Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.

  Unlike local, grain-based currencies, these central currencies were not biased toward flow, but toward storage. In the new system, having money meant having a monopoly on transaction. Those who wanted to transact now needed to borrow money from the treasury in order to initiate their business cycles. Only those with large amounts of scarce capital could lend it, and they did so for a premium. Hoarding money was no longer a liability but the surest means to greater wealth.

  The shift to central currency not only slowed down the ascent of the middle class, it also led to high rates of poverty, the inability to maintain local businesses, urban squalor, and even the plague. Over the long run, however, it also enabled capitalism to flourish, created the banking industry, and allowed for European nations to colonize much of the world.

  Our current economic crises stem, at least in part, from our inability to recognize the storage bias of the money we use. Since it is the only kind of money we know of, we use it for everything. We naturally tend to assume it is equally good at flow and storage, or transaction and savings—but it’s not. That’s why injections of capital by the Federal Reserve don’t end up as widely distributed as policy makers imagine they will be. It’s also why government can’t solve local economic depression simply by getting a bank to lend money for a corporation to open a plant or megastore in the afflicted area. Failing local economies need flow, not more storage. Policies encouraging local peer-to-peer transactions end up allowing people to create value for one another, and a local economy to sustain itself the old-fashioned way. Top-down, central currency simply isn’t the very best tool for that job. In Japan, for example, when the greater economic recession seemed intractable, current and former government officials encouraged rather than discouraged local and alternative currency innovation. This resulted in over six hundred successful currency systems, most famously a trading network called Fureai Kippu, through which hundreds of thousands of people earn credits to pay for care of elder relatives.9

  Of course, the net has opened the way for more flow. Capitalism’s crisis today might even be blamed on the net’s ability to birth new businesses with almost no investment. Two kids with a laptop and virtually no capital can create and distribute music, television programming, or smart phone apps capable of earning millions of dollars. What’s a venture capitalist to do? On an innovation landscape now characterized by flow, capital competes for vehicles in which to invest. Accordingly, interest rates plummet and banks threaten insolvency.

  Instead of borrowing money from banks, depressed communities can jump-start their local economies by using alternative currencies biased toward flow. Time Dollars and local economic transfer systems (LETS), to name just two, allow people to list their skills or needs on a website, find one another, and then pay in locally defined units, or even “hours,” of time. Everybody starts with the same amount, or a zero balance, and goes up or down as they receive or provide goods and services. There’s no incentive to hoard currency, since it is good only for transacting. People just try to maintain equilibrium. It is present-based currency, encouraging transactions in the here and now.

  While alternative currencies have yet to solve all our economic woes, they reveal the inadequacy of a storage medium to solve problems of flow and vice versa. When we attempt to pack the requirements of storage into media of flow, or to reap the benefits of flow from media that locks things into storage, we end up in present shock.

  MASHUP AND MAKEUP

  The women on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills hurt one another’s feelings quite a lot. Every episode seems to hinge on a misunderstanding between two or more housewives over a meal, which is then amplified via text message and Facebook, and ultimately ends in a full-fledged fight. Unlike those on Mob Wives or one of the New Jersey reality series, these fights don’t take the form of physical, hair-pulling brawls, but there is nonetheless something intensely and unnervingly physical about the nature of these conflicts.

  The only other thing characterizing the series—besides the toxic wealth of its subjects—is plastic surgery. All the people on this program wear faces frozen in time by their many procedures. The skin around their eyes is stretched tight, hiding expression lines. The women’s lips are infused with weighty collagen, muting what may be smiles and leaving their mouths in the half-opened stupor of a person with a chronic sinus infection. And their foreheads are quite literally paralyzed by botulism injections, leaving eyebrows in the locked and angular orientations of their last facelifts.

  They seem to stare in wide-eyed disbelief at everything everyone says, but that’s only because they are staring, wide eyed, all the time, by default. They have no choice; they cannot blink. In the quest to lock in their thirtysomething looks, they also locked their faces in a permanent, confused glare.

  No wonder they have so many misunderstandings; they are missing out on that 94 percent of human communication that occurs nonverbally. It’s not only the words we say but the visual cues we send while saying them. The tension in our mouth, the shape of our eyes, the lines in our foreheads, and the direction of our eyebrows tell what we are feeling. How else to distinguish between enthusiasm and sarcasm, or a joke and a complaint? Sometimes our faces communicate indirectly, compensating unconsciously for our words. Threatening statements may be undermined by a softening gaze or subtle smile. It’s as if our bodies know how to keep the peace, even when our words may be disagreeing.

  The Housewives have no access to this dashboard of human expression. They have traded their ability to communicate and commune in the present moment for an altogether unconvincing illusion of timeless beauty. In attempting to stop the passage of time and extend the duration of youth, they have succeeded only in distancing themselves from the moment in which their real lives are actually transpiring. Incapable of engaging and connecting with other human beings in real time, they send each other false signals. Their faces don’t correspond to the ideas and emotions they are expressing, and they appear to be lying or covering up something. Or their silent signals seem inappropriate or even numb to the thoughts and expressions coming from others.

  They are trapped in another version of the short forever—one in which a particular stage of one’s life is deemed to be better than the rest, and so everything before and after is remade in its image. Twelve-year-olds and forty-year-olds both aim for about age nineteen, making children look promiscuous and women look, well, ridiculous. And as any nineteen-year-old knows, it’s not actually a particularly perfect moment in life to celebrate above any other. In fact, as fashion magazines, advertisers, and fictional media focus on this age as the pinnacle of human experience, late adolescents feel even more pressure to achieve physical, sexual, and social perfection. This is not a reasonable expectation for a college sophomore; 25 percent of them engage in bingeing and purging as a weight-management technique,10 and nineteen is the median age for bulimia,11 which may as well be the signature disease for overwinding and subsequent explosion.

  We have all stuck our heels in the ground at certain moments in our lives, attempting to slow the progress of time, only to get whipped back around to our real ages once we lose our grip. These temporal compressions generate an almost spasmodic movement through time, where the trappings of one moment overaccumulate and prevent our moving on to the next. It’s present shock as Peter Pan syndrome, where the values of youth are maintained well into what used to pass for adulthood.

  A growing number of names are emerging to identify these temporally compressed lifestyle choices. “Grup,” for example, is New York magazine journalist Adam Ste
rnbergh’s new term for the aging yuppie hipster. Grups is the word for “grown-ups,” used on a world ruled by children in a Star Trek episode: turns out all the adults have died of a strange virus that quickly ages and kills anyone who has passed puberty—but extends the lifetimes of children to hundreds of years. Likewise, real-world grups are hip, indie fortysomethings who, according to Sternbergh, “look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.”12 Grups wear the vintage sneakers of their own childhoods, put their babies in indie rock T-shirts, and use messenger bags instead of briefcases.

  Eventually, the time compression takes its toll, requiring some pretty intense mental gymnastics: “If you’re 35 and wearing the same Converse All-Stars to work that you wore to junior high, are you an old guy sadly aping the Strokes? Or are the young guys simply copying you? Wait, how old are the Strokes, anyway?”13 Just as in the Star Trek episode, the realization of one’s adulthood comes on suddenly, painfully, and fatally, as the clock’s overwound mainspring suddenly releases, long overdue.

  Hipsters—the fashionably antifashion young adults found in artsy neighborhoods, from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg to San Francisco’s Mission or Lower Haight—suffer from the reverse distortion. They appropriate the styles of previous generations and pack them into the present in order to generate a sense of timeless authenticity. Unlike grups, they are actually young, but operating under the tacit assumption that creativity and authenticity lie somewhere in the past. They may drink Pabst beer and wear Dickies—both brands with rich histories, such as brand histories go. But the hipsters are unaware that the many companies they feel they have discovered are utterly aware of their own repositioning and revival as hip retro brands. Zippo lighters and V-neck T-shirts may reference a moment in American working-class history, but purchasing them as fashion items is superficial at best—not a real affiliation with the proletariat. That they provide a sense of grounding and reality to young people today says less about the high quality and authenticity of mass-produced midcentury goods than it does about the untethered, timeless quality of the hipster experience. Authenticity comes to mean little more than that an object or experience can be traced to some real moment in time—even if it’s actually being purchased at Walmart or on Amazon.com.

  The ready availability of anything to anyone removes it from whatever its original context may have been. In the mid-twentieth century, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin wondered about the effects of mechanical reproduction on the work of art. What would it mean that people could see reproductions of paintings in books or listen to music on records without ever beholding the work for real, in their original settings? Would the aura of the originals be lost?

  As anyone who grew up in the twentieth century knows, however, to discover and learn about a counterculture or art movement still involved a journey. Only certain used-record stores and bookshops may carry the genre in question, and even knowing what to look for required mentorship from those who went before. And getting that help meant proving oneself worthy of time and tutelage. Beat poetry, psychedelic literature, Japanese pop music, and John Cage recordings weren’t available via a single Google search. Accumulating knowledge and content took time, and that time was a good and necessary part of the experience. It didn’t simply make these nooks and crannies of culture more elitist; it helped keep them more like tide pools than oceans. Their stillness and relative obscurity helped these genres grow into unique cultures.

  When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense. In the short forever, there is no time to prepare and anticipate. No wonder people hang on to the musical styles and fashions of their youth. Finding them took a kind of time—a particular windup—that is unavailable to cultural explorers today.

  It is also unavailable to the cultural creators. No sooner is a new culture born than it is discovered by trend-setting Vice magazine; covered by the New York Times Style section; broadcast on MTV; and given a book, record, or movie deal. There is no time for an artist or scene to develop unless those involved take extreme measures to isolate themselves and avoid being noticed. As a result, there is no time to develop the layers and experiences required for a genre to evolve.

  As a substitute for this process, temporal compression takes the form of mashup. Originally just a way of describing how a deejay may overlay the vocal track of one recording onto the instrumental track of another, mashup now refers to any composition or process that mashes up previously distinct works into something new. Mashup is to culture as genetic engineering is to biological evolution. Instead of waiting to see how genres merge and interact as cultures over time, the artist cuts and pastes the cultural strains together.

  A lot of it is tremendous fun—such as a YouTube video that mashes up Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,”14 demonstrating how the two songs are nearly identical. But a lot of mashup is also serious, thought-out art. The Grey Album, released by Danger Mouse in 2004, mashes up an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z’s Black Album with instrumentals from the Beatles’ White Album. It not only led to lawsuits over its use of copyrighted Beatles’ content, but also won the critical attention of the New Yorker and Album of the Year from Entertainment Weekly. Mashup mix-artist Gregg Gillis’s project Girl Talk has released records that are both commercial and critical hits. The New York Times waxes almost reverential: “Girl Talk has created a new kind of hook that encompasses 50 years of the revolving trends of pop music. Sometimes cynicism is a hook, sometimes the hook is humor, angst, irony, aggression, sex or sincerity. Girl Talk’s music asserts all these things at once.”15 The Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly features exhibitions and performances by mashup artists, such as DJ Spooky remixing D. W. Griffith’s footage with modern imagery into a new piece called Rebirth of a Nation. While mashups may compress time, they do allow for a new sort of commentary, intention, and irony to emerge.

  In the twentieth century, cubism responded to the deconstructed processes of the Industrial Age by expressing everything as deconstructed shapes. Artists broke from the tradition of showing something from a particular perspective and instead used multiple points of view in the very same painting. The artist pulled apart objects into planes that would normally be visible only from multiple vantage points. This allowed them to show more than one facet of a person or scene at the same time. While cubism looked at one moment from different perspectives, mashup looks at one perspective from multiple moments. Perhaps best understood as cubism’s twenty-first-century corollary, mashup accomplishes the reverse: instead of sharing one moment from multiple perspectives, it brings multiple moments into a single whole. Twenties jazz, sixties rock, nineties electronica—all occurring simultaneously. Where cubism compresses space, mashup compresses time. Cubism allowed us to be in more than one place at the same time; mashup allows us to be in more than one time at the same place.

  Although it may not be as classically structured or emotionally resolved as the artistic works of previous eras, mashup does express the temporal compression almost all of us feel on a daily basis. Fifteen minutes spent on Facebook, for example, mashes together our friendships from elementary school with new requests for future relationships. Everything we have lived, and everyone we have met, is compressed into a virtual now. While grade school relationships used to be left back in childhood, they reemerge for us now—intentionally forgotten memories forcibly shoved back into current awareness. We live all of our ages at once. Nothing can be safely left behind.

  For digital memory never forgets. After conducting a simple Google search, US immigration agents at the Canadian border denied entry to Andrew Feldmar, a seventy-year-old college professor, because they found an obscure reference to the fact that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. While that case was sensational enough to make
the headlines, this same inability to shed the past from the present affects us all. According to research by Microsoft, 75 percent of human resources departments do online research about their candidates, utilizing search engines, social networking sites, personal blogs, and even photo-sharing sites. Seventy percent of these prospective employers say they have rejected candidates on the basis of their pictures and comments.16 And our own online hygiene may not be enough to spare us the consequences. Did someone else snap a photo of you while you were drunk at her party? Did she upload the picture to Facebook (or did her camera do it automatically, as so many smart phones now do)? Facial-recognition software online can tag the photo with your name if someone doesn’t do that manually. And even if you find out and get it deleted, it is always there in someone’s history or hard drive. Moreover, Facebook pages can be temporarily hibernated, but they cannot be removed.

  This ends up favoring the past over the present. Most societies give individuals the opportunity to reinvent themselves over time. We are either forgiven for past mistakes, or they are eventually forgotten. Jewish Talmudic law requires people forgive all trespasses at regular intervals, and even forbids someone from reminding another of an embarrassing moment from his past or childhood. The ancients understood that community could not function if knowing someone for a long time was a social liability 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.

  Today the new permanence of our most casual interactions—and their inextricability from more formal legal, financial, and professional data about us—turns every transient thought or act into an indelible public recording. Our résumés are no longer distinct from our dating histories. It’s not just the line between public and private activity that has vanished, but the distance between now and then. The past is wound up into the present and no longer at an appropriate or even predictable scale. The importance of any given moment is dependent solely on who has found it and what they use it for. Many of the top political science and constitutional law graduates steer clear of politics or even judgeships for fear of the scrutiny that they and their families will be subjected to. Nothing, no matter how temporally remote, is off-limits. A forgotten incident can resurface into the present like an explosion, threatening one’s reputation, job, or marriage.