains a central temporal modality for the advancement of current historical processes. It drives various phenomena, ranging from the speeding-up of the technological industry to the accelerating logic of the economy, or the future-making advancements from IOs as exposed in ‘The mastery of time as a demand for future-making’ section. As we stated above, the future is not an extension of the present, but rather a field of struggle in its own right, which means that its images influence the actual present (Delanty, 2021; Urry, 2016). The relevance of imagined futures over the present has been highlighted both theoretically (Beckert & Suckert, 2021; Suckert, 2022) and empirically (Cuzzocrea & Mandich, 2016). Moreover, contemporary attention has also turned to what kind of future we can expect given the risky scenarios that lie ahead. These scenarios also make the threat of the ‘end of the world’ plausible by means of a contemporary risk that overwhelms societies as a common condition.

In their 2017 book The Ends of the World, Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro question the meaning of the doomsday predictions of the death of the planet Earth and all its inhabitants. For the authors, the threat of global warming is not the ‘end of the world’ itself, but of a particular way of conceiving the world: for example, the demise of some of the iconic symbols of modernity. From the collapse of the notion of progress to the emergence of new values related to the ties between humans and nature, due to the Western capitalist economy and the environmental crisis it has created, the end of the ‘world’ has already begun. And we should add that this end has also occurred centuries ago. The emergence of capitalist modernity was also the ‘end’ of the world for many indigenous peoples all over the planet, and especially in the so-called ‘New World’ of the ‘Americas’. The ‘discovery’ of this new continent was the beginning of the end for many forms of life, including ancient cultures. For them, their traditional world collapsed without any deliberation or choice. Yet other worlds opened up on the ruins of the former.

In the same vein, one of the most paradoxical things about ‘our’ world is that ‘the desire for control produces, behind our backs, a world that in the end is utterly uncontrollable in all relevant aspects’ (Rosa, 2020, p. IX). The improvements in the control of social living conditions produce unforeseen complexities that not only require new means of action but sometimes seem unbearable. And this leads to another paradox: the key role of the mastery of time in capitalist modernity can turn into the precondition for a closed future as constant efforts to control it, precluding the possibility of complete openness. Niklas Luhmann's (1976) alluded to a similar argument in his thesis about the systemic modern structures that prevent the future from actually beginning. The need to control contingency in a faster lane requires more anticipatory practices that fence the future possibilities, as in the modern institutional cases mentioned previously. According to Luhmann, ‘a faster rate of change requires more anticipatory behaviour – literally, more acting before the event, more future-oriented planning’ (1976, p. 134). At the same time, any anticipatory effort occurs beyond the actual control of every society sphere, as regarding the hidden forces driving the historical becoming (Löwith, 1957) or the unexpected secularization waves fostered by the acceleration of technical means (Torres, 2016).

Given these paradoxes, can we therefore imagine a future without the mastery of time? Or, is the uncontrollability of the world a feasible future? Surely there is an irreducible level of necessary control, or what we call ‘fenced contingency’, where social processes can and deserve to be managed. Health care, housing infrastructure and food production certainly need to be rationally controlled and managed towards world-reproduction goals. However, these tasks cannot be taken seriously today without consideration of forms of ‘non-human’ agency, such as that of biogeological processes. As decelerationist stances argue, society's actions must take into account the impact on the world's energy resources, minerals, animal and plant life, oceans and atmosphere. And this already constitutes another imagined future.

In the first half of the 20th century, Chilean literature coined the term Mundonovismo, a concept used to define the typical characteristics of local art, which was also reflected in the Latin American perspective. The term, attributed to the Chilean writer Francisco Contreras, helped to clarify the adoption of modernismo (modernism) in literary spheres, along with the elevation of the local environment and cultural conditions as key points of the nature-culture bond (Contreras, 1919). Although the movement did not last long and its literary influence is limited (Housková, 1987), its central arguments deserve to be seen as a rehearsal of the hypothesis of a Nuevo Mundo (New World) in which nature and culture unfold. The writings of the mundonovistas promote a synchronicity between nature and society, in which nature always plays a privileged role. Without romanticizing nature, the aim here is to discuss what ‘world’ we are referring to when we speak of its collapse, what future we consider to be ‘at risk’, and, consequently, what rehearsals of new scenarios we can made up (considering also which ones have already been done). Because of past and present imperial and colonial projects, because of the unequal distribution of resources and capital, the ‘world’ referred to, more often than necessary, does not apply to the whole of ‘planet Earth’. As Danowski and Viveiros de Castro rightly point out, the end of the world has happened many times before. We can count the world of native communities in Africa or the Americas, but also the world before the Second World War or the atomic droppings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even the digital age could be seen as the rise of a new ‘kind of’ world. To be clear, it is not the threat of the collapse of the planet Earth what we are questioning, but rather what future is worrying, what world image is at risk. As we can see from the reckoning of other well-known statements, it may be more difficult to imagine a radically new future than the actual end of this world.

Final remarks

Instead of a conclusion, we call for a better understanding of our expectations about the future by asking what kind of world we have in mind when we forecast. As we have seen, the controllability of time is a crucial aspect of the convergent future in which acceleration and deceleration claim a part. Acceleration and deceleration share the basic structure of mastering time and, consequently, their futures are constrained by the very same limits of the time-controlling assumption. Time mastering leads to a closure of the future itself, since a strict, control-oriented thinking make other imagined futures unthinkable. Historical examples of other futures, as in the case of the Mundonovistas, as in the fate of the indigenous peoples of ‘Abya Yala’ (a world replaced by ‘America’), open the discussion about our ‘own’ future, its chances, and what we should be afraid of 2016. Even the idea of ‘no future’ might be counted as a consequence of a convergent future, where no further or alternative options are distinguishable. The great promises that once touched modern societies have been steadily chipped away, leaving a trace of repetition. Yet while deceleration is much more favourable to repetition and stagnation, acceleration is far more reactive to both. Speeding up societies need a promise of change -although within the limits of its own path-, while deceleration claims are more sluggish. Both converge, though, in the basic assumption that time can be mastered. Even with nuances, it should be controlled. Therefore, the time mastery outcomes and implications can be summed up in several levels.

First, the world of modernity may have already ended with the demise of progress and the rise of other epistemologies (Allen, 2016; Wagner, 2016), but other worlds have certainly begun with the same momentum. Discussions about the future also presuppose debates about what world we are seeking to inhabit and, therefore, what past and present we wish to retain and which one we might want to overlook. Moreover, continuous and discontinuous futures could be a more fruitful approach to observe proposals for another worlds, oriented to modify the current global situation – or rather to maintain the current one.

Secondly, the mastery of time is not a call that can be identified solely with one social agent. It is not only the domain of the global ruling class or the privileged – although they certainly have the strongest influence on its course and short-term profits. As we have shown, it has a material and cultural basis that transcends the current historical understanding of our world. In a historical sociology perspective, the modern capitalist era is an epoch based on the quest to control nature, humanity and its pace. Who is to blame? This is a question beyond the scope of this article. So far, it has to be understood as a cultural interpretation of a material base, although the transnational organizations and people who benefit more are those who oversee the extraction and production processes. A more confident openness to what is to come could then be a starting point for overcoming the characteristic short-sighted politics of today. A ‘hinged time’ fosters a long-term scope that allows us to see the world ahead differently. A world with less fear of what the future may bring is also a world where the mastery of time coexists with more plural ways of understanding the unfolding of life and history.

Thirdly, as we have shown, in authors who argue for uncontrollability, there is an awareness of the ‘negative dialectic’ of modernity: the recognition that it was the quest for the controllability of the world at all costs (through capitalism and industrialization) what unleashed the forces of uncontrollability of the planetary system through the climate crisis. The lesson we draw from this negative dialectic in this article is that human subjectivity must accept the limits of controllability in order to update the critical inquiries. While it is true that deceleration, like acceleration, is part of the modern quest for controllability, decelerationist visions represent a version of controllability that acknowledges its own threshold by recognizing that human societies are embedded with a milieu in a long-time process. This acknowledgement opens deceleration to alternative temporalities, such as planetary time.

Finally, an ultimate way of offering a consistent interpretation of these two opposing forces is to couple them as an additional move on the ‘hinged times’ of a long past and future process: acceleration/deceleration as a version of a solid controllability replaced by the prospect of a multiple, open controllability. All in all, as a response to the realization that the promise of the society's rational control turns into a force that limits the possibilities of that very rational mastering.