Scenarios in a Time of Urgency Shifting Temporality and Technology

This article explores the connection between technology and temporality, and discusses specifically scenario technology and the temporality of urgency, in the context of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. It illustrates how, despite the inherent orientation toward the future potentiality in this technology, once an actual event occurs and the temporality of preparedness is overridden by a temporality of urgency, the scenario technology is adapted to the new temporality in terms of its form and content. In correspon-dence with the scholarship of ‘the anthropology of the future’, the article focuses on changes in temporal orientations – specifically, with a shift from a temporality of (future) preparedness to a temporal orientation of (immediate) urgency and how such a shift in temporality affects the technology of the scenario. Moving from preparing for potential future uncertainties to responding to an urgent event set in a present that is unfolding into an uncertain, immediate future provokes a new temporal orientation, for which the initial temporality of the scenario technology becomes its limitation.