En-Crip-ing Time

Readme.md

En-crip-ing time is a coming to of co(de)-poetics, in which we layer our voices and blur crip practices of system administration and poetic coding through the reimagination of cron jobs as chronic jobs, performing deterministic server maintenance as indeterminate indefinite crip care and kinship. 

Its sexCI chronic job is an invitation to become intimate in these crip times and their (incomputable) futures. It is an invitation to seduce the pain in the ass that is system and community maintenance to be a site of radical joy, pleasure and possibility beyond ableist chrononormativity.[1]

This essay is in its form a repo to run your own chronic job, and practice with us our cripping of computational time and their determined futures. Channeling Alison Kafer’s «After Crip, Crip Afters», this means reorienting these formats and syntaxes to hold crip times, meaning to be accessible through relations of intimacy, care and poetics. To care for your own chronic job, follow the coded steps and add your own poem.

To Run a Cron Job

Cron jobs can be scheduled by inputting commands into a shell program on a Linux-based system (which includes MacOS). Cron is commonly pre-installed by default – otherwise, run the installation command according to your package manager.

Due to cron being an intimate act with your system you might need user privileges, as it may only be run using root permissions. To give yourself root privileges, attach sudo to the beginning of the command:

sudo crontab –e

When entering crontab -e for the first time, it will ask you to choose which text editor you want to edit the file with, such as nano or vi. Choose nano for increased accessibility.

Screenshot of a Linux Terminal window, displaying the executed instructions (George Simms, 2024).

Chronic Jobs

To Run a Chronic Job

Once you have opened the crontab in a text editor, add the line below to the bottom of the text then save and exit. Make sure to replace the <path/to/your/chronic/job.sh> with the path to the en-crip-ing ~ de-crip-ing script you will write in the next section.

* * * * * sleep $[RANDOM\%69]m ; <path/to/your/chronic/job.sh>

Ours looks like this:

* * * * * sleep $[RANDOM\%69]m ; /home/cozy/chronic/job.sh

What does this syntax represent?

A cron job’s syntax takes the form of a slightly cryptic set of time metrics represented here by M H D-D M D-W, followed by a command, script to call or combinations of the two which look like this:

M H D-D M D-W   
OR 
M H D-D M D-W <path/to/job.sh>
OR
M H D-D M D-W  ; <path/to/job.sh>

Looking closer at M H D-D M D-W, we see it stands for:

So, when our chronic job declares

* * * * * sleep $[RANDOM\%69]m ; /home/cozy/chronic/job.sh

it’s saying:

> * = All the time and indefinite
> sleep = Rest as a valid (in)activity
> RANDOM = Indeterminacy
> 69 = Interdependence, desire and pleasure
> /home/cozy/chronic/job.sh = Chronic care

This chronic job, by stating all the cron variables of time as *, refuses such linear computational metrics to instead hold the past*present*future, future*past*present, and * * * * * of crip times. The crip desire for sleep and rest is chronic and valid. The RANDOM is the indeterminacy of crip and chronic life that current computation cannot account for. 69 symbolizes the independence of crip bodies, of needing someone(s) there and the joy this brings, of holding each other close and finding pleasure in becoming intimate with each other’s access needs.[2] The chronic/job.sh comprises the acts of care and labor that are never valued but always needed.

En-crip-ing time’s chronic/job.sh script is de-criped in the en-crip-ing ~ de-crip-ing section, but you can run another bash script or improvise from ours, whatever meets your needs. 

Chronic Jobs Are:

never linear, always alive,
a continuum of becoming,
that bends, lingers and loops back,
infinite in its defiance.

Why Are Chronic Jobs SexCI Tho?

When crips go anywhere, the one thing people often underestimate is how sexy we make things. Yes, there is pain, there are frictions, constrictions and boundaries crossed, but there are also many possibilities for pleasure that are often foreclosed.[3] When it comes to the current pain in the ass treatment that is computational infrastructure (CI),[4] we could definitely enable some more potentialities for pleasures and intimacy. So why not reorient them through Crip Intimacy (CI), or even Chronic Indeterminacy (CI)? This wordplay draws on «For Careful Slugs: Caring for Unknowing in CS (Computer Science), »[5] which plays with the acronym of CS to chance, cushion and cry into it with critical disability studies and trans*feminist technoscience. Working with their recipe for «Careful Slugs (CS), » we want to re-imagine the anagram of CI to enable other Imaginaries, Intimacies and Intensions for us to compute with.

When we say Crip It (CI), we mean cripping the deterministic times, scales and demands of CI, of the always being on-time, in-line[6] and ready-to-use. In many ways we just refuse this CI for a sexCI, as it has to be intimate, it has to hold us and it has to be accessible to our touch. 

The cron job can also represent Computational Instantaneity (CI). Winnie Soon’s article «Throbber: Executing Micro-temporal Streams» introduces this sense of computational time in the context of data streams and the increasing expectation of immediacy in network communications. They focus their analysis on what the digital artifact known as the throbber, or loading animation icon, reveals about cultural norms that associate it as a system flaw to be overcome, as determined by the incessant sending and receiving of data packets that must become seemingly perfected into instantaneity – no latency, or time to cuddle or care.

A chronic job is sexCI tho, as it meets the square cron job (always deterministically on time and up to date) somehow both late, early and on time to gently give it the care it needs.[7] The crip joy and pleasure overflowing from this cron job has re-encoded it poetically, both variably and functionally, in many ways rendering it «unusable» for normative system administration. This is the filling of time pieces with expanding foam until they seize.[8] It takes pleasure to subvert these unquestioned needs for reliability, timelines and other normative approaches to task automation. It flexes these restraints of time, of control and of determinism to question «what should happen on time.»[9]

En-Crip-ing ~ De-Crip-ing

    
#!/bin/bash 
CRIP_TIMES="./time.html" 
INTENTIONS= < set intention > 
CHRONO_NORMATIVE_SCALES=$(wc -l ‹ "$CRIP_TIMES")
ORIENTING_A_CRIP_TIME=$(($RANDOM%$CHRONO_NORMATIVE_SCALES+1)) 
CRIP_PRESENCE=$(sed -n "${ORIENTING_A_CRIP_TIME}p" "$CRIP_TIMES") 
{ 
# de-crip-ing is the intimacy needed to understand and be with disability and chronic health. Never clear, nor a full image, flowing and changing capacities of bodies.
EN_CRIPED_TIME=$(echo "$CRIP_PRESENCE" | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc - pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -salt -a -pass pass:"$INTENTIONS") 
}||{
# en-crip-ing is the falling out of sync with able-bodied time and chrono-normativity, either through relational/politics or through the crip experience of their body*mind.
EN_CRIPED_TIME=$(echo "$CRIP_PRESENCE" | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc - pbkdf2 -iter 100000 -salt -a -pass pass:"$INTENTIONS") 
EN_CRIPED_TIME=$(echo $EN_CRIPED_TIME | tr -d '[:blank:]' ) 
} 
awk -v line="$ORIENTING_A_CRIP_TIME" -v text="$EN_CRIPED_TIME" '
NR==line { $0=text } 
{ print }
' "$CRIP_TIMES" > temp_file && mv temp_file "$CRIP_TIMES" 
cat "$CRIP_TIMES

Here we reach the chronic job.sh that is called into play by the chronic’ed cron job. This script enacts crip relations of time and intimacy by en-crip-ing and de-crip-ing the crip times’ poem. In doing so, it animates the text to only be experienced through care, enabling the poem to only be understood by taking the time to be intimate with and learn to relate to what and how it is communicating out (of) CI time.

We are here in CI with Winnie Soon’s and Geoff Cox’s notion of software-art and codework,[10] where we enact and intertwine their coding/thinking through code with a crip poetics. For them performing code this way allows for a material and conceptual interrogation of its execution of liveness as well as its underlying structures and embedded logics. We’re CI-ing to ask how we reorient from executing its liveness, Capital Infliction (CI), to specifically thinking what lives and joy code has capacities for and can enable.

The poetics and practices of this script challenge us to imagine what a CI could feel like that is not always on, not always legible, often a pain in our * * * * * and not really what you would call obedient.[11] When we open up CI and its maintenance practices and say CI, we think beyond the us/them/it/that problem of things, and into what relations enable us to feel and orient our own issues and actions.

This performance of crip technical poetics serves to encourage new variables and objects for us to imagine crip futures through re-scripting the un-queeried and sedimented narratives contemporary CI sets out for us.  

Here, en-crip-ing and de-crip-ing positions crip people not so much as the objects of encryption but as having agency within the discourse of disability.[12] Following Kafer’s political/relational model in this discourse, we see the determinate relations, times and politics of ableist institutes as key disablers. It reminds us that bodies, such as Chronically Ill (CI) ones, will sometimes never get better, no matter how we treat them or their relations. This model gives these scripts the guts and the gumption to not want to be debugged, problematized or fixed. Rejecting these curing practices, it asks what we can learn from moving with CI for CI?

We follow this crip move to entangle the relationship, and denounce the separation, of mind and body. Instead, we repose in the unification and multiplication of the body*mind. The chronic job.sh performs this multiplication by not expressing a divide between the HTML’s <body> and <head> elements. In addition to rendering (not only) viewed content unreadable and en-crip-ed, it also involves en-crip-ing the structure, relations and representation of the poem. The chronic job en-crips references to the CSS stylesheet, page titles and formatting code, thereby radically changing the appearance and structure of the poem and showing how en-crip-ing is both political and relational. CI affects the infrastructure as well as the poem. 

This queerying of network formats and structures is also informed by early net-art and cyberfeminist works that reflected upon the structure of HTML as executable anthropomorphic metaphors, such as Mariela Yeregui’s «Epithelia»[13] and Talan Memmott’s «Lexia to Perplexia.»[14] «Epithelia» presents the body as a specimen, a fragmented collection of parts and organs from medical textbooks, only to question the violence of the «medical gaze» especially towards the bodies that escape biomedicine’s rigid categorizational and collectionist impulses. Conversely, «Lexia to Perplexia» approaches <body> and <head> in their subjectivity as a diagrammatic metaphor, mixing source-code and computational jargon into human-readable text to discuss new possibilities of intimacy, or «intertimacy,» through the network. When interacting with the labyrinthine interface of Memmott’s work, there is always the possibility of malfunction, as the artist trespassed the boundaries between input and output, source-code and interface, internal monologues and skin marks. 

Encoded Poetics

A Screenshot of https://time.cozy-cloud.net/ in action. George Simms and Mariana Marangoni, en-crip-ing time, 2024, web-based performance.

There are many poetics in being crip. There are these threads that fold through and pull together those experiences that can’t quite be put into words. There are these repetitions, rhythms and rhymes that you can only ever really feel. Here we bring these poetics into a variability, thinking how poetics can be encoded into the language around CI. In these crip times,[15] where * * * * * we demand for futures of CI for&with our presence. In this section we provide a selection of CI variables that orient our crip times and play out in them as repetitions, rhythms and paradigms.

Affirmation:

This variable points to abolition. Life affirmation has its routes within Black and intersectional abolition feminism, with the likes of Ruth Wilson Gilmore,[16] Sins Invalid,[17] Healing Justice London (HJL)[18] and too many others to list here. Life affirmation presents life’s value as innate and indeterminable. It moves from a normative measure that not all can measure up to – Computed Invalidation (CI) – and reorients it to validate every body*mind as a whole person. Life affirmation means being able to be intimate with each other,[19] to move together while being able to care for and move with your own capacities and needs. It means feeling cozy even in conflicts, for corrections to be loving.[20] It is for a relation to be flexible to the bodies involved, instead of forcing them to be what they are not.

With HJL’s imaginary of «life affirming infrastructure» and us as crip (en)coders, we ask here what logics and variables a Care-Full Infrastructure (CI) might need? How can the values of these variables be innate and at the same time indeterminate? How can variables stay with the bodies they represent and flex to their form? How can another infrastructure be improvised with these crip variables and logics of affirmation?

Chrono: 

Chrono is a prefix that comes from the Ancient Greek χρόνος (khrónos), meaning time. In ancient Greek religion and mythology, Cronos was the father of time and its personification, who devoured his children to maintain his hegemony. An entity whose power and significance could be considered as strong as ever: time has never been so metrified, commodified and unwavering as in the 21st century, the cruel master of Capital that is always against us. 

Crip bodies, though, defy time’s linearity, its quest for power. Attracting its ire but persisting and thriving despite. 

Chronic Illnesses (CI) and conditions are, most of the time, long-term and incurable – a life-long companion of ups and downs and in-betweens, requiring continuing medical care and support. A condition bound in crip time in a unique long-term relationship between host and illness, which also brings forth its double, Continuous Interdependence (CI) in the multiplicity of ways there are to care, support and accommodate for one another. It’s a dance of time, not a prescriptive, efficient solution, but an intimate attunement to others’ temporalities, conditions and contexts.

Survival/Resistance: 

It’s impossible to address the notion of crip time vs. normative clock time without addressing the role of capitalism and prevalent neoliberal ideals which, through their impact on crip experiences, enforce a society that is extremely violent and ableist towards bodies that are not able to perform the infinite expectations of efficient productivity. Cozy Inceptions (CI)[21] enable us to exist in our own flexible, non-linear and unpredictable temporalities. Radical care for oneself and others under contemporary capitalism is a «radical reworlding»[22] that opens up more just and livable futures rooted in collective survival and interdependence. 

Normative: 

When we ask what is normal about Crip Intersectionality (CI), the answer is not much. CI represents so many different bodies and relations, so many different capacities, experiences, privileges and oppressions that it sighs at the thought of «normal.» Normative is the urge to divide (CI/CI), to be told that we are each on the other side of the gutters of a curve. It is to be told that we must be divided and pitted against one another. CI inverts this curve to impossibly fold its exterior to its center. It is to find kinship, to feel cared for, and to resist a line ruling us out. When we hold these new queer&criplines of CI there is no formula that could divide us, force us to one side and to stay in-line.

Embedding Crip Care

A screenshot of a split-screen browser view: the site’s rendered content on the left and the inspector tools on the right, showcasing HTML source code interwoven with traces of our shared rhythms of work, mutual care and rest. George Simms and Mariana Marangoni, en-crip-ing time, 2024, web-based performance.

When we get to this subtle depth and inspect this site for a minute—the text, the source, the code, between the li(nes)—we see crips making space. Txts that pause time, let us rest, change roles and end goals to fit our capacities. Affirming needs, holding CI in our spare time. Letting ourselves rest and work on what we are able to do.

In bringing in theses dialogues into the source of this code, we mean to bring to the surface the crip care that went into this Crip Infrastructure (CI). How we held time for each other and changed the project sensitive to our bodies, morphing it around the capacities of one another. These comments show how crip practices can enable relations of caring for infrastructure out of time and in relations that can hold our needs. They represent how situated these relations and needs are. They tell stories of how each of us need different things at different times, and that we are not able to generalize or prescribe these practices of crip care.

In between these li(ne)s we are practicing a new type of radical politics, one which tries to (en)code into infrastructure the care and relations that make crip futures pos-able.

The End of Computer Epochs, and the Possibility of Pluri-Epochs

«Clocks, it is often forgotten, do not keep the time, but a time.»[23]

«Crip time is time travel,» wrote Ellen Samuels.[24] Forever out of sync with linearity and the tyranny of one-directional, always fleeting time. A concept so colonized and domesticated into a predictable, obedient animal that ticks and tocks as a cyclicity of precise numbers constricted by mechanical exactitude. 

An illusory continuum between space-time.

Brought forth by imperialism, maintained and refined by modernization and capitalism. Induced to not accept the co-existence of distinct measurements of time and ways of embodying it. A method of colonial violence[25] in which the advent of digital computation only intensified through the alleged unquestionability of programming logic.
It’s all but a widely accepted construct. Fallible, biased and with an expiration date.

    
date +%s

January 1st, 1970 at UTC: a new Unix epoch was born from the heart of the British Empire, to, supposedly, the rest of the world. Rather than recording a separate time, date and year—computer systems use a single number based on the number of seconds from a set point in time. 

This led in 1985 to the Network Time Protocol, or NTP, which synchronizes all machines on the network. Those early NTP versions use 64-bit timestamps and will need to be ratified by February 7th, 2036, a forthcoming time limit that might cause issues with timekeeping and synchronization. 

January 19th, 2038 at UTC: the eradication of digital time as Unix timestamp due to a 32-bit overflow.

Even CI that is so synchronous, infinite and absolute stems from a computed time that has its limits. As crips, we wait ambitiously for the next clock, and a change in times, but re-imagine and hack the machinic now. Forming time infrastructure that invites us to travel back and forth together, bringing the subjective and the imprecise, the idle and the othered to the foreground. Subverting its violent logics to expose it to gentler interrelational becomings. What is considered «possible» is opened up, allowing a sexCI pluriverse[26] to unfold.