ABSTRACT
Since the olive presses and sundials, the myth of automation reduces governance to the rule of Chronos, arbitrary cycles and patterns discovered and utilized by few to rule the many. To discuss the alternatives to this ideal of governance, the chapter starts with the forgotten history of Renaissance instruments, which emphasizes the experience of time as an opportunity and transformation (Kairos). Renaissance prototypes of instruments both support and problematize the ideal of governance as automation, monopoly, and control over the future. They echo Thales’ gesture of using cosmology and Chronos to enforce monopoly in Francis Bacon’s project of Instauration (restoration). They also reject the teleological ideals with prototypes of living instruments and cosmoscopes that perform the personal and social agency over the future. The Renaissance living instruments of Cornelius Drebbel and other mechanical philosophers mobilized different actors to imagine new futures as a problem of agency, curiosity, and creativity rather than control.
