Remember Your Future

Remember Your Future is the program Miraijin will help carry into a future threatened by the collapse of ordinary freedoms: a doctrine of changed conduct, discernment, and collective action, sustained from secret places and public landscapes alike. Its name joins a programmatic promise to an act of memory, making the future something its participants must actively protect and shape.

Naming and Sources

The name arose while the author was searching Doppiozero’s homepage for an essay by Rocco Ronchi, whose work on the conflict between truth and freedom inspired the chapter’s opposition between those two values. Scrolling through the available essays, the title Remember Your Future suggested the program name before the author had read Mauro Zanchi’s essay of that title. Zanchi’s discussion concerned the Archives of the Future section of the exhibition European Photography 2017 – Time Maps. Memory. Archives. Future, shown at several sites in Reggio Emilia between May and July 2017. The author later read the essay as well, describing that reading as useful.

The Program and Its Work

In the book’s imagined future, Remember Your Future has become a program in the full sense: a doctrine setting out precepts, behavioral changes, and intended results, developed by the capable minds fighting alongside Miraijin. Its work is directed especially toward children and teenagers on the Net, described as hostile ground where freedom’s metastases proliferate. Miraijin and others like her are to keep alive there a countervailing practice of discernment through games, stories in native languages, and lists of do’s and don’ts.

This defense of truth is deliberately grounded in ordinary life as well as grand principle. The program is meant to preserve pity, normality, and a tradition of European goodness associated with emigrants and exiles, laborers and sailors, intellectuals, artists, scientists, and others whose work and suffering helped make life better for those who came after them. The task is not to impose an abstract ideal but to keep alive the sense that the world has been welcoming and full of gifts that cost nothing—and could still be so.

Miraijin’s Role and the Cost of Truth

Miraijin’s celebrity and her commitment to truth, including banal and everyday truths, put her in danger. At nineteen she must leave her home, life, and city, move constantly, and live in secret places. She is simultaneously threatened and defamed, admired and defended as a treasure. From hiding, she continues promoting Remember Your Future; the program’s message also travels through poppy fields, glaciers, and the open sea as its followers multiply.

The future envisioned by the passage is not secured by Miraijin alone. Children and young people she addressed in her early years grow up, separate from their parents, fight them if necessary, and learn to think in the plural. Drawn by her centripetal beauty, they seek one another, unite, and place culture among their chief interests. As the old world dies, many come to know what to do; the narrative attributes this emerging capacity in particular to Miraijin’s influence.

Distance, Memory, and Significance

The program’s public reach deepens rather than cancels the intimacy of its name. Miraijin’s grandfather follows her through a mobile phone and computer after she has gone into hiding, and discovers that she often speaks about him. He is moved by this recognition and looks back on the seventeen years devoted to her, which seem to have passed in a whisper. Though separated, they remain connected by the work she carries forward and by the houses he has preserved in Piazza Savonarola and Bolgheri, where she visits when she can, accompanied by an escort.

Remember Your Future thus holds together two scales of inheritance: a grandfather’s years of care and a movement addressed to generations not yet grown. The name’s imperative is both political and personal. It asks its audience to remember what made life worth defending, while treating the future not as a certainty but as a shared responsibility that can survive displacement, danger, and the death of the world that preceded it.