The times, they are a-changing. The literary Nobel Prize committee agreed: you are right, Mr Dylan. Time to go with the flow. Time to remain true to yourself. Remember to switch your mobile phones into airplane mode. Remember to enjoy virtual realities and enhanced dreams. Time matters more than ever before. More than space?
Once upon a time, all things large and small circled the earth, and we (as in we, the thinking human beings) were close to the beating heart of everything. The first painful blow came from Copernicus. The Polish astronomer told us that our planet does not order other heavenly bodies around. The star called the Sun does. The message took some time to register. Even more to impact the way we think about places and spaces. Time went along.
Along? Everybody tried to capture the moment, conquer the flow, win the time, time after time. But not everything is as easy as a selfie online. No matter how hard we try, we always have a situation. Time and again. There is no magic shield from the random surprises. With the idea of relativity, Einstein did for time what Copernicus did for space. We (as in thinking human beings, remember?) lost the royal privilege of imposing a single time on days, years, centuries. The echo of this blow is still audible in the sensemaking caves of our imagination. The passage of time means that a reality, which we try to imagine in the brevity of abstract concepts, surprises us with the hard facts, fluid realities, and fresh impressions of the events. We value the testimonies of the firsthand witnesses, who experienced the events from the “inside”. But we also access opinions of the outsiders, who claim a true report from the “outside”. The passage of time is experienced as a travel through events, which flow into the river-like processes, which flow into “realities”.
The changes in thinking about space and time surfaced in work, leisure and learning. Factory work went to the bots, office workers switched to the online mode. Leisure exploded. Theatres were too small and too few. Sports stadia were too small and too few. Infotainment is for billions. Streaming instead of concerts. Uber foods instead of McDonald’s. Clouds instead of libraries. Influencers instead of authorities. Learning dispersed, access replaced attendance. Everybody can afford a personal tutor, an AI coach; a Claude, or a ChatGPT, or a Gemini. Perfect timing.
Haarlem, July 4, 2026