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| excerpt under embargo until march 20.
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| ==Preface==
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|
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| Douglas Rushkoff:
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| “Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything
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| is live, real time, and always on. It’s not a mere speeding up,
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| however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the
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| rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment
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| of anything that isn’t happening right now— and the onslaught of
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| everything that supposedly is.
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|
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| It’s why the world’s leading search engine is evolving into a live,
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| customized, and predictive fl ow of data branded “Google Now”;
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| why email is giving way to txting, and why blogs are being superseded
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| by Twitter feeds. It’s why kids in school can no longer engage
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| in linear arguments; why narrative structure collapsed into reality
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| TV; and why we can’t engage in meaningful dialogue about last
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| month’s books and music, much less long- term global issues. It’s
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| why an economy once based on long- term investment and interest-bearing
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| currency can no longer provide capital to those who plan to
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| put it to work for future rewards. It’s why so many long for a “singularity”
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| or a 2012 apocalypse to end linear time altogether, and
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| throw us into a posthistoric eternal present— no matter the cost to
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| human agency or civilization itself.
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|
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| But it’s also how we find out what’s happening on the streets of
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| Iran before CNN can assemble a camera crew. It’s what enables
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| an unsatisfied but upwardly mobile executive to quit his job and
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| move with his family to Vermont to make kayaks— which he
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| thought he’d get to do only once he retired. It’s how millions of
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| young people can choose to embody a new activism based in patient
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| consensus instead of contentious debate. It’s what enables companies
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| like H& M or Zara to fabricate clothes in real time, based on
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| the instantaneous data coming from scanned tags at checkout counters
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| five thousand miles away. It’s how a president can run for office
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| and win by breaking from the seeming tyranny of the past and its
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| false hope, and tell voters that “we are the thing we have been waiting
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| for.”
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| Well, the waiting is over. Here we are.
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| If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism,
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| the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
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| The looking forward so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound
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| to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that
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| era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and
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| on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/ 11 magnified
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| this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own
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| impermanence. People had babies in droves,1 and even filed for divorces,
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| 2 in what was at least an unconscious awareness that none of
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| us lives forever and accompanying reluctance to postpone things indefinitely.
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|
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| Add real- time technologies, from the iPhone to Twitter;
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| a disposable consumer economy where 1-Click ordering is more important
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| than the actual product being purchased; a multitasking
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| brain actually incapable of storage or sustained argument; and an
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| economy based on spending now what one may or may not earn in
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| a lifetime, and you can’t help but become temporally disoriented.
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| It’s akin to the onslaught of changing rules and circumstances that
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| 1970s futurist Alvin Toffl er dubbed “future shock.”
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|
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| Only, in our era it’s more of a present shock. And while this phenomenon
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| is clearly “of the moment,” it’s not quite as in the moment
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| as we may have expected.
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| For while many of us were correct about the way all this presentism
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| would affect investments and finance, even technology and
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| media, we were utterly wrong about how living in the “now” would
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| end up impacting us as people. Our focus on the present may have
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| liberated us from the twentieth century’s dangerously compelling
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| ideological narratives. No one — well, hardly anyone — can still be
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| convinced that brutal means are justified by mythological ends.
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|
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| And people are less likely to believe employers’ and corporations’
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| false promises of future rewards for years of loyalty now. But it has
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| not actually brought us into greater awareness of what is going on
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| around us. We are not approaching some Zen state of an infi nite moment,
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| completely at one with our surroundings, connected to others,
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| and aware of ourselves on any fundamental level.
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| Rather, we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on
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| the periphery are magnifi ed and those immediately before us are ignored.
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| Our ability to create a plan — much less follow through on
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| it— is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way
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| through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at
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| any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and
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| now, we end up reacting to the ever- present assault of simultaneous
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| impulses and commands.
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|
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| In some senses, this was the goal of those who developed the
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| computers and networks on which we depend today. Mid-twentieth-century
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| computing visionaries Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider
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| dreamed of developing machines that could do our remembering for
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| us. Computers would free us from the tyranny of the past — as well
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| as the horrors of World War II — allowing us to forget everything and
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| devote our minds to solving the problems of today. The information
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| would still be there; it would simply be stored out of body, in a machine.
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|
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| It’s a tribute to both their designs on the future and their devotion
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| to the past that they succeeded in their quest to free up the
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| present of the burden of memory. We have, in a sense, been allowed
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| to dedicate much more of our cognitive resources to active RAM
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| than to maintaining our cerebral- storage hard drives. But we are
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| also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on the trivial
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| pursuit of the immediately relevant over any continuance of the innovation
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| that got us to this point.
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|
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| Behavioral economists exploit the growing disparity between
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| our understanding of the present and that of the future, helping us
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| see future debts as less relevant than current costs and leading us to
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| make financial decisions against our own better interests. As these
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| ways of understanding debt and lending trickle up to those making
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| decisions about banking and macrofinance— such as the Federal
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| Reserve or the European Central Bank— our greater economies end
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| up suffering from the same sorts of logical traps as those of individual
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| mortgage holders and credit card users.
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|
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| Neuroscientists, mostly at the service of corporations looking to
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| develop more compliant employees and consumers, are homing in
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| on the way people make choices. But no matter how many subjects
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| they put in their MRI machines, the focus of this research is decision
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| making in the moment, the impulsive choices made in the
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| blink of an eye, rather than those made by the lobes responsible for
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| rational thought or consideration. By implementing their wares solely
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| on the impulsive— while diminishing or altogether disregarding the
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| considered— they push us toward acting in what is thought of as an
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| instinctual, reptilian fashion.
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|
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| And this mode of behavior is then justified as somehow more
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| connected to the organic, emotional, and more relevant moment
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| in which human beings actually live. Of course, this depiction of
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| consciousness may help sell the services of neurotechnicians to advertisers,
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| but it does not accurately represent how the human brain
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| actually relates to the moment in which the organism exists.
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|
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| No matter the technologies at their disposal, marketers and
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| pollsters are never looking at people actually choosing their products
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| or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or
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| thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.
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| The “now” they seek to understand tells them nothing about desire,
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| reasons, or context. It is simply an effort to key off what we have
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| just done in order to manipulate our decisions in the future. Their
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| campaigns encourage the kinds of impulsive behavior that fool us
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| into thinking we are living in the now, while actually just making
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| us better targets for their techniques.
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| That is because there is no now—not the one they’re talking
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| about, anyway. It is necessarily and essentially trivial. The minute the
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| “now” is apprehended, it has already passed. Like they used to say
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| about getting one’s picture on a Time magazine cover: the moment
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| something is realized, it is over. And like the diminishing beauty returns
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| for a Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the
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| passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek
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| to preserve.
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| As a result, our culture becomes an entropic static hum of everybody
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| trying to capture the slipping moment. Narrativity and goals
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| are surrendered to a skewed notion of the real and the immediate; the
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| Tweet; the status update. What we are doing at any given moment
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| becomes all- important— which is behavioristically doomed. For this
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| desperate approach to time is at once fl awed and narcissistic. Which
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| “now” is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?
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| In the following chapters, we will explore present shock as it
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| manifests in a variety of ways, on a myriad of levels. We will look
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| at how it changes the way we make and experience culture, run our
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| businesses, invest our money, conduct our politics, understand science,
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| and make sense of our world. In doing so, we will consider
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| panic reactions to present shock right alongside more successful approaches
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| to living outside what we have always thought of as time.”
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