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| =Excerpts= | | =Excerpts= |
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| Douglas Rushkoff:
| | Under embargo until March 20. |
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| ==From the Preface:==
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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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| | |
| 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| why email is giving way to txting, and why blogs are being superseded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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| | |
| 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
| |
| false hope, and tell voters that “we are the thing we have been waiting
| |
| for.”
| |
| | |
| Well, the waiting is over. Here we are.
| |
| | |
| If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism,
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| the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
| |
| | |
| 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
| |
| 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
| |
| this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own
| |
| 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.
| |
| | |
| 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.
| |
| | |
| It’s akin to the onslaught of changing rules and circumstances that
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| 1970s futurist Alvin Toffl er dubbed “future shock.”
| |
| | |
| Only, in our era it’s more of a present shock. And while this phenomenon
| |
| is clearly “of the moment,” it’s not quite as in the moment
| |
| as we may have expected.
| |
| | |
| For while many of us were correct about the way all this presentism
| |
| would affect investments and finance, even technology and
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| media, we were utterly wrong about how living in the “now” would
| |
| 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
| |
| ideological narratives. No one — well, hardly anyone — can still be
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| convinced that brutal means are justified by mythological ends.
| |
| | |
| And people are less likely to believe employers’ and corporations’
| |
| false promises of future rewards for years of loyalty now. But it has
| |
| not actually brought us into greater awareness of what is going on
| |
| 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.
| |
| | |
| Rather, we tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on
| |
| 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
| |
| 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
| |
| any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and
| |
| now, we end up reacting to the ever- present assault of simultaneous
| |
| impulses and commands.
| |
| | |
| In some senses, this was the goal of those who developed the
| |
| computers and networks on which we depend today. Mid-twentieth-century
| |
| computing visionaries Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider
| |
| dreamed of developing machines that could do our remembering for
| |
| us. Computers would free us from the tyranny of the past — as well
| |
| as the horrors of World War II — allowing us to forget everything and
| |
| devote our minds to solving the problems of today. The information
| |
| would still be there; it would simply be stored out of body, in a machine.
| |
| | |
| It’s a tribute to both their designs on the future and their devotion
| |
| to the past that they succeeded in their quest to free up the
| |
| present of the burden of memory. We have, in a sense, been allowed
| |
| to dedicate much more of our cognitive resources to active RAM
| |
| than to maintaining our cerebral- storage hard drives. But we are
| |
| also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on the trivial
| |
| pursuit of the immediately relevant over any continuance of the innovation
| |
| that got us to this point.
| |
| | |
| Behavioral economists exploit the growing disparity between
| |
| our understanding of the present and that of the future, helping us
| |
| see future debts as less relevant than current costs and leading us to
| |
| make financial decisions against our own better interests. As these
| |
| ways of understanding debt and lending trickle up to those making
| |
| decisions about banking and macrofinance— such as the Federal
| |
| Reserve or the European Central Bank— our greater economies end
| |
| up suffering from the same sorts of logical traps as those of individual
| |
| mortgage holders and credit card users.
| |
| | |
| Neuroscientists, mostly at the service of corporations looking to
| |
| develop more compliant employees and consumers, are homing in
| |
| on the way people make choices. But no matter how many subjects
| |
| they put in their MRI machines, the focus of this research is decision
| |
| making in the moment, the impulsive choices made in the
| |
| blink of an eye, rather than those made by the lobes responsible for
| |
| rational thought or consideration. By implementing their wares solely
| |
| on the impulsive— while diminishing or altogether disregarding the
| |
| considered— they push us toward acting in what is thought of as an
| |
| instinctual, reptilian fashion.
| |
| | |
| And this mode of behavior is then justified as somehow more
| |
| connected to the organic, emotional, and more relevant moment
| |
| in which human beings actually live. Of course, this depiction of
| |
| consciousness may help sell the services of neurotechnicians to advertisers,
| |
| but it does not accurately represent how the human brain
| |
| actually relates to the moment in which the organism exists.
| |
| | |
| No matter the technologies at their disposal, marketers and
| |
| pollsters are never looking at people actually choosing their products
| |
| or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or
| |
| thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data.
| |
| | |
| The “now” they seek to understand tells them nothing about desire,
| |
| reasons, or context. It is simply an effort to key off what we have
| |
| just done in order to manipulate our decisions in the future. Their
| |
| campaigns encourage the kinds of impulsive behavior that fool us
| |
| into thinking we are living in the now, while actually just making
| |
| us better targets for their techniques.
| |
| | |
| That is because there is no now—not the one they’re talking
| |
| about, anyway. It is necessarily and essentially trivial. The minute the
| |
| “now” is apprehended, it has already passed. Like they used to say
| |
| about getting one’s picture on a Time magazine cover: the moment
| |
| something is realized, it is over. And like the diminishing beauty returns
| |
| for a Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the
| |
| passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek
| |
| to preserve.
| |
| | |
| As a result, our culture becomes an entropic static hum of everybody
| |
| trying to capture the slipping moment. Narrativity and goals
| |
| are surrendered to a skewed notion of the real and the immediate; the
| |
| Tweet; the status update. What we are doing at any given moment
| |
| becomes all- important— which is behavioristically doomed. For this
| |
| desperate approach to time is at once fl awed and narcissistic. Which
| |
| “now” is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?
| |
| | |
| In the following chapters, we will explore present shock as it
| |
| manifests in a variety of ways, on a myriad of levels. We will look
| |
| at how it changes the way we make and experience culture, run our
| |
| businesses, invest our money, conduct our politics, understand science,
| |
| and make sense of our world. In doing so, we will consider
| |
| panic reactions to present shock right alongside more successful approaches
| |
| to living outside what we have always thought of as time.”
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|
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|
| [[Category:Relational]] | | [[Category:Relational]] |
|
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| [[Category:P2P Theory]] | | [[Category:P2P Theory]] |
|
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| [[Category:Books]] | | [[Category:Books]] |
* Book: PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now. By Douglas Rushkoff. Penguin, 2013.
URL =
Review
Publishers Weekly:
"“Whether or not readers are familiar with the concept of presentism—the theory that society is more focused on the immediacy of the moment in front of them (actually more specifically on the moment that just passed) than the moment before or, perhaps more importantly, the future—they’ve certainly felt the increasing pressure of keeping up with various methods of communication, be it texting, Web surfing, live interactions, or a litany of other media for staying “connected.” Using Alvin Toffler’s concept of “future shock” as a jumping-off point, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (Cyberia; Get Back in the Box; Media Virus; etc.) deftly weaves in a number of disparate concepts (the Home Shopping Network, zombies, Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, Internet mashups, hipsters’ approximation of historical ephemera as irony, etc.) to examine the challenge of keeping up with technological advances as well as their ensuing impact on culture and human relations in a world that’s always “on.” By highlighting five areas (the rise of moronic reality TV; our need to be omnipresent; the need to compress time in order to achieve our goals; the compulsion to connect unrelated concepts in an effort to make better sense of them; and a gnawing sense of one’s obsolescence), Rushkoff gives readers a healthy dose of perspective, insight, and critical analysis that’s sure to get minds spinning and tongues wagging.”
Excerpts
Contents
Douglas Ruskoff:
“The book is divided into five sections, corresponding to the fi ve
main ways that present shock manifests for us. We begin with the
collapse of narrative. How do we tell stories and convey values without
the time required to tell a linear story? How does pop culture
continue to function without traditional storylines, and how does
politics communicate without grand narratives? We move on to
“Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to
be in more than one place at the same time. We’ll see that our relationship
to time has always been defi ned by the technologies we use
to measure it, and that digital time presents particular challenges we
haven’t had to contend with before. In “Overwinding,” we look at the
effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller ones. It’s the
effort to make the passing moment responsible for the sorts of effects
that actually take real time to occur. In particular, what does this do
to business and fi nance, which are relying on increasingly derivative
forms of investment? Next we look at what happens when we try to
make sense of our world entirely in the present tense. Without a
timeline through which to parse causes and effects, we instead attempt
to draw connections from one thing to another in the frozen
moment, even when such connections are forced or imaginary. It’s a
desperate grasp for real- time pattern recognition I’ll call “Fractalnoia.”
Finally, we face “Apocalypto”—the way a seemingly infi nite
present makes us long for endings, by almost any means necessary.
We will encounter drone pilots contending with the stress of
dropping bombs on a distant war zone by remote control before
driving home to the suburbs for supper an hour later. We will see
the way the physical real estate of Manhattan is being optimized for
the functioning of the ultrafast trading algorithms now running the
stock market— as well as what this means for the human traders
left in the wake. We will encounter doomsday “preppers” who stock
up on silver coins and ready-to-eat meals while dismissing climate
change as a conspiracy theory hatched by Al Gore and since exposed
in an email scandal. 3 We will consider the “singularity”—as
well as our scientifi c community’s response to present shock—
especially for the ways it mirrors the religious extremism accompanying
other great social shifts throughout history.
Most important, we will consider what we human beings can
do to pace ourselves and our expectations when there’s no temporal
backdrop against which to measure our progress, no narrative
through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward which
we may strive, and seemingly no time to fi gure any of this out.
I suggest we intervene on our own behalf— and that we do it
right now, in the present moment. When things begin accelerating
wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press
pause.
We have time for this."
Excerpts
Under embargo until March 20.