I was invited to the 2021 Platform Cooperativism Conference in Berlin, The New Common Sense. Faced with the prospect of presenting the complexities of DisCO in a five minute lighting talk, I decided to take a completely different approach and speak from the heart to get to the soul of DisCO through poetry, rhythm and sound.

You can watch the full lighting talk season here.

What would you do… If you had the time?

Tick-Tock
Time is running out, time is running out
Is time on our side, or is time grinding against us?

Who are the masters that made the cut, the measure of time?
From punch clock to the micro secondary fractions of HFTs, Derivatives,
Cyborg Finance

Time is not ours, we lost time to the man, to the atomic clock,
tick tock, tick tock

Now there’s feel time, rhythm time, and the beat: call it Kairos
Kairos is the time of song
From seasons, sunrise to sunset, keeping rhythm with the Earth
Keeping rhythm with each other…

From each according to their capacity to each according to their need
300,000 years of Sapiens²,
A species so smart we had to say it twice

And in the wink of an eye, time was amputated from flow,
Warlords, gods, masters, owners, kings
cutting time into minutes, quotas and blueprints, into productive time
Time has been stolen from us.

Time is money? Is that the whole truth and nothing but?
Money for who? Money for what?

Factory time encloses us:
Call it Chronos, the time of the masters
It is surveillance, it is control
Atomic clock ruling your life
tick tock, tick tock

Time, time was invented, made up by the man,
Imposing particles and subdivisions on waves
What are you doing with your time,
what are you doing with your ability to do and to think?

Is your capacity meeting the need of your sisters and brothers,
Can your capacity meet the needs of the planet that birthed us
Do we have capacity to rescue this planet
This planet we are burning from the brink?
Or do we not have the time?

Time to work on it, unlearning the madness, time to work
Not work for the clock time, not work for the man
To work for and with each other

What would you do? What would you do if we had the time?
Time not to fear, time to be calm, to think and talk about what’s ahead
What would you do?
What would you do if we took back the time?

Time to be taken care of, time to care
To care for yourself, for others, for and with the Earth.
You’re gonna spend a third of your life in a bullshit job?
What would happen if we all had the time?
Time to do the work, time to stay with the trouble.

Because we are the others, the othered,
The marginalised, oppressed, and killed
The women, the witches, the black and brown,
the queer and weird, the poor and starved

What if we had time to talk, to plan?
Is time money? Or is it power?
Take it back yo, take-it, take-it, take-it back yo,
We gotta take the power back

What would you do?
Do if we owned time?
What would everyone do?

And how do we prepare for taking back power, taking back time?
How do we agree on how to use our time?
How do we even speak of these things?

We dance, we DisCO, we do the work, we stay with the trouble
We’re deep into the funk, we stay with the beat

We talk, we mutually recognize
We build anew, we take back, we take back time.

To quote:

“Time, time is a ship on a merciless sea
Drifting toward an abyss of nothingness
Until it can be recharted for its own destiny”.

Tick tock, time, time, time.
Time is ours to reclaim, to reinvent.
We are the ones we are waiting for.
The time is now.

What would you do… …if you had the time?

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Lead Image by Liv Hema from original art by Murielle Cohen