Money Quotes: Present Shock (assembled by symbolist)

www.symbolist.com

July 2013

Money Quotes - Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff 2 www.symbolist.com

Don’t expect the content in the book

Present Shock to solve any problems.

It does however present a great discussion

around how technology is changing how

we view time and whether that change is

impacting how we think and act.

I found the book to be compelling enough

to grab some quotes that resonated with

me and put them into this slide show. The

book is almost too dense to put together a

“money quote” show (but I gave it a shot.)

Anyone who is involved with social networks

will find the concepts in this book very familiar.

In fact, the arguments laid out in the book

might be enough to get you to pull back from

some of your social media properties and

begin to focus on longer-term issues. I know I

am now consciously inserting time in my day

to focus on the future, focus on context more

than current events and take a break from the

constant stream of information in front of me.

I highly recommend you take some time – buy

the book and read it.

If the end of

the twentieth

century can be

characterized

by futurism,

the twenty-first

can be defined

by


Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s

not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at

which we attempt to do things.


Rather, we tend to exist in a distracted present, where

Our ability to create a plan—much less follow through on it—is undermined by

our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external

impacts that stand to derail us at any moment.


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,

rather than those

made by the lobes responsible for

rational thought or consideration.


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.


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.

Finally, we face “Apocalypto”—

the way a

,

by almost any means necessary.


Narrativity is just the first of

many things obsolesced by

presentism, and the sense of

trauma at losing linearity just

the first of five main forms of

present shock.


Experiencing the world as

a series of stories helps

create a sense of context.

It is comforting and

orienting. It helps smooth

out obstacles and

impediments by recasting

them as bumps along the

way to some better

place—or at least an end

to the journey.


How does the current story of

career and retirement adjust to life

spans increasing from the sixties

to the one hundreds? How do

fertility drugs change the timeline

of motherhood, how does email

change our conception of the

workweek, and how do robots

change the story of the

relationship of labor to

management? Or, in our current

frame of reference, how does

social networking change the

goals of a revolution?


As Aristotle explained, “When the

storytelling in a culture goes bad

the result is decadence.”


Futurism became less about predicting the future than pandering to

those who sought to maintain an expired past.


Leaders cannot get on top

of issues, much less ahead of them,

as they instead seek merely to respond to

the emerging chaos in a way that makes them


The descent of what used to be professional

journalism into professional opining

generates the sense that there is

no objective truth.


From 1985 to 2005, the number of Americans unsure about

evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent, resulting in a


People

are

still

analog.


The tension between the faux present of digital bombardment and

the true now of a coherently living human generates the second

kind of present shock, —digi for

“digital,” and phrenia for “dissordered condition of mental activity.”


Oral communication unites people in

groups. Writing and reading are solitary

activities that throw the psyche back on itself.


We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the

amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo

contemplation or live engagement with another human

being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as

valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.


With the invention of text came the ability to draft contracts, which were

some of the first documents ever written, and described agreements that

endured over time. With contracts came accountability, and some ability

to control what lay ahead.


A people was defined and its activities organized by its calendar, its

holidays, and its memorials.

Calendars tell a culture what matters both secularly and religiously.


Where calendars led people to

think in terms of history, clocks led

people to think in terms of

productivity. Time was money. Only

after the proliferation of the clock

did the word “speed” enter the

English vocabulary, or did

“punctual”—which used to refer to

a stickler for details—come to mean

a person who arrived on time.


Digital time does not flow; it flicks.

Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there.

In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is

always in the now, or in no time.


There is stored time—the

stuff that gets bound up by

information and symbols.

And then there is flowing

time—the stuff that

happens in the moment

and then is gone. One

needs to be unpacked. For

the other, you have to be

there.



Catching up with Twitter is like

staying up all night to catch up

on live streaming stock quotes

from yesterday. The value was

in the now—which at this point

is really just a then time.

There is no safe time.

If we are truly to take time away from the program, we feel

we must disconnect altogether and live “off the grid,” as if

we were members of a different, predigital era.


Using past

data to steer

the future,

however,


These analysts are describing the new turbulence of a

present-shock universe where no longer an event

that happens, but a


We are similarly disoriented by digital time, for it tends to

mix and match different scales simultaneously. A date

twenty years in the future has the same size box in the

Google calendar as the one tomorrow or next week.


Like an astronaut

traveling at light speed for just

a few seconds who returns to an

Earth on which ninety years have

passed, our digital selves exist in a

time unhinged from that of our

bodies. Eventually the two realities

conflict, leading to present shock.


We compress history into words, stories, and

symbols that allow living people to learn and

benefit from the experiences of the dead.


We create symbols, or what Korzybski calls abstractions, in order to

represent things to one another and our descendants more

efficiently. They can be icons, brands, religious symbols, familiar

tropes, or anything that compresses information bigger than itself.


Remember, corporations themselves were born to counteract

the peer-to-peer, every-which-way connectivity of the bazaar.


So instead of telling us the true story of the factory, the corporation

tells us the story of how elves baked the cookies in a hollow tree.

This is what is known as brand mythology;


When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and

iTunes, the entirety of



The ancients understood

that

instead of

a strength. In more recent

history, written records

would often be expunged

after a period of time, a

person could move to a new

neighborhood and start

over, or a bankruptcy

cleared after seven years.

So it’s not only our past, but our futures that are compressed into

the present, as well.

We end up in —filled with

contradiction and paralyzed by both the weight of an indelible

history and the anticipation of a preordained fate.



Because we can’t actually be more than one

person at the same time, we experience

digiphrenia instead of sync.

The mistake so many of us

make with digital technology

is to imitate rather than

simply exploit its multitasking

capabilities. We try to

maximize our efficiency by

distributing our resources

instead of lining them up.

The amount of time

between purchase (or

even earning) and

gratification has shrunk

to nothing—so much so

that the purchase itself is

more rewarding than

consuming whatever it is

that has been bought.


The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who

actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are

used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families

had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place.


The emergence of credit cards, federally preapproved residential

mortgages, and other lines of credit in the mid-twentieth century

served a growth economy in two ways.


Second, the

First, and most simply, it gave people a way to buy more stuff now

than they actually had money to buy. This is pure time compression:


Hoarding money was no longer a liability but

the surest means to greater wealth.

When the

only value

left is time,

the world

becomes a

clock.


In the real world,

Our gestures, tone of voice, facial expressions, and even the size of

our irises at any given moment tell the other person much more

than our words do.


These are the cues we

use to gauge whether

someone is listening to

us, agrees with us, is

attracted to us, or wants

us to shut up.

As long as we live as individuals,

the distant future doesn’t really

matter so much. The philosophy

of the long now would suggest

that the only way to see past

this immediate, consumer-era

self-satisfaction is to look further

in the future.


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Money Quotes: Present Shock (assembled by symbolist)

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