On Being Ahead: Missives from a Future Already Arrived

Iceland’s financial crash of 2008 was experienced as an identity crisis as much as a capital one.  Recovery, then, has required re-imagining the nation as well as carving out a new economic niche.  Today a diverse coalition of unlikely allies – from activists to officials to entrepreneurs – aim to do just that by transforming the nation from a financial hub into an “information haven.”  In spite of their differences, there is one idea these reformers all share: that in realizing an information economy and society, Iceland has accessed the future - while the rest of the world now lags far behind.  Iceland is becoming an island, that is, not only in space but in time.  

In this paper I take up Hirokazu Miyazaki’s call to investigate temporal incongruity as lived experience and mode of knowledge production.  But where Miyazaki drew from his interlocutors’ sense of “being behind,” I start from Icelanders' experience of “being ahead"; of claiming to live in the future today.  I ask how Icelanders involved in the high tech sector work to figure their nation, so long seen as being “behind”, as having pulled to the fore.  Situating Iceland among its Nordic neighbors, I suggest that “being ahead” is nothing new in the European North – but it was and remains a dangerous game.  Laying claim to the future has been a mode of peripheral power, but always risks missing the mark.