The Sealed Present: Ecological Irreversibility and the Crisis of the Imagination
Iris ter Schiphorst

By now the term “climate crisis” is part of the moral background noise of our times. And this is the problem with it: the fact that it not only describes an ecological situation but also establishes a specific relationship to time.

In modern political thought, a crisis is considered a temporary state of emergency – a momentary deviation within an otherwise stable order, which can be brought into line through targeted interventions. Every crisis thus carries with it the promise of return: stabilisation, management or repair. This is why the concept of crisis remains compatible with a technocratic rationality that treats ecological destruction primarily as an administrative problem.¹ But what if this exceptional state has become the norm?² Then “crisis” loses its temporary character and becomes the structure of the present itself: a system of permanent disruption.

The transformation of the Earth system defies this crisis logic. The individual environmental parameters are not changing in isolation from one another; instead, the interplay of atmospheric, biological and geological conditions as a whole has been thrown into disarray. This shift is happening gradually and is, moreover, irreversible. Species extinction, collapsing water systems, toxic material cycles and climatic tipping points no longer mark ordinary historical changes. They point to temporal dimensions whose ecological irreversibility far exceeds the scope of technical control.³ Two forms of time collide within the concept of climate crisis: the linear understanding of time, directed toward a better future, which characterises the modern era, and the finiteness of ecological processes that cannot be repaired. The ecological crisis is thus not a crisis in the conventional sense, it is the confrontation of modernity with its own irreversibility. And that is why it remains largely unimaginable.

How does the present change when it is no longer structured as a durational quantity but solely as a process of permanent updating?

The confrontation with ecological irreversibility marks a shift in how society relates to time. As the modern model of progress reaches its biophysical limits, the system escapes into an informational real time. Algorithms do not see the world as historical processes but rather apply a form of continuous real-time processing to it.⁴ Sociologist Hartmut Rosa describes modernity as a regime of acceleration in which social and technical processes increasingly operate decoupled from duration. According to his diagnosis, the present is not conceived as a stable whole but as a continuous succession of changing states. This dynamic influences not only the pace at which something happens but also what can be considered “the present” in the first place.⁵

Digital platforms radicalise this structure by organising attention around intensity rather than continuity.⁶ What can gain traction in the short term is made visible. What disappears does not do so because it is irrelevant but because it no longer generates a temporal foothold. The present thus disintegrates into a sequence of isolated updates. It is not the reality of ecological destruction that disappears but rather the embeddedness of that reality in time. While forest fires, heat waves and floods remain materially present, they are integrated into ever new information cycles, without their historical importance ever being truly felt.⁷

As early as 1981, Jean Baudrillard outlined a culture in which the real disappears beneath the weight of its simulations.⁸ Today, this diagnosis seems to be radicalising ecologically: destruction is constantly being represented – and simultaneously neutralised, both psychologically and aesthetically.⁹ We are aware of it without ever really absorbing its temporal dimension. The present is not merely accelerated. It is sealed.¹⁰ Or, in the spirit of the philosopher Marita Tatari, it can be understood as a form of immersion – the embedding of consciousness in procedural networks without beginning or end.¹¹ While ecological reality continues its irreversible advance, the algorithmically organised present operates within a closed time loop. The result is a peculiar form of collective fixation on the present: a structural blindness to those processes that are silently eroding the foundations of modern societies.

Imagination, here, means the capacity to comprehend historical time as a coherent whole and to grasp developments that reach beyond immediate events. It is this capacity that is now coming under pressure from permanent algorithmic updating. This, then, is the crisis of the imagination.

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as the writer and blogger Mark Fisher asserted in his polemic Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). This diagnosis points to a profound impasse: the future no longer appears as an open historical horizon but rather as a rigid zone of tension torn between technological extrapolation and diffuse catastrophe.

Technocratic modernity treats the future as terrain to be administratively managed. Forecasts, data models and logics of valorisation survey the time horizon in advance and convert planetary ruptures into a permanently administered present. The philosopher Peter Trawny describes this as “technical totality”, in which the world exists only as an available and calculable resource.¹² And it is precisely for this reason that ecological irreversibility is so unimaginable: it runs counter to the linear progress narrative of modernity, whose temporal model is geared to constant optimisation. Within this order, an irrevocable end can be imagined only as a spectacular end-of-days scenario.¹³ The paralysis of the imagination therefore does not derive solely from the fear of collapse but from the inability to conceive of a future beyond technocratic administration, permanent valorisation and algorithmic control.

Ecological destruction does not unfold within a homogeneous social space – it exacerbates existing asymmetries. While large portions of the population are increasingly caught up in the infrastructures of a precarious present, parallel zones of selective resilience are taking shape: private security architectures, shielded supply systems and technological sanctuaries. The future is starting to fracture along social lines. According to Bruno Latour, what is unfolding in this process is the erosion of an “insurable world” – “insurable” in the sense that insurance is not only an economic instrument but also a modern model of time: It was what made the future calculable by translating uncertainty into risk and thus stabilising a shared horizon.¹⁴

With the collapse of this model, the idea of a collectively shared future disappears. Communal provision is increasingly replaced by privatised coverage: wealthy actors withdraw their resources from the solidarity of the common good and channel them into exclusive safe havens and selective future security. Global elites have long since abandoned modernity’s central historical promise – a shared and better future for all.¹⁵

At the same time, capitalism’s crisis logic is shifting into speculative visions of the future. Ideologies such as longtermism and projects like the colonisation of Mars extend the progress narrative beyond planetary boundaries and earthly time. While immense capital flows pour into extraterrestrial scenarios, the stabilisation of the Earth system itself is increasingly becoming a secondary concern.

What scope for action remains when the future is no longer a shared horizon?

This question cannot be resolved simply by invoking new technologies or environmental programmes, because the manifestations of ecological destruction are not limited to climate collapse or the depletion of biophysical resources but rather signal a fundamental rupture with the temporal order of modernity.

A culture whose attention is wholly governed by the dictates of permanent yield expectations and algorithmic acceleration gradually loses the capacity for historical orientation – and herein lies the political dimension of ecological destruction. One possible answer might therefore be that political agency begins with the reclaiming of other forms in which time is experienced: forms that are not wholly permeated by the imperatives of efficiency, valorisation and permanent reactivity.

Such an interruption of the prevailing temporal order requires spaces of shared duration, shared attention and shared experience. Traditionally, these included philosophy, aesthetic practice and collective forms of reflection.¹⁶ Contemporary late-modern culture, however, tends to absorb even these practices into processes of permanent valorisation. Whatever resists this logic comes under material pressure and is dismissed as an unproductive void.¹⁷ But where such spaces disappear, the gift of perceiving the world beyond the immediate present is lost.

Ecological irreversibility therefore marks not only the limit of an economic model. It may also mark the limit of a form of civilisation that was only able to map out the future in terms of progress, expansion and technological control. What is at stake, then, is not merely the stability of our livelihoods but rather the capacity to experience the world as something shared – something that endures beyond the present of its exploitation.

Translated by Peter Rigney

Iris ter Schiphorst, composer, musician and author, has been a member of the Music Section at the Akademie der Künste since 2013 and has served as its deputy director since 2021.

1. The linear temporal model inherent to capitalism and its rationale of crisis conceives of time as an infinite, measurable and irreversible line oriented primarily towards progress, efficiency and valorisation, in which crises are understood as necessary processes of adjustment preceding new phases of growth. Science and technology are instrumentalised to optimise the growth engine in purely technocratic terms and to displace crises spatially, rather than to critically examine their structural causes. See Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston: Beacon Press, 1964; Jürgen Habermas, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology’”, in Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science, and Politics, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, Boston: Beacon Press, 1970, pp. 81–122. In the current phase of Green Capitalism, this technocratic mode of governance is applied to the ecological crisis itself: rather than structurally transforming the regime of permanent growth predicated on linear time, this strategy aims to regulate ecological challenges through new technologies (e.g. decarbonisation, geoengineering) and the commercialisation of ecosystem services (such as carbon certificate trading) in a market-compatible manner. The natural sciences are deployed to manage ecological tipping points administratively and to stabilise, on the basis of ecological sustainability, the functional capacity of the existing economic system over time. See Stephan Kaufmann and Tadzio Müller, Grüner Kapitalismus: Krise, Klimawandel und kein Ende des Wachstums, Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2009; Philipp Degens and Sighard Neckel, eds., Das Scheitern des grünen Kapitalismus: Analysen, Aussichten, Alternativen, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2024, pp. 7–28.
2. Since ecological destruction is crossing planetary boundaries irreversibly, it can no longer be understood as a temporary phase preceding the next linear surge of growth. The system falls into a technocratic loop of the present: as the progressive promise of the future collapses, political and economic agency narrows to a permanent administrative crisis management in the here and now. This temporal block fixes capitalism in an endless loop of damage control and self-preservation that prevents genuine transformation. See Philipp Staab, Systemkrise: Legitimationsprobleme im grünen Kapitalismus, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2025, pp. 45–75.
3. Ecological irreversibility refers to irreversible damage to species, ecosystems and biophysical cycles once critical threshold values have been crossed.
4. With algorithms setting the pace, the capitalist economy is being radically transformed: the classical market principle – whereby profits are generated through productive competition and the qualitative improvement of goods – gives way to an intensified profit imperative of pure extraction. In digital platform capitalism, market logic is increasingly superseded and replaced by an economy of access control. Capital is not accumulated by those who manufacture the better product but by those who control the digital and informational infrastructure that mediates access to the world. This shift from production to technological enclosure constitutes the economic matrix for those neo-feudal tendencies that are growing increasingly radical in the face of the crisis of the Earth system.
5. See Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, pp. 113–58 and pp. 339–51.
6. See Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism, Cambridge: Polity, 2017.
7. For neoliberalism, nature no longer exists in its material, living, intrinsic temporality; instead, it is dissolved into pure data streams, risk metrics and tradeable certificates. Through this total informatisation of the biosphere, its irreversible loss – as a consequence of, for example, soil erosion or species extinction – is translated into reversible mathematical equivalents. The ecological crisis thus signals not an insurmountable loss of control but an innovation catalyst that applies classical crisis thinking to nature, feeding it into new cycles of valorisation as a data point via the price mechanism. See William D. Nordhaus, Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, pp. 22–42 and pp. 81–98.
8. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
9. The aesthetic neutralisation of the crisis remains a privilege of relatively protected consumer societies; in many regions of the Global South, the crisis has long since manifested as immediate material reality.
10. See Bernard Stiegler, Symbolic Misery, vol. 1, The Hyper-Industrial Epoch, trans. Barnaby Norman, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. Stiegler describes technological conditioning as a “grammatisation” of consciousness: those who move through digital space find their thinking and perception pressed into the logical schemata of algorithms. This temporal cadence blocks the capacity for long-term imagination and fixes consciousness in a state of permanent updating.
11. See Marita Tatari, Kunstwerk als Handlung: Transformationen von Ausstellung und Teilnahme, Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. Tatari conceives of digital immersion as a condition in which the constitutive gap between subject and environment – the distance that makes critical reflection and historical consciousness possible in the first place – has all but disappeared. In the state of immersion, consciousness becomes inseparably fused with procedural, algorithmic operations. Time is thereby no longer experienced as a progression (with a past and a future) but as a seamless, permanently self-updating present that renders reflexive interruptions nearly impossible.
12. See Peter Trawny, Technik. Kapital. Medium, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2015, pp. 24–58. Trawny draws here on Martin Heidegger's concept of Bestand from Heidegger’s philosophy of technology (see “The Question Concerning Technology”, 1953).
13. This functional reduction corresponds to that total digital immersion which embeds consciousness seamlessly in procedural networks and blocks every historical or reflexive pause. See Tatari, Kunstwerk als Handlung.
14. On the “insurable world” as a temporal model of modernity, see Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
15. This development is described as neo- and techno-feudalism. Rather than through classical competition, profit today is secured through monopoly: while tech corporations control digital platforms, global elites monopolise the most important future technologies and seal themselves off within a “Green Fortress” – an exclusive space of protection against climate crises. For the global peripheries this means structural dispossession, as they are reduced to being a mere source of raw materials for the core zones and lose access to resources that are essential for life. See Sighard Neckel, “Refeudalisierung: Systemische Krisenmerkmale des Gegenwartskapitalismus”, Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 32, no. 2 (2022), pp. 203–25; Sighard Neckel, “Zerstörerischer Reichtum: Wie extreme Ungleichheit die Gesellschaft spaltet”, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 12 (2022), pp. 65–74; Douglas Rushkoff, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.
16. See Tadzio Müller, Zwischen friedlicher Sabotage und Kollaps: Wie ich lernte, die Zukunft wieder zu lieben, Vienna: Mandelbaum Verlag, 2024. In the face of advancing climate change, Müller advocates for the establishment of explicitly communal zones decoupled from the market regime (“collapse camps”) in order to provide spaces for emancipatory neighbourhood networks beyond the coercive imperatives of capitalist valorisation.
17. On data-driven valorisation logic in the cultural sector, see the debates surrounding models of streaming economics and the distribution key used by GEMA, the German music copyright society.