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Present Shock- explained in 15 minutes

Douglas Rushkoff — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:21:26 +0000

I like this very brief talk I did for PSFK about Present Shock. It doesn't explain the whole book, but it definitely conveys the "gist" of it, in presentist style. See what I mean:

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock. When Everything Happens Now from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

Present Shock Blows Stephen Colbert's Mind

Douglas Rushkoff — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:48:31 +0000

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive

Steven Soderberg Describes His Own Present Shock

Douglas Rushkoff — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:37:30 +0000

Here's the beginning of Steven Soderbergh's State of the Cinema Address, delivered Saturday in SF:

So I’m getting comfortable in my seat. I spent the extra $60 to get the extra leg room so I’m trying to get comfortable and we make altitude. And there’s a guy on the other side of the aisle in front of me and he pulls out his iPad to start watching stuff. I’m curious to see what he’s going to watch – he’s a white guy in his mid-30s. And I begin to realize what he’s done is he’s loaded in half a dozen action sort of extravaganzas and he’s watching each of the action sequences – he’s skipping over all the dialogue and the narrative. This guy’s flight is going to be five and a half hours of just mayhem porn.

I get this wave of – not panic, it’s not like my heart started fluttering – but I had this sense of, am I going insane? Or is the world going insane – or both? Now I start with the circular thinking again. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s generational and I’m getting old, I’m in the back nine professionally. And maybe my 22-year-old daughter doesn’t feel this way at all. I should ask her. But then I think, no: Something is going on – something that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age you cannot keep a secret.

Something is going on – something that can be measured is happening, and there has to be. When people are more outraged by the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos than some young girl being stoned to death, then there’s something wrong. We have people walking around who think the government stages these terrorist attacks. And anybody with a brain bigger than a walnut knows that our government is not nearly competent enough to stage a terrorist attack and then keep it a secret because, as we know, in this day and age you cannot keep a secret.

So I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum. Again, I thought maybe that’s my generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask my daughter. But then I remember somebody did this experiment where if you’re in a car and you’re going more than 20 miles an hour it becomes impossible to distinguish individual features on a human being’s face. I thought that’s another good analogy for this sensation. It’s a very weird experiment for someone to come up with.

So that was my Jet Blue flight. But the circular thinking didn’t really stop and I got my hands on a book by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time”. That’s the hum I’m talking about. And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think it’s having an effect on our culture, and I think it’s having an effect on movies. How they’re made, how they’re sold, how they perform.

CNN: The Terror of Real Time

Douglas Rushkoff — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:08:09 +0000

(CNN) -- So is this the "new normal"? That's the question I keep hearing as people try to comprehend the tragedy at the Boston Marathon and its chaotic aftermath. The answer is yes -- in more ways than you might think.

I don't mean that we're supposed to get used to explosions, school shootings and other threats arising seemingly randomly and without warning. But we should accept that the old ways of understanding and responding to conflicts and threats no longer apply.

In an always-on, post-narrative age, 24-hour cable and Internet news and Twitter feeds offer a steady stream of opportunities for panic and misinformation. We have a suspect; no, we don't; yes, we do. The school is on lockdown; no, it's not. False alarms are still alarms, after all. It's like we are all living in newsrooms, or as 911 operators or air-traffic controllers, for all the emergency interruptions and bulletins we navigate practically every hour.

Then consider the equally unnerving limbo we endure once there's nothing new to report. The stakes are too high to return to regular programming, so we just sit there, poised on high alert along with the police and journalists. This time, it was flashing blue lights and the search for a suspect. Before that, it was the live feed of Deepwater Horizon in the corner of the screen for weeks, belching oil into the sea. Whether interruptive or chronic, the anxiety keeps pouring in.

We live in a state of "present shock."

And even if network anchors still had the authority they once did, they would not be able construct a satisfying story around the onslaught of neverending news. When the journalists cheered as the police caught the marathon bombings suspect in the boat, it seemed that they were mostly relieved at reaching a definitive conclusion to a neverending news cycle. One news anchor actually declared "justice won" as she was at last permitted to cut to commercial. It rang false, because there's no genuine finality anymore. The story just doesn't end. Nor does the anxiety.

For it's not so much a matter of responding to a particular crisis, threat or tragedy but of coping with the persistent flow of urgency itself. Some of the unease we feel with the Boston bombings comes from the nagging sense that we have no way of gauging where we are in the arc of violence. Is this the beginning of a new series of attacks, a rare event like the Oklahoma City bombing or part of some greater conspiracy yet to be revealed?

Of course, none of the usual narratives apply, for we no longer live in a world with beginnings, middles and ends. That quaint structure went out with the Industrial Age and the moon shot. We no longer design career paths; we no longer invest in the future. We occupy; we freelance; we trade derivatives. Everything happens in the now.

Even terror. While there are certainly groups such as al Qaeda with political goals and a modicum of organization, for every plotted attack with strategic goals, there are many more that arise haphazardly, randomly -- by either sympathizers, copycats or mentally ill nihilists with no political justification whatsoever.

We're no longer fighting enemies in the normal sense. We cannot begin a war on terrorism and then declare victory when we're done. We can't stick a flag in it and call it won.

No, the challenges of a post-Industrial society are less like conquests with clear endpoints than they are steady-state concerns. Oil is spilling. The climate is changing. Terrorists are plotting. Crises are never quite solved for the future so much as managed in the present.

But accepting the essentially plotless and ongoing nature of crisis needn't compromise our ability to respond appropriately and effectively. In fact, by freeing ourselves from the obsolete narratives we used to rely on, we can begin to recognize the patterns in the apparent chaos. We may not get answers to rally around or satisfyingly dramatic finales, but neither will we need to invent compelling, false stories to motivate ourselves into action.

In a world where crises are constant and perpetual, we might as well begin to develop more sustainable approaches to solving them in real time, rather than once and for all.

Life goes on.

Time Ain't Money: Stop Punching the Industrial Age Clock

Douglas Rushkoff — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 17:48:16 +0000

Here's a Present Shock manifesto for business I wrote for a website called ChangeThis.

“Living in the digital media environment changes a whole lot more than the technologies through which we do business. It has changed our relationship to time—and this is having profound effects on our businesses, our economy, and our customers.

To put it most simply, the money we use has a built-in clock—an embedded relationship to time that informs how we obtain capital, how we pay it back, how we invest, how we sell, and how we communicate. That clock has run out. It has wound down, and been replaced with something else. I call it “presentism”, or a focus on the now over the past or even the future. If we understand this shift—the most truly significant change wrought by the digital—we can thrive in the new landscape. If we can’t—if we end up paralyzed in what I’ve come to call “present shock,” then we may as well go down with the rest of the Industrial Age.”

Download the PDF here. Anbd better, go buy the book here!

'Present Shock': The Future Isn't a Book, It's a Videogame

Douglas Rushkoff — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 01:21:53 +0000

by MORGAN CLENDANIEL via FastCompany.

In Present Shock, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that technology has delivered us to the future, and so it’s now time to use that technology to allow us to focus on the present, instead of force us to constantly try to catch up.

"I’m a Presentist," says Douglas Rushkoff. His new book, Present Shock, outlines a world where technological advancement has allowed us to live in real time. The future--which used to be a destination that we marched toward--has arrived. Now, says Rushkoff, we need not worry about the future at all, because we are living in a present that will continue forever. Now we must either accept that fact and use our new technology to create a happier, present-based society, or constantly fight against it, in a losing battle against an always-on, always-connected economy.

What happened to the future? Rushkoff says you can trace its death to the same roots as the financial crisis. "Futurism--the yearning toward an end--is a symptom of the industrial age that we’re leaving behind," he says. "It’s happening because the industrial age economy is finally running out of steam. … Industrial age currency has an accelerating clock built into it and we’ve reached the limits of our ability if not to grow, then to accelerate our growth."

A STEADY STATE ECONOMY

Think about what this has meant for the global economy. Rushkoff notes that we’ve often taken abstract economic concepts and elevated them above production of physical goods. "The main forms of innovation from American companies that we’ve seen over the last 10 or 20 years have been financial innovation, which is more about creating a new kind of derivative that can compress time but that doesn’t actually make anything."

Global warming, terrorism, child starvation: these are chronic problems that we can’t address through victory.

Whole economies are fueled by these abstractions, which means the economy doesn’t need to keep expanding physically. It’s moved past the metaphor of progress that has fueled our idea of the future. "The industrial age was about going forward; was about growth; was about building for the future; was about investing in something that was going to be bigger later," he says. "That has ended up getting replaced by a much more steady state economy, one that’s biased more toward transaction and the velocity of money rather than expansion and the storage of money. The cultural bias and economic bias metaphor is shifting from hard drive to RAM, from potential energy to kinetic energy."

SOLVING 21ST-CENTURY PROBLEMS

Visualizing a better future seems nothing but admirable, but Rushkoff argues that by assigning a linear paradigm to these issues, we’re limiting ourselves in the possibilities of solutions. "If we stop looking at politics like a book, with a beginning, middle, and end, and we start looking at it more like the Internet, with an ongoing approach to behavior--that’s what’s going to solve 21st-century problems," he says. "Twentieth century problems could be won, they had bad guys that could be beaten. You could go to the moon and stick a flag in the ground. But 21st century problems don’t have clear end points. Global warming, terrorism, child starvation: these are chronic problems that we can’t address through victory, but rather through developing sustainable, real time models or behaviors. These are not things you win, they’re things you learn to deal with and abate."

If we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change.

And if you accept that there is no end to these issues, but a constant "now" in which they can be managed in a sustainable way, the future starts to look "less like a story and more like a video game," a collection of people all making decisions in real time--with no final climax in sight: "If we stop believing in a future, if we stop doing things for something else but start doing them for now, some fundamental things change. Retirement becomes less about how much money you can squirrel away now and much more a matter of participating and contributing to your own community now so that they want to take care of you. … We’re going to move into a world where your retirement will be more secure if you’ve made lots of friends with young people rather than collected lots of dollars."

CHRONOS AND KAIROS

What happened to the future? It’s become lost in our changing concept of time, what Rushkoff calls the difference between the Greek terms chronos and kairos, time and timing. Digital devices have changed the way we think about time from segments of the day to discrete moments. When you look at an analog clock, you can see the time that will come after and the time that came before. But a digital clock presents each time as one instance; 3:23 exists by itself. "Presentism is the acknowledgement that human beings exist in a unique temporal landscape in which not all moments are the same. We’ve been taking digital technology and pushing it into service of the old, but working in an increasingly digital environment means forcing our digital operating systems to conform to human time, rather than the other way around."

This isn’t just philosophical. Changing our idea of the passage of time could have enormous effects on the workplace, our understanding of the human body, and how people relate to each other. "We’ve been living in chronos for the past thousand or so years," says Rushkoff. "Time was what’s on the clock. And now that our digital devices can take that for us. We can move into kairos."

Working in an increasingly digital environment means forcing our digital operating systems to conform to human time.

Once we acknowledge that 3:23 is just a time on a digital device, it will start to become clear that we need to focus more on the kairos, the timing. A certain time may not be the best time to ask an employee to start a new project, even if it’s the middle of the work day. "I think it’s going to take us another decade or so for us to acknowledge the way that our neurotransmitters change over time, that there is a very distinct and measurable lunar cycle that corresponds to increases and decreases in particular neurotransmitters," says Rushkoff. "As we come to understand that this is a serotonin week or this is a dopamine week, we’ll become a lot better at surfing the moods of our families and coworkers and markets."

Some people may decry the idea that time has ceased to exist, saying it’s another symptom of an Internet age where we are always connected--to each other, to our workplaces--and no one can rest. But we don’t need to live that way. "We feel compelled to answer every ping and vibration that comes at us, or we feel like we are falling behind somehow. As if all those things are in the present and we’re trying to catch up with them. But we’re in the present, and those things are trying to catch up with us. We’ve got the cause and effect kind of reversed."

That, says Rushkoff, is what Presentism is, a way to harness the changes wrought by technology to make our lives easier by transforming a constant searching for the future into a focus on the present: "It’s a reaction against our misuse of digital technology as a way of exacerbating the ills of the industrial age, rather than using it to welcome in an entirely new approach to time, money, work, and living. Futurism has ended, and now we actually get to be in that future."

Douglas Rushkoff On The Terror of Modern Time

Douglas Rushkoff — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 12:36:56 +0000

Nice short movie about Present Shock by Abe Riesman of the New York Observer's "betabeat". Here's the piece he wrote to go with it:

Douglas Rushkoff On The Terror of Time

"Are we gonna give all our bloggers Adderall and stick ‘em in a room and tell ‘em to just churn out more shit?”

By Abraham Riesman 3/26/13

Over the course of 20 years, 15 books, and countless speeches and articles, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has established quite a following among technophiles.

With titles like 2010’s Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age, it’s no wonder folks like Andy Weissman quoted Mr. Rushkoff to explain why Union Square Ventures led a $2.5 million investment in Codecademy, a startup that teaches anyone programming languages like Ruby and Javascript. (Not long after, Codecademy announced Mr. Rushkoff would be joining their team as a “code literacy” evangelist.)

But while tomes like Program or Be Programmed or 1994′s Cyberia: Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace warned about the perils and responsibilities of digital citizenship, his latest book is all about time. Rather, it’s about how people are driving themselves insane by approaching time in unhealthy ways.

In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, which just hit shelves a few days ago, Mr. Rushkoff coins ominous terms like “digiphrenia” (the kind of disorientation you get when you’re trying to process something as fast as Twitter and something as slow as a news article in the same sitting) and “fractalnoia” (the mistakes organizations make when they try to predict major future trends using small bits of data from the recent past).

Sound a bit heady? Don’t worry. To slow things down a bit, we took Mr. Rushkoff to Sutton Clocks, a sales and repair shop for antique timepieces on the Upper East Side. There, amidst the ticks and tocks, Mr. Rushkoff told us how misunderstanding time can cripple a workforce and tempt you to make dumb decisions.

Try to rein in your digiphrenia as you watch him explain what happens to our biological clock when the digital world treats day and night interchangeably and why the 24-hour blog-cycle is a terrible idea.

Futurists Don't Suck

Douglas Rushkoff — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:57:57 +0000

I apologize. I wrote short piece for Good last week, inappropriately entitled "Why Futurists Suck". While I agree with the piece I wrote, the title frames a very particular situation in much too broad and unnecessarily incendiary terms. The title is actually a reference to the satirical subtitle of a talk I did at SXSW back in 1997, when as young man I hoped to take a swipe at the slick magazines and high-paid consultants who seemed to be derailing the digital age.

The idea of the piece is not that futurists suck. It's that the digital renaissance offers us new access to present. The emergence of digital technology gave us new ways to manage our time - ways that I hoped would give us new freedom to work when we wanted to, from wherever we wanted to and, for the most part, less. These technologies empowered the individual, the community, and the local, real-time reality. Whether trading in restored peer-to-peer marketplaces or starting businesses without venture capital, the cyberpunks were going to liberate us from the Industrial Age time-is-money way of life that was not only running out of steam but threatening to ruin the planet.

What angered me at the time was that many of the digerati and, yes, futurists who could have been helping usher in this new era instead reframed the digital era as an extension and amplification of the Industrial Age. Instead of offering us an alternative to extractive venture capitalism and debt-based growth imperatives, the digital age was to be the harbinger of a "long boom" through which the NASDAQ would be able to grow infinitely.

And that shift from hands-on, maker-centric digital culture to high flying digital industrialism really bummed me out. Jerry Garcia died the same day Netscape went public. And that seemed significant.

But it wasn't until I began working on Present Shock that I came to understand what it was that had actually been disturbing me so profoundly back in 1997. And it wasn't until I was finished with the book and introducing to an audience at SXSW in 2013 that I realized I had come full circle. Here I am again, explaining how we are misapplying the a-temporal, presentist potentials of digital technology to the obsolete, time-based agenda of the Industrial Age.

So no, futurists don't suck. Hell, I even play one on TV. The piece would have been better entitled "when futurists suck" or, better yet, something altogether different. But as it went out, the title and the sentiment it projects were wrong. It not only obscures the point I was trying to make, but offends an entire profession - most of whose members are as dedicated to making the world a better place to live right now.

Favorite Present Shock Interviews

Douglas Rushkoff — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:49:06 +0000

I've been in media mode for Present Shock, hoping to get people to - yes - buy it! But it's also a great opportunity to engage with people about the ideas I've been wrestling with for the past, gosh, twenty years. Here's a list of some of my favorite conversations. I'll be updating this post as more come in.

All Things Considered (audio) The gist, in 6 minutes.

OnPoint. (audio) Tom Ashbrook's NPR show out of Boston. An hour-long interview with call-in.

Interview with Rob Walker. (text) Former NYT Consumed columnist, now at YahooNews.

Brian Lehrer (audio) WNYC's morning show. 15 minutes with community radio's best host.

Edutopia (text) Brilliant Betty Ray engages with me about the implications of Present Shock for education.

TheVerge (video) Techno-shut-out Paul Miller panics over Apocalypto.

PandoDaily (text) Andrea Huspeni interrogates me on the impact of Present Shock on business and startups. And how to thrive in this new landscape.

New York Times' Janet Maslin reviews Present Shock

Douglas Rushkoff — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:08:36 +0000

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/books/present-shock-by-douglas-rushkoff.html?ref=books&_r=0

Out of Time: The Sins of Immediacy

By JANET MASLIN

“Present Shock” is one of those invaluable books that make sense of what we already half-know. Playing on the title of Alvin Toffler’s influential 1970 “Future Shock,” which sounded an alarm about what Mr. Toffler called “a personal perception of too much change in too short a period of time,” Douglas Rushkoff analyzes a very different phenomenon. The future arrived a little while ago, he posits — maybe with Y2K, maybe with Sept. 11. Now it’s here. And we are stuck with “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now — and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” Mr. Toffler warned that we would be unready for this onslaught. Mr. Rushkoff is more analytical than alarmist. He divides his thoughts into five sections addressing five kinds of profound change, and his biggest illustration of present shock has to do with the actual book itself. Because the present is more full of interruptions than the past was, it took him extra time to write. Because its ideas aren’t glib, he says, “here I am writing opera when the people are listening to singles.” And he realizes that data-swamped readers may take longer to finish books now. Coming from him the phrase “thanks for your time” has new meaning.

“Present Shock” begins by simply describing how we have lost our capacity to absorb traditional narrative. It goes on to explain what we have used to replace it. There was a time, Mr. Rushkoff says, when everything had narrative structure, even TV ads. Captive audiences sat through commercials that introduced a protagonist, presented a problem, then pitched a product to solve it. The little story ended well, at least from the advertiser’s point of view. But now viewers may be more angry than bored at such intrusions. They know that “someone you don’t trust is attempting to make you anxious,” so they ditch the ad before it’s over.

The ancient Greeks learned about the hero’s journey from Homer’s narratives. We’ve gotten decades of Homer Simpson, who “remains in a suspended, infinite present,” while his audience moves from one satirical pop-culture reference to the next. Citing “Forrest Gump” as a film that failed to combat late-20th-century feelings of discontinuity and “Pulp Fiction” as one wild enough to usher in a new era, Mr. Rushkoff moves on to what came next: the video game open-ended structure that keeps TV drama in the eternal present. About “Game of Thrones” he says, “This is no longer considered bad writing.” Changes to news presentation are even more dramatic. This book describes the present shock of politicians who — thanks to the 24/7 coverage ushered in by “the CNN effect” that began in the 1980s — “cannot get on top of issues, much less get ahead of them.” He notes that both the political left (MSNBC, with its slogan “Lean Forward”) and right (conservatism devoted to reviving traditional values) share this goal: They’re trying to escape the present.

Contrasting the Tea Party with the Occupy movement, he says the Tea Party’s apocalyptic yearning for closure is diametrically unlike Occupy’s “inspiring and aggravating” quest for an eternal present. The ways Occupy resembles the Internet make him think it may be the more durable of the two movements.

When Mr. Rushkoff moves on to what he calls digiphrenia — digitally provoked mental chaos — he writes about present shock’s capacity to be a great leveler. Now that a single Facebook post can have as much impact as 30 years’ worth of scholarship, how do we analog creatures navigate the digital landscape? How do we shield ourselves from distraction, or gravitate to what really matters? This section of Mr. Rushkoff’s agile, versatile book veers into chronobiology, a burgeoning science that has not yet achieved peak popular impact. Dr. Oz may speak of it on television, but the correlation between time and physiology is ripe for more exploration. Mr. Rushkoff, who likes being his own guinea pig, divided his writing of this book into weekly segments based on a lunar cycle.

Among the intuitive ideas turned tangible by “Present Shock” is “filter failure,” the writer and teacher Clay Shirky’s improved term for what used to be called “information overload.” Mr. Rushkoff’s translation: “Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”

Your new boss isn’t the person in the corner office; it’s the P.D.A. in your pocket. And there are the discrepancies between age and appearance that are increasingly possible in our malleable present. The book contends that young girls and Botoxed TV “housewives” all want to look 19; that hipsters in their 40s cultivate the affectations of 20-somethings, to the delight of marketers; and that apocalyptic types just want to opt out of time altogether. “Present Shock” gives them good reason to feel that way.

But in the end only some of the ills in “Present Shock” can be chalked up to dehumanizing technological advances. “I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people that what people are choosing to do to one another through technology,” Mr. Rushkoff writes. “Facebook’s reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking’s convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines.” They were made by human intelligence, because present shock’s ways of targeting, pinpointing and manipulating aren’t just shocking. They’re very lucrative too.