Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  The more we function on the level of fast learning, the less we are even attracted to working in the other way. It’s a bit like eating steak and potatoes after you’ve had your chocolate. And the market—always acting on us but especially so in the artificial realm of the Internet—benefits in the short term from our remaining in this state, clicking on more things, signing into more accounts, and consuming more bytes. Every second we spend with just one thing running or happening is a dozen market opportunities lost.

  The digital realm, left to its own devices or those of the marketplace, would atomize us all into separate consuming individuals, each with our own iPhone and iTunes account, downloading our own streams of media. Our connections to one another remain valuable only to the extent they can be mediated. If we are kissing someone on the lips, then we are not poking anyone through our Facebook accounts.

  Of course, many of us try to do both. I have a friend, a psychotherapist, who often conducts sessions with patients over the phone when circumstances prevent a live meeting. What concerns me most about these sessions is the freedom he feels to send me text messages during those sessions, telling me to check out something he just noticed online! After I recover from the distraction from my own workflow, I start to feel depressed.

  When the social now is relegated to the multitasking digital environment, we may expect the results we have been witnessing: teen suicides, depression, higher stress, and a greater sense of disconnection. It’s not because digital technology is inherently depressing, but, again, it’s because we are living multiple roles simultaneously, without the time and cues we normally get to move from one to the other.

  In the real world, 94 percent of our communication occurs nonverbally.37 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. When a person’s head nods and his irises dilate, we know—even just subconsciously—that he agrees with us. This activates the mirror neurons in our brains, feeding us a bit of positive reinforcement, releasing a bit of dopamine, and leading us further down that line of thought.

  Without such organic cues, we try to rely on the re-Tweets and likes we get—even though we have not evolved over hundreds of millennia to respond to those symbols the same way. So, again, we are subjected to the cognitive dissonance between what we are being told and what we are feeling. It just doesn’t register in the same way. We fall out of sync.

  We cannot orchestrate human activity the same way a chip relegates tasks to the nether regions of its memory. We are not intellectually or emotionally equipped for it, and altering ourselves to become so simply undermines the contemplation and connection of which we humans are uniquely capable. With this knowledge, however, we can carefully and consciously employ digital-era sync to the processes in our lives and businesses for which digiphrenia is not a liability.

  Real-time supply-chain management, for example, such as the system employed by retail clothing chain Zara, syncs the store checkout with the production line. At the same moment the scanner at the cash register identifies the yellow T-shirt, the information is sent to the production facility, the facility’s suppliers, and so on, all the way down the line. As one leading logistics company explains, “Synchronization of demand/supply information minimizes work-in-process and finished goods inventories up and down the channel, dampens the ‘bullwhip effect’ as products are pulled through the distribution pipeline, reduces costs overall, and matches customer requirements with available products.”38

  This rapid production process reduces the time from design to delivery to just a couple of weeks, making Zara famous in Spain for being able to knock off fashions from the Paris runways and get them into their store windows before they even appear in Vogue. Subjecting designers to this schedule or forcing them to submit to the metrics of cash register feedback would no doubt induce digiphrenia or worse. (Yes, many youth-fashion companies do just that.) But for an industry that simply copies, manufacturers, and distributes, such sync is the goal. The feedback from people is used to program the machines and not the other way around.

  The same goes for the trucking industry, where computers can track the location, contents, and available capacity of thousands of trucks at once, adjusting routes and maximizing the efficiency of the entire system. Stress on the human trucker goes down, not up, as he manages to make an extra haul instead of simply riding all the way with an empty trailer after a drop.

  On the Web, with the emergence of HTML 5, we are finally witnessing the disappearance of the split between ad and store. In the upcoming rather holistic model of online marketing, the banner ad is no longer a click-through to some other website, but it is the store itself. The ad unfolds and the customer can make a purchase right there and then.* You will be able to buy my next book wherever it is online that you’re finding out about it, without going to Amazon. By embedding stores directly into ads, we reduce the digiphrenia and increase the sales.

  Any company today can differentiate itself by imposing less digiphrenia on its employees and customers. A robo-answering computer may save your company the cost of a human receptionist, while instead costing your customers and suppliers hundreds of man-hours in menu navigation. Except in cases where you are actually trying to avoid this communication (such as health insurance appeals desks or cell phone cancellation specialists who succeed when we give up), it makes more sense for you to stop externalizing the cost to your clientele. It’s the smallest businesses that should be using automatic answering machines, since they can least afford to be interrupted.

  In all these cases, our ability to experience sync over digiphrenia can be traced to the extent to which we are the programmers of our own and our businesses’ digital processes. In the digital realm we are either the programmers or the programmed—the drivers or the passengers.

  My dad wound up his own alarm clock every night, and I always thought the reason he wasn’t so alarmed by the chiming of the bell as I was by the buzzing of my digital clock had less to do with the different sounds than the fact that he had wound the bell himself. His relationship to the ringing was different, because it was an expression of his own muscle, his own kinetic energy. In a sense, he was the source of the bell, where my buzz was fueled by some power plant, somewhere else. No wonder it always went off before I was ready to wake up.

  OVERWINDING

  THE SHORT FOREVER

  Too many of my favorite basketball players got injured in 2012. Just two months into the season, a significantly higher number of players were on the bench with injuries than the year before. Previously, there were on average 7.3 injuries to basketball players each day. In 2012 there were nearly 10 new injuries every day.1

  Basketball fans knew to blame this on the shortened and condensed basketball schedule resulting from an extended lockout in the fall. By the time players and team owners negotiated a contract, several months of the playing season had passed, so a compressed schedule, with more games per week, was thrown together. As sports publications unanimously agreed, with virtually no training camp or preseason ramp-up, players were on the court and getting more hurt than usual. Or so it seemed.

  Even though the numbers appeared to show that the shorter, packed schedule had led to more stress and injury, our perception of what actually happened was being distorted by time. Yes, there were more injuries per day in the NBA, but that’s because there were more total games being played per day. The number of injuries per game actually remained constant over the past three seasons. The real difference between seasons is that it took fewer days on the calendar to accumulate fifty games’ worth of injuries. We watched them occurring faster, so everyone—even the experts—assumed there were more. In hindsight, we know that the increased injury rate was an illusion. It was the same sort of illusion that makes us believe that shark attacks are on the rise sim
ply because we have a global media capable of reporting them wherever and whenever they happen—which they cannot help but do.

  What was real, however, is that players experienced more injuries in less time. This meant less time for recovery between injuries, more games played while wounds were still healing, and the anxiety of sitting out more games for every week spent on the bench. So the arithmetically disproved fans and sportswriters were still right about something, even though they didn’t have the accurate numbers to prove that on some very real level things were worse. The long-term effects of this compressed schedule of stress, injury, and recovery have yet to be determined.

  It’s a bit like what a figure skater in an ice show experiences when stuck in the outermost position in one of those giant group pinwheel maneuvers. The skater on the outside is traveling the same number of revolutions as the skaters closer to the center, even though the outside skater is moving much faster and covering much more distance. They’re all in the very same circle but functioning on very different scales of activity. We understand this viscerally as we watch that skater on the very end of the line race desperately around the rink while the ones in the middle smile and barely move. But we tend to lose sight of these different scales of time as they play out in the world around us.

  Scientist Freeman Dyson attempted to clarify this for us when he came up with the concept of temporal diversity. As he came to realize, the survival of a species depends on adaptation and learning on six distinct timescales. On the shortest, most immediate scale, species must exist from year to year. The unit of survival for this year-to-year existence is the individual life form. Over decades, the unit of survival is the family, whose multiple generations last much longer than any single individual’s life span. Over centuries, it’s the tribe or nation. Over millennia, it is an entire culture. Over tens of millennia, it is the species itself, slowly evolving or surrendering to an evolved competitor. And over eons, the unit of survival is “the whole web of life of our planet.”2 Human beings have endured as a result of our ability to adapt on all six scales of being and to balance the conflicting demands of each.

  This notion of temporal diversity offers a new way of understanding the particular characteristics of different timescales. While chronobiologists looked at the various natural cycles influencing the processes of life, proponents of temporal diversity are encouraging us to understand and distinguish between the different rates at which things on different levels of existence change.

  Former Merry Prankster and Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand applied temporal diversity to different levels of society. In his book The Clock of the Long Now, he argues that we live in a world with multiple timescales, all moving simultaneously but at different speeds. Brand calls it the order of civilization. Nature, or geological time, moves the slowest—like the skater in the middle of the pinwheel. This is the rate at which glaciers carve out canyons or species evolve gills and wings—over eons. On the next level is culture, such as that of the Chinese or the Jews—which lasts millennia. On the next concentric ring comes governance—the rather long-lasting systems of monarchies and republics. The next level is infrastructure—the roads and utilities those governments build and rebuild. Faster yet is commerce that occurs through that infrastructure. And finally the outermost ring is that of fashion—the ever-changing styles and whims that keep the wheels of commerce fed.

  Where we get into trouble, however, is when we lose the ability to distinguish between the different scales of time and begin to subject one level of activity to the time constraints of another. For basketball players, it was subjecting their game schedule—a culture of sorts—to the more temporally abstract timing of contracts and union negotiations. For politicians, it is the attempt to act on the timescale of government while responding to polls conducted on the scale (and value system) of fashion. For companies, it is trying to create value on the timescale of infrastructure, while needing to meet the investment requirements on the timescale of commerce. For the environment, it is fixing our focus on where to find the cheapest gallon of gasoline, with little awareness of the hundreds of thousands of years it took for the energy within it to be accumulated and compressed. Or throwing a plastic bottle into the trash because the recycle bin is thirty seconds out of our way—even though the plastic will become part of the planet’s landfill for hundreds of years until it decomposes into toxic chemicals for hundreds or thousands more.

  For Brand, the solution is to expand our awareness of the larger, slower cycles. He is working with inventor Danny Hillis to build a 10,000-year clock—a clock of the “long now” that changes our orientation to time. His hope is that by beholding this tremendous time-keeping structure in the desert (itself the product of a multigenerational effort), we will be able to experience or at least perceive the bigger cycles that evade us in our daily schedules. In addition, instead of writing our years with four digits, Brand encourages us to use five, as in 02020 instead of 2020, keeping us aware of the much larger timescales on which important activity is still occurring. We could still operate on the timescale of the seasonally changing fashions or TV schedules while remaining cognizant of the greater cycles binding humanity to the cosmos.

  Maintaining such a multiple awareness may be a worthy goal, but it’s also a treacherous path—particularly for those of us living in the new eternal present. Dyson and Brand both understand the way all activities, particularly in a Western culture, tend toward the faster layers of pacing on the periphery of the pinwheel. When time is money, everything tends to occur in the timescale of fashion. As Brand puts it, “There is always an alternative to the present urgency—and it’s not a vacation, it’s acknowledging deeper responsibility.”3 Still, the only ones who seem to get to live with awareness of the larger cycles are either indigenous people herding sheep in the mountains or climate scientists measuring our progress toward environmental catastrophe. What happens when those of us living at the pace of fashion try to insert an awareness of these much larger cycles into our everyday activity?

  In other words, what’s it like to envision the ten-thousand-year impact of tossing that plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it’s not altogether pleasant. Unless we’re living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It’s a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled into the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It’s less of a Long Now than a Short Forever.

  This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We’ll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It’s the effort to make the “now” responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.

  Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets. Yet—as we’ll see—it’s also true when we try to use interest-bearing, long-distance central currencies to revive real-time local economies. A currency designed for long-term storage and investment doesn’t do so well at encouraging transactions and exchange in the moment. Overwinding also happens when we try to experience the satisfying catharsis of a well-crafted five-act play in the random flash of a reality show. It happens when a weightlifter takes steroids to maximize the efficiency of his workouts by growing his muscles overtime. In these cases it’s th
e over-winding that leads to stress, mania, depletion, and, ultimately, failure.

  But in the best of circumstances, this same temporal compression can be applied deliberately and with an awareness of the way different timescales interact and support one another. Instead of overwinding time, we spring-load it so it’s available to us when we need it. It’s what happens when Navy SEALs prepare for months or years for a single type of maneuver, compressing hundreds of hours of training into a mission that may unwind in seconds when they are called upon to free a hostage or to take out an enemy. It’s studying for a test over weeks (instead of cramming overnight), so that the things we’ve learned stay in our memory even after the one-hour exam is over. It’s the science of storing wind energy in batteries, or of letting government work on problems that won’t produce returns quickly enough for the marketplace.

  Those of us who can’t navigate these different temporal planes end up bingeing and purging in a temporal bulimia. To distinguish between spring-loading and overwinding we must learn to recognize the different timescales on which activity occurs and how to exploit the leverage between them without getting obese or emaciated, paralyzed or burned out.

  TIME BINDING

  Alfred Korzybski, the founder of the Institute of General Semantics, was fascinated by the way human beings—unlike any other life-form—could exploit temporal compression, or what he called time binding. As Korzybski saw it, plants can bind energy: Through photosynthesis, they are able to take energy from the sun and store it in chemical form. Days of solar energy are bound, or compressed, into the cells of the plant. One step up from that are animals that bind space. Because they can move around, they can gather food, avoid dangers, and exploit the energy and resources of an area much larger than that of a rooted plant. The squirrel binds, or compresses, the energy of a whole acre’s worth of nuts and seeds, even though his body is only a foot long.