Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  Some of the most devout members of this religious universe were responsible for breaking time down even further. For their new Islamic faith, Muslims were required to pray at regular intervals. Their methodical call to prayer sequence used the height of the sun and measurement of shadows to break the day into six sections. In Europe, it was Benedictine monks who organized not just the calendar year but every day into precisely defined segments for prayer, work, meals, and hygiene. Handheld bells coordinated all this activity, making sure the monks performed their tasks and said their prayers at the same time. Surrendering to this early form of schedule constituted a spiritual surrender for the medieval monks, for whom personal time and autonomy were anathema to their new collective identity. Although their schedule might look simple compared with that of an average junior high student today, the monks were exercising radically strict temporal discipline for the time.

  As they became more concerned (some may argue obsessed) with synchronizing all their daily routines, the monks eventually developed the first mechanical timepieces. The Benedictine clocks were celebrated for their escapement technology—basically, the ability to control the descent of a weight (or expansion of a spring) by breaking its fall slowly and sequentially with a little ticking gear. The real leap, however, had less to do with escapement than with ticking and tocking itself. What the monks had discovered was that the way to measure time was to break it down into little beats. Just as ancient Buddhist water clocks could mark four hours by storing the combined volume of hundreds of relatively regularly falling drops, the Benedictine clocks broke down the slow, continuous descent of weights into the regular beats of a pendulum. Tick-tock, before-after, yes-no, 1/0. Time was necessarily digital in character,7 always oscillating, always dividing. As an extension of the new culture of science (a word that originally meant to separate one thing from another, to split, divide, dissect), the clock turned time into something that divides, and, like any technology, created more preferences, judgments, and choices.

  Even though the Chinese had accurate water clocks for centuries before the Benedictines, clocks and timing did not come to spread and dominate Asian culture the same way they did in Europe. Westerners believed this was because the Chinese didn’t know quite what to do with all this precision. But it may have had less to do with a lack than with a bounty. The Chinese already had a strong sense of culture and purpose, as well as a different relationship to work and progress over time. The introduction of timepieces capable of breaking down time didn’t have quite the same impact on a people who looked at time—for better and for worse—as belonging to someone else, anyway.

  Arriving on church bell towers at the dawn of the Industrial Age, the clock was decidedly more interesting to those looking for ways to increase the efficiency of the new working classes. Ironically, perhaps, an invention designed to affirm the primacy and ubiquity of the sacred ended up becoming a tool for the expansion of the secular economy. Trade had been expanding for a century or two already, and keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule.

  The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market were all punctuated by the ringing of bells. In line with other highly centralizing Renaissance inventions such as currency and the corporation, bells were controlled by central authorities. This gave rise to distrust, as workers were never sure if their employers were measuring time fairly. The emergence of the clock tower gave everyone access to the same time, allowing for verification while also amplifying time’s authority.

  Thanks to the clock tower, the rhythms of daily life were now dictated by a machine. Over time, people conformed to ever more precisely scheduled routines. Where the priority of the calendar-driven civilization was God, the priorities of the clockwork universe would be speed and efficiency. 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” (spelled spede) 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.8

  The metaphor for the human being became the clock, with the heartbeat emulating the ticks of the escapement, counting off the seconds passing. Management of people meant management of time (the word “management” itself deriving from putting a horse through its paces, or manege). People were to perform with the precision and regularity of the machines they drove—and, in some senses, were becoming. By the 1800s, workers punched clocks to register their hours. A mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor applied his skill with machines to human beings, inventing a new field called scientific management. He and his assistants would spread out through a company armed with stopwatches and clipboards to measure and maximize the efficiency of every aspect of the work cycle. The time it took to open a file drawer was recorded down to the hundredth of a second, in order to determine the standard time required to complete any job. Once that was known, the efficiency of any particular worker could be measured against it. The efficiency movement was born, for which glowing accounts of increased productivity over time were published and promoted, while evidence of worker dissent was actively suppressed.9

  Now that human beings were being tuned up like machines, the needs of humans and machines became almost indistinguishable. The entirety of the clockwork universe may as well have been a machine, with new innovations emerging primarily to assist technology or the businesses on which those technologies depended. Thanks in part to the legal arguments of a railroad industry lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, for example, the rights of local municipalities were subordinated to those of corporations that needed thoroughfare for their trains and cargo. Time and timing began to mean more than place. Transcontinental commerce required synchronized activity over great distances, leading to “standard time” and the drawing of time zones across the map. (Greenwich Mean Time’s placement in the United Kingdom represented the British Empire’s lingering domination of the globe.) Likewise, the telegraph emerged primarily as a communication system through which train crashes could be minimized. Directing the motion of trains with red lights and green lights was eventually applied to cars and ultimately to people navigating the crosswalks—all timed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and speed. In the clockwork universe, all human activity—from shift work to lunch breaks to TV viewing to blind dates—involved getting bodies to the right place at the right time, in accordance with the motions of the clock. We were as clocks ourselves, with arms that moved and hearts that counted and alarms that warned us and bells that went off in our heads. Just wind me up in the morning.

  If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don’t compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped. In nature, our activities were regulated by the turning of the Earth. While the central clock tower may have coordinated human activity from above, in a digital network this control is distributed—or at least it seems that way. We each have our own computer or device onto which we install our choice of software (if we’re lucky), and then use or respond to it individually. The extent to which our devices are conforming to external direction and synchronization for the most part remains a mystery to us, and the effect feels less like top-down coordination than personalized, decentralized programs.

  The analog clock imitated the circularity of the day, but digital timekeeping has no arms, no circles, no moving parts. It is a number, stationary in time. It just is. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. Digital time does n
ot 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. It is still. Poised.

  I remember when I was just ten years old, how I used to stare at my first digital clock. It had no LED, but rather worked a bit like a train terminal’s board, with a new number flipping down into place every minute. I would wait and count, trying and failing to anticipate the click of the next number flipping down—each time being surprised by its suddenness in a micromoment of present shock. My dad’s old alarm clock required him to wind it up each night, and then to twirl a second winder for the alarm. Over the course of the day, the potential energy he wound into the device slowly expressed itself in the kinetic energy of the motion of the arms and bell hammer. My digital clock just sat there, interrupting itself each minute only to sit there again. Its entire account of the minute 7:43 was the same. Maybe that’s why, to this day, digital watches have not replaced their analog counterparts—though wristwatches are primarily ornamental for most wearers, who now read the time on a smart phone.

  That is, if the smart phone only sat there and waited for us to read it. More often than not, it’s the phone or laptop demanding our attention, alerting us to the upcoming event in our schedule, or unpacking one of a seemingly infinite number of its processes into our attention. Indeed, if the Axial Age was coordinated by the calendar, and the clockwork universe by the schedule, the digital era subjects us to the authority of code. Our children may have their afternoons scheduled, but we adults live in a world that is increasingly understood as a program.

  Where a schedule simply lists an appointment we are supposed to attend or a task we are to complete, a program carries out the actual process with us or for us. The clock dictated only time; the computer (and smart phone, and biometric device on the wrist) tells us what we should be doing when. We once read books at our own pace; computer animations, YouTube movies, and video games play out at a speed predetermined by the programmer. The GPS on the dashboard knows our entire route to the dentist’s office and offers us the turns we need to take on a need-to-know basis. The computer graphic on the exercise machine tells us how fast to pedal and turns the simulation uphill when it knows we need it. We surrender this authority over our pacing because we know that, for the most part, the programs will be better at helping us meet our stated goals than we are. The events carried out by computers are less like schedules than they are like simulations; less like sheet music, more like a piano roll. In a scheduled world, you are told you have half an hour to peruse an exhibit at the museum; in a programmed world, you are strapped into the ride at Disneyland and conveyed through the experience at a predetermined pace. However richly conceived, the ride’s complexity is limited because its features are built-in, appearing and unfolding in sync with the motions of your cart. The skeleton dangles, the pirate waves, and the holographic ship emerges from the cloud of smoke. In the programmed life, the lights go on and off at a specified time, the coffee pot activates, the daylight-balanced bulb in the programmable clock radio fades up. Active participation is optional, for these events will go on without us and at their own pace.

  As we grow increasingly dependent on code for what to do and when to do it, we become all the more likely to accept a model of human life itself as predetermined by the codons in our genomes. All we can do is watch the program of our DNA unfold or, at best, change our fates by altering the sequence of genes dictating what’s supposed to happen. Free will and autonomy are eventually revealed to us to be a simulation of some sort, while the reality we think we’re participating in is really just the predetermined dance of pure information. The timekeeper is no longer the controller of the clock but the programmer of the computer.

  And instead of taking our cues from the central clock tower or the manager with the stopwatch, we carry our personal digital devices with us. Our daily schedule, dividing work time from time off, is discarded. Rather, we are always-on. Our boss isn’t the guy in the corner office, but a PDA in our pocket. Our taskmaster is depersonalized and internalized—and even more rigorous than the union busters of yesterday. 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.

  Time in the digital era is no longer linear but disembodied and associative. The past is not something behind us on the timeline but dispersed through the sea of information. Like a digital unconscious, the raw data sits forgotten unless accessed by a program in the future. Everything is recorded, yet almost none of it feels truly accessible. A change in file format renders decades of stored files unusable, while a silly, forgotten Facebook comment we wrote when drunk can resurface at a job interview.

  In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile—a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself—our social graph of friends and likes—is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures. Using past data to steer the future, however, ends up negating the present. The futile quest for omniscience we looked at earlier in this chapter encourages us, particularly businesses, to seek ever more fresh and up-to-the-minute samples, as if this will render the present coherent to us. But we are really just chasing after what has already happened and ignoring whatever is going on now. Similarly, as individuals, our efforts to keep up with the latest Tweet or update do not connect us to the present moment but ensure that we are remaining focused on what just happened somewhere else. We guide ourselves and our businesses as if steering a car by watching a slide show in the rearview mirror. This is the disjointed, misapplied effort of digiphrenia.

  Yet instead of literally coming to our senses, we change our value system to support the premises under which we are operating, abstracting our experience one step further from terra firma. The physical production of the factory worker gives way to the mental production of the computer user. Instead of measuring progress in acres of territory or the height of skyscrapers, we do it in terabytes of data, whose value is dependent on increasingly smaller units of time-stamped freshness.

  Time itself becomes just another form of information—another commodity—to be processed. Instead of measuring change from one state of affairs to another, we measure the rate of change, and the rate at which that rate is changing, and so on. Instead of proceeding from the past to the future, time now proceeds along derivatives, from location to speed to acceleration and beyond. We may like to think that the only constant is change, except for the fact that it isn’t really true—change is changing, too. As Mark McDonald, of IT research and advisory company Gartner, put it, “The nature of change is changing because the flow and control of information has become turbulent, no longer flowing top down, but flowing in every direction at all times. This means that the ability to manage and lead change is no longer based on messaging, communication and traditional sponsorship. Rather it is based on processes of informing, enrolling and adapting that are significantly more disruptive and difficult to manage for executives and leaders.”10

  Or as Dave Gray, of the social media consultancy Dachis Group, explains it, “Change is not a once-in-a-while thing so much as something that is going to be happening all the time. Change is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be nearly continuous. Periods of sustained competitive advantage are getting shorter, and there are a host of studies that confirm that. It’s not just something that is happening in technology, either. It’s happening in every industry.”11

  These analysts are describing the new turbulence of a present-shock universe where change is no longer an event that happens, but a steady state of existence. Instead of managing change, we simply hope to be iterated into the next version of reality that the system generates. The only enduring truth in such a scheme is evolution, which is why the leading spokespeople for this world-after
-calendars-and-clocks tend to be evolutionary scientists: we are not moving through linear time; we are enacting the discrete, punctuated steps of a program. What used to pass for the mysteriousness of consciousness is shrugged off as an emergent phenomenon rising from the complexity of information. As far as we know, they may be right.

  It’s not all bad, of course. There are ways to inhabit and direct the programs in our lives instead of simply responding to their commands. There are ways to be in charge. Unlike the workers of the Industrial Age who stood little chance of becoming one of the managing elite, we are not excluded from computing power except through lack of education or the will to learn. As we’ll see, becoming one of the programmers instead of the programmed is probably a better position from which to contend with digitality.

  CHRONOBIOLOGY

  Thanks to our digital tools, we are living in a new temporal order, one no longer defined by the movement of the heavens, the division and succession of the years, or the acceleration of progress. We are free of the confines of nature, capable of creating simulated worlds in which we can defy gravity, program life, or even resurrect ourselves. And as anyone who has gotten lost in World of Warcraft only to look up at the clock and realize four hours have gone by can tell you, we are also free of time—and as cognitive studies show, more so than when reading a book or watching a movie, and with temporal distortions lingering still hours later.12