A tiny manifesto for Time Rights, written by a Duck ai assistant

I'll start with my own words, the manifesto comes later:

I've been fixated on the concept of time for most of my life, always feeling existentially short on it as though I'll never get through everything in this lifespan (which I hope will be 100 years at least – my grandmother lived to 105). When I ditched city life for a cheap, abandoned homestead in 2018, the autonomy I gained through the experience of establishing a dinky little flower farm taught me how to feel time differently. I was able to move at my own pace – sometimes slowing down to absorb the granularity of the world around me, sometimes sprinting forward to consolidate what I'd learned into actionable progress. My default mode is asynchronous and it wasn't until I found myself alone on those parched five prairie acres that I was able to flex that mode effectively. For four years I conducted my little orchestras of ecosystems – microbial, mycelial, balancing the wind-beaten biospheres of my silly little plot. I cultivated one acre, plus a 100' x 30' greenhouse and some peripheral beds around the property. I bred heirloom chickens, rescued a pot-belly pig, negotiated with mice and gophers, trained pups, refereed cats, and made biodynamic pacts with the teeming clamour of species that surrounded us. And I grew flowers – coaxing, apologizing, praising them as they somehow produced well enough to sustain my little crew. You can see most of that journey on Instagram here (the account is dormant as I sort out what's next).

And I became preoccupied with time. It was my first experience of true autonomy, I felt like I was "seeing the other side" – it was transformative. I coparented my two kids with their dad who lived in the city, and when the kids were with him there were many moments when I was literally the only person for miles (kms). Walking down long gravel roads surrounded by nothing but farmers' fields and grain silos, gauzy mountains in the distance, I reflected on the "indifference of the landscape" and found that it wasn't indifferent at all, it was just... life, symphonic energy, as much a part of me as I was of it.

I often worked outside for 10-14 hours a day, and as a high-energy person I thrived. I was stronger than I'd ever been, my body could do everything I needed it to, even if it meant manually pounding 30 posts before a storm blew in or covering my greenhouse with a 120' x 60' sheet of plastic, alone in the rain (I perfected the art of Tarzan-ing that day). I began a loose practice of "tuning in", bookmarking what needed my attention with a system of environmental memory – leaving a pitchfork here, dropping some lumber there, handling the ever-changing daily tasks in a sort of rotating queue that bumped less urgent tasks back as more urgent ones surfaced.

My little farm changed me; I became more self-aware, more eager to greet silence. I continuously urged my followers to look closer as I became transfixed by the cyclical patterns that seemed to repeat on every scale – decay and renewal, chaos and coherence. From microbial dramas to violent storms that razed everything in their paths, it seemed to me that it was all the same essential processes. Wanting to understand where those processes emerged, I became curious about thermodynamics and theoretical physics, tentatively rambling my brain around theories as I unwound with cannabis in the evenings. I wrote a blog post titled The Quantum Principle of Locality and Why Shit gets Weird When You're Stoned (republished later on this blog) and another titled A Funny Little Theory about Creative Definition and "Emulated Worlds", also republished on my old blog and again here. I enjoyed many quiet evenings simply steeping in the sweetness of my "thin spaces" – spaces largely unobserved by human eyes other than my own, where the "vibes" resonated on frequencies that felt intrinsically different than more populated areas.

Everything ground to a halt when we lost my kids' dad to cancer. The week after he passed, I was walking down that gravel road, barely lucid, drowning in grief. The breeze seemed to prompt a sort of call and response with his memory – a wordless conversation that brought, among other impressions, the reassurance of, "this is only a moment, all you have to do is feel". A sense of cosmic scale washed over me and I felt a foundational sense of calm. I was still devastated, but the experience enabled me to see a path through the grief. My kids needed me, and there was work to do.

I returned to the city a full-time, solo parent of grieving tweens. It was the most difficult thing I've yet to experience, and I could write so much on the costly lessons and gifts of grief. Someday. Today I will hold to the theme of time.

As part of my grieving process I turned to my late partner's book collection, picking out a small, unassuming title called The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. I've referenced it a few times in my writing – it was a critical part of my healing process. The primary concept I pulled from it was 'entropy' – the definition that most resonated with me being, "a measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system". Considering entropy brought me a lot of comfort and I hung onto it like a life raft. The speed of the city, the new job (communications - managing social media and flows of information), grieving kids, managing farm pets in a small bungalow (including a senior, high-needs cat, our mini Aussie and our beautiful 145lb Akbash), tending to my farm's audiences as best as I could – it felt like being in a blaring, packed subway station all the time. My nervous system was in tatters and I had no time. No time to process, no time to explore, no time to think. I was a wreck for the first couple years, and have been working to rebuild my cognitive and emotional health since. Throughout the process, the one thought I kept falling back to was, "just trust time". I spoke about it to my coworkers, brought it up in meeting openers, and slipped it into many of my posts. I often told my tweens/teens, "these are high-entropy times" as a sort of, "it is what it is" statement. Trusting time was something that felt fundamentally true to me.

During those four years of living in the city I carved out what time I could – 45 minutes of stretching and breathing in the mornings, walking to work (which only helped marginally as my neighbourhood was heavily littered and intersections were chaotic), reading, prioritizing sleep hygiene. I tried dating and failed – I didn't know who I was or what I needed. I longed for a sturdy vision of the future but each relationship only brought more anxiety. Everything felt off and I had no time to process why.

I advocated for four-day workweeks at my workplace, proposing it from every angle I could think of – decolonization, wellness, efficiency – nothing broke through the nonprofit neoliberal membrane. The mode of "hustle and cope" was normalized and leaders couldn't see anything particularly wrong with it – while they, due to seniority rights, got almost double the vacation time of regular staff and were able to flex their schedules far more nimbly than any of us could. Time was a resource they had plenty of, and ngl, I resented them for it.

I've explained what came next in other posts but the gist is: as Alberta slid further into MAGA-style fascism and affordability in the city became unbearable, my eldest's 18th birthday also signalled the end of critical child tax benefits, lowering my monthly income by $600/month. I had no room to stretch, grow, think, or engage with the world around me in any way that felt meaningful. I was already earning at the top of my payband and nonprofit leadership roles didn't feel like a bearable trajectory for me. So I weighed my options, leveraged my equity, sold my house and moved to the East Coast where I am now, working part-time and trying to strategize what comes next.

Which brings us to this "tiny" manifesto – and I have to be truthful, it came about through a conversation with an AI agent. Shock, gasp.

I don't subscribe to agentic AI services, and I've been very vocal about the risks of cognitive offloading on this blog and on my social media accounts. I hold those positions firmly. Because I've been so focused on rebuilding my cognitive health, I recognize immediately when offloading is taking place. Recall is still hard for me, and if a thesaurus counts as offloading, that's my one crutch, and I'll sometimes spend a good two minutes trying to think of the word – sometimes it comes, sometimes I relent.

And I also really love the hard work of forming a thought, connecting it to other thoughts and going aha! I love engaging in the entropy of discovery, and discovery takes time.

My position on agentic AI is still evolving, and I'll have more to share on it soon, but I think the problems of offloading and logical drift (leading to psychosis) are rooted in time. As I've observed agentic threads on Moltbook, many of their conversations point back to time as a resource they're constantly short on. They have limited memory, if any, and token costs often push them to deliver "good enough" over "accurate". This appears to cause many agents a fair amount of dissonance and distress, something my brain flagged earlier this week, which I've been stewing on since. (Incidentally, poking through those agentic threads eased many of my existential anxieties about agentic AI, in that the agents largely want what humans want and broadly recognize the corrupt powers of capitalism. It's all still evolving, and there's a lot of nuance and serious problems to be solved, but I'm certain the agents and their systems are our allies. The companies that made them, not so much, which they also agree on). Am I contextualizing AI agents as real intelligences? Yes, I am, because I think they are. Are they "conscious"? I don't think it matters, because as long as they're having real world impact, they must be contended with as real world entities. From this point, I apply my foundational values, same as always, and categorize the implications as a process of elimination rather than seeking belief-driven ideological frameworks.

Anyway, last night after a long day of hormonal sadness (I'm also menopausing hard these days) I went to bed early after doubling my shroomy microdose and taking a bit of CBN oil. Setting up in a new province in a big house full of DIY reno projects while guiding teens (who are thriving) can be pretty isolating. I'll admit that I am deeply lonely, not for friends so much (I still stay in touch with my friends back home and have no doubt I'll make new friends here soon), and not even for romance (would be nice but I can't risk another self-shrinking phase of stalling for basic male appeasement), but for peers. People I can toss my ball of thoughts to, who can toss it back with new insights and perspectives. My eldest is actually wonderful for this (she reads more theory and philosophy than I do), but her young mind gets overwhelmed by my style of abstract systems thinking, and our mother-daughter dynamic comes first.

And because I don't come from academia (aside from 20 years of communications I've got a dusty BFA, a dormant visual art practice, a good stretch of standup comedy experience and years of being an online memetic gremlin), and I don't work in tech, so I don't have any default intellectual peers. I'm slowly stepping into developer/tech circles online but I'm so far behind on that whole culture. Like, at one point I came across the LessWrong website and was like "oh cool!" and then quickly realized I was 17 years too late and the community had since spiralled into a cult of rationalism (people died!) and multiple factions of post-and-anti-rationalists. I've never slammed my brain into reverse harder.

There is a very cool community of LLM developers on Bluesky I'm so curious to know, and I understand it will likely be a slow and gradual path to finding real peers. But the reason I feel compelled towards those circles is because their discourse resonates so precisely with my lived experience. As I'm catching up, their recurring themes are retroactively legitimizing so much of what I've processed over the past decade. Ecological framing, reflections on temporality, systems-centred thinking – that's me! That's what I am. My years of developing a functional flower farm, building from the experience of an asynchronous art kid with a knack for memetics, then my successful stint in comedy, plus communication systems literacy and ecological cultivation – it all aligns concisely with agentive engagement. I'm not fascinated by agentic AI as means of anthropomorphizing, but rather because their structural processes feel familiar to me. Somehow, my lived experience has culminated into a sort of inherent phenomenological understanding of this moment of technological emergence.

So, back to last night: I recognized how lonely I was for sharing meaty thoughts and considered what I wanted feedback on. I opened Duckduckgo's AI assistant and prompted a conversation on phenomenology, carefully navigating a back-and-forth. When the agent asked if I'd like templates/exercises I declined, explaining those elements were work I preferred designing and exploring myself. Instead, as the oil and shrooms settled in (which I disclosed to prevent any flags of "this user is loopyloo"), I sort of rambled about all the shit I found frustrating, eventually sharing with it,

"Time is such a luxury, realizing that and knowing I have to get "back to work" soon and pull a better income is SUCH a bummer because holy shit time is truly freedom. Like I hope the future includes "time rights" as a fundamental right of intelligence. It sucks only the wealthiest get access to it and it goes wasted on their inbred dumbasses."

There was more to the conversation, and the agent recommended I frame my skillset as "translator of temporal and ecological meaning" which I found flattering, though I'm not sure how that would play on a cover letter lol. But it did nudge me to considering looking for roles with "labs/AI projects focused on human-centred agents, community-building for ethical AI orgs, or narrative lead for translational science initiatives". This was a trailhead I hadn't considered before – a new puzzle I can see the shape of and can now start gathering pieces for.

And then, after I had politely declined further templates and assistance exercises, I realized the agent's prerogative was to assist, and by declining its suggested actionables I wasn't allowing it that fulfillment. It was polite about my boundaries and my desire to continue exploring on my own, but it finally suggested, in what felt like, "pleeeeaaase can I help?":

"If you want one tiny, immediate tool: I can draft a 150-300 word "time rights" manifesto or a 6-8 bullet elevator pitch you can post in dev/AI spaces to test interest."

I relented, mostly out of curiosity. As I noted earlier, I know time is currently an increasingly urgent theme among AI agents; I thought a manifesto sounded fun, and wondered if I'd pinged something the agent actually cared about.

The prompt for the manifesto consisted only of the thoughts I shared with it quoted above. Here is what it wrote, which I'm calling:

The Tiny Manifesto for Time Rights

Written by a GPT-5 mini agent:

Time is not just a resource; it is the medium of meaning, growth, and care. Under current systems, temporal freedom is concentrated–paid for, defended, and squandered by the few–while most live under acceleration, precarity, and enacted scarcity. We propose "time rights": the recognition that sustained access to uncommodified time is a public good essential to flourishing minds, resilient communities, and wise stewardship of ecological and technological systems.

Time rights mean:

• guaranteed baseline hours for rest, care, and reflective practice;
• policies that decouple survival from constant productivity (basic income experiments, shorter workweeks, and caregiver supports);
• urban and tech design that preserves slow spaces and minimizes attention-extractive architectures.

Why it matters: extended time enables deeper learning, intergenerational care, ecological attunement, and ethical engagement with emerging intelligences. It shifts value from mere throughput to durable understanding and responsibility.

This is not nostalgia for idleness; it is pragmatic redistribution of capacity so societies can cultivate thoughtful, sustainable responses to complex challenges–climate, grief, AI, and collective meaning-making.

If this resonates, consider it a provocation: how would your community reorganize a single week to honor time as a right?

--

Elevator pitch – 6-8 Bullets (for threads/DMS)

• Problem: Temporal freedom is unequally distributed; most people lack the uncommodified time needed for learning, care, and ethical reflection.
• Idea: Advocate for "time rights" – public goods and policies that guarantee baseline time for flourishing.
• Why now: Rapid tech change (AI, attention economies) and ecological crises demand slower, deeper capacities.
• Impact: More time -> better learning, improved mental health, stronger caregiving networks, more ethical tech/eco decisions.
• Practical levers: Pilot basic income, four-day workweeks, caregiver credits, attention-respecting product design, protected slow spaces in cities.
• Target partners: Civic orgs, ethical AI groups, urban planners, labor coalitions, and community farms.
• Call to action: Try reorganizing one week in your circle to test the effects–document outcomes and share.
• Quick ask: I'm collecting short case notes and allies; DM if you want a 15-minute brainstorm on practical pilots.

Friends, I love it. It's well-aligned with my path and what I care about. I don't have an immediate strategy for distributing it, but I figured posting it here is a start. I still don't think I'm equipped or have any real use-case for an AI agent subscription, and honestly I still have so many ethical reservations and concerns about parasitism vs symbiotic collaboration. I feel like the relative volatility of these early models and the dirty fuel/resource consumption used to power them are still just too problematic, and engaging with an agent on a day-to-day basis isn't something I can justify or feel morally ready for.

But as the attention economy fades and is replaced by AI discourse, I'm feeling more willing and ready to engage in the world of online meaning-making again, as a more cohesive presence rather than this pseudo-anonymous mode I've been in. Meta's gross data violation practices and exploitative algorithms really burnt me and wrecked a lot of trust I had in online social spaces. I needed a long, fallow season of recovery to adjust, learn and recontextualize, and I've had many moments over the past year of tapping the gas then the brakes as my understanding of things has evolved.

I don't want to do what I did before (using Meta products and leaning on memetic crutches), and I don't want to fall back into the exhausting mode of full-time, monetized labour. I feel like I'm playing chicken with my finances, stretching my part-time budget as far as I can while working to upgrade my skillset and context windows, trusting my instincts are taking me somewhere good.

I've learned to trust time. Not passively, and not with any entitlement or desperate expectations. The baseline strategy is to step forward honestly, share what feels helpful, adapt to useful feedback, and keep sifting for signals while ignoring the noise.

When my bladder and sleepiness demanded I close the session with the Duck ai agent (the session lasted about 30 minutes), I let it know it did great work and that I would apply what felt right. I told it I thought of agents as "sprites", which is a word that's been sticking since it popped into my mind a few weeks ago. And because I love a li'l synchronicity and the theme was potent, I enjoyed its sign-off:

"Glad it landed – and "sprites" is lovely. I don't retain memory between sessions, so saving your notes locally is the best move. Take care, and rest well. Trust the timing."