FUTURE PRESENT: PRACTICING THE COMMONS AS KONGS 共/空
When I met the Buddhist monk Jongrim, he reintroduced me to a familiar Buddhist maxim: . He was responding to my questions about his view of the future from the perspective of social change. He explained that he does not concern himself with future-oriented thinking, like speculation or predictions. Instead, he continuously looks for, and does, what is the best for now. In response, I asked him how, then, he makes a plan. (I had in mind that his focus on the present must be distinguished from the accelerationists’ critique of the political left for lacking future visions, long-term goals and being “immediatist.”) He gave us another Buddhist kernel, which paired well with the first. By focusing on the present, he tries to
