Wolfgang Wild has a distinctive philosophy of time. The founder and editor of tRetronaut argues our new ability to readily access the images and artefacts of the past has given us a chance to rethink our notions of the present and the future.

Antony Funnell, ABC Future Tense

Most of us have a linear model of time—we imagine the past behind us, we are standing in the present and the future is ahead of us. But that is not necessarily the way that time works.

Actually, we are not always moving forwards. The limitation of the linear model is that the past is behind us—it becomes something that we don't see and we don't use because it's over and done with.

We almost have a social prohibition against looking back. We have the story of Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt, and we talk to people about ‘looking forward’ and let's ‘move forward’, whereas in fact we can think of the past in quite a different way, not by using the word 'past' but by thinking of it as a timescape.

Imagine ourselves standing at a central point and looking out in time, looking out at all the things that we've done before, all the versions of the world and the versions of ourselves that we've created and curated; they are all in front of us and they are available to us to remix into our own version of now.

The digital tools that we have, particularly the internet, have served to collapse our sense of time.

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s the things of my childhood were far removed from me—toys, programs I'd seen—it was hard to track those things down. Now all of that is instantaneously available to all of us pretty much all the time.

So the ephemera of what has gone before is much more available to us to use, and our sense of the distance of time has collapsed.

There are quite a few advantages to a non-linear model of time. One is that with the linear model of time, the past is dead and it's over and it's behind us. Whereas with a non-linear model, the past becomes the sum total of all that we've created so far, all the versions of now that we've created, all the versions of the world and of us, and that means that it's free and available to us to reuse.

That's a very positive point of view; rather than the past being something which we think we should learn from but never do, it becomes something that we can employ in our own version of now.

Another advantage is that rather than thinking of ourselves as fixed in the present and in a static version of ourselves, we become much more remixable and curatable to ourselves.

In other words, we recognise that we are not heading forward into a future which is a different place to where we are now, it's all one big now and it's always in flux and changing, and that includes ourselves. It's a liberating message that we are free to re-curate ourselves in any way that we want to be.

I started Retronaut as a rather elaborate way to show people that the version of the past that they thought was the case wasn't necessarily the case, it wasn't fixed. And the reason I did that—this was the elaborate bit—was to help people to think that if the past isn't fixed, maybe the present isn't fixed, maybe I can make changes much more fluidly.

Putting that in a very practical sense and using a small analogy, I like to think of somebody's wardrobe. If we have a wardrobe of clothes, we don't just wear the newest garment that we've bought, which is at the front of the wardrobe, the whole of the wardrobe is available to us, all the different points in time, for us to remix and re-curate and change.

Some people might only wear the very latest thing, but in general we have a much more fluid approach to our back catalogue of clothes, and that's how I like to think of time, that we can have this fluid approach to the back catalogue of all the different ways that there have been.

Another advantage is that rather than thinking of ourselves as fixed in the present and in a static version of ourselves, we become much more remixable and curatable to ourselves.

In other words, we recognise that we are not heading forward into a future which is a different place to where we are now, it's all one big now and it's always in flux and changing, and that includes ourselves. So it's a liberating message that we are free to re-curate ourselves in any way that we want to be.

There's a rather philosophical point to be made here which is: what is the nature of time? What are we talking about when we talk about time?

Without change, without some form of change, then there is no sense of time. So time is actually a way of measuring change, it's a way of measuring the relationship between one thing and another as that relationship changes. In the same way that length is the relationship between two points, so time is the relationship between two points as they change in relationship to each other.

In other words, rather like length is a container, so time is a container for all the behaviour that exists in the universe. So the behaviour of how people have their hair, how buildings are made, how galaxies evolve and so on and so forth.

What that means is that what we are dealing with in time is not some directional arrow from past to present to future, but a set of behaviours that we can change in whatever way we want them to be changed.

Nothing is fixed, there's just this one moment which is the now and then there's all the things that we choose to do.

In terms of our concept of the future, the future as we tend to perceive it doesn't exist and it can't exist. You see this a lot with political parties. There was a Labour Party manifesto that I remember in the UK, which was A Future Fair For All, it showed a family gazing over some hills into the sunset, and there was a sense that the future was over the horizon.

And we know that that's not true. The future in that way never comes, it can't come because it doesn't exist. There's only the present moment, and there's what we do in that present moment; it's the behaviours that we exhibit in this present moment, the tools that we choose to use, the ways that we choose to behave, the ways we choose to dress or interact with each other.

So the great news about that is there is no future and the moment of action is now and always will be now.