Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  The hardest part of living in present shock is that there’s no end and, for that matter, no beginning. It’s a chronic plateau of interminable stresses that seem to have always been there. There’s no original source to blame and no end in sight. This is why the return to simplicity offered by the most extreme scenarios is proving so alluring to so many of us.

  I, ZOMBIE

  Even those of us who aren’t storing up on survival shelter supplies at Costco (yes, they now sell MREs and other apocalypse goods) are nonetheless anxious to fantasize about the coming Armageddon. In popular culture, this wish fulfillment takes the form of zombie movies and television shows, suddenly resurrected in the twenty-first century after decades of entombment. AMC’s The Walking Dead, in which a ragtag group of fairly regular folks attempts to survive a total zombie apocalypse, is the highest-rated basic-cable drama of all time.

  Like any great action drama, a zombie show gives its viewers the opportunity to strategize, vicariously, on a very simple playing field. Scenario: two people are running from a horde of flesh-eating zombies and losing ground. If one person shoots the other, will this attract enough zombies to the victim to allow the shooter to get away? Is such a sacrifice ethical? What if it allows the shooter to return to the camp with medical supplies that save a dying child? This was the climax of just one episode of The Walking Dead, which—like many others—spawned countless pages of online discussion.

  The Prisoner’s Dilemma–like clarity of the scenario reassures modern audiences the way Cain and Abel simplified reality for our ancestors. But in our case, there’s no God in judgment; rather, it’s the zero-sum game of people with none of civilization’s trappings to mask the stark selfishness of every choice, and no holy narrative to justify those choices.

  The zombie legend originated in the spiritual practices of Afro-Caribbean sects that believed a person could be robbed of his soul by supernatural or shamanic means and forced to work as an uncomplaining slave. Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis studied Haitian voodoo rituals in the 1980s and determined that a kind of “zombie” state can be induced with powerful naturally derived drugs. In horror films, people become zombies by whatever process is deemed scariest by the filmmaker of the era—magic, possession, viral infection—but the result is the same. The victim becomes a walking corpse, a human without a soul.

  Indeed, zombies are the perfect horror creations for a media-saturated age in which we are overloaded with reports of terrorism, famine, disease, and warfare. Zombies tap into our primal fear of being consumed and force us to come up with something—anything—to distinguish ourselves from the ever-hungry, animated corpses traipsing about the countryside and eating flesh. Deep down, these schlocky horror flicks are asking profound questions: What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning? How will it all end?

  The way in which zombie movies pose these questions has changed significantly over time, telling us more about ourselves, and about what we most fear, in the process. Zombies have been a staple of American filmmaking since the indie flick White Zombie (1932), best remembered for its eerie shots of undead slaves staring into the night. In that movie, Bela Lugosi plays an evil sorcerer who promises to turn a woman into a zombie so that her spurned lover can control her forever, presumably as a mindless sex servant. Perfect fare for a nation finally reckoning with its own population of former slaves, as well as one of preliberated females just beginning to find their own voices. Back then, though, the big questions seemed to have more to do with whether a walking dead servant or wife could fully satisfy a man’s needs. (Given the outcome, apparently not.) By 1968 George Romero’s low-budget classic Night of the Living Dead had reversed this dynamic. Now it was up to the film’s human protagonists to distinguish themselves from the marauding bands of flesh eaters—and to keep from being eaten. Racial conflicts among the film’s living characters end up costing them valuable time and resources; against the backdrop of attacking zombies, the racial tension of the late 1960s seems positively ludicrous. The film’s African American hero survives the night but is mistaken for a zombie and shot dead the next morning.

  The film’s sequels had survivors holing up in places like shopping malls, through which zombies would wander aimlessly all day as if retracing the steps of their former lives as consumers. Of course, the real consumption begins when the zombies find humans on whom to feast—an irony not lost on one tough guy who, as his intestines are being eaten, has enough wit to shout, “Choke on ’em!” What makes the humans for whom we’re rooting any different from the zombies by whom we’re repulsed? Not much, except maybe cannibalism, and the technical distinction that our humans are living while the zombies are “living dead.”

  State-of-the-art zombie films—most notably 28 Days Later (2002) and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later (2007)—use the undead to explore today’s hazier ethical climate. Instead of fearing magic or consumerism, we are scared of the unintended consequences of science and technology. Perhaps that’s why rather than reaching zombification through magic or rampant consumerism, the undead in this film series have been infected by a man-made virus called “rage.” Playing to current apocalyptic fears, the zombies in 28 Days Later wipe out the entirety of England, which has been quarantined by the rest of the world in a rather heartless but necessary act of self-preservation. Like the hilarious but unironically fashioned book The Zombie Survival Guide (2003), here’s a zombie tale for the 9/11 era, when fantasies of urban chaos and duct tape–sealed apartment windows are no longer relegated to horror films; these paranoid scenarios became regular fare on CNN.

  In 28 Weeks Later, well-meaning American troops work to rebuild England by putting survivors in a protected green zone and even firebombing the innocent in a desperate attempt to quash a zombie insurgency. The movie’s undead ruthlessly attack anyone for flesh, and its weaker characters choose to save their own skins instead of protecting their wives and children. The film’s heroes distinguish themselves and redeem our view of humanity through acts of self-sacrifice. It turns out, however, that they’ve sacrificed themselves on behalf of a child who carries the virus and goes on to infect the rest of the world. Humanity, like civil liberty, is no longer a strength but a liability.

  In the TV series The Walking Dead, as well, we are to question who truly are the ones who have lost their humanity—whatever that may have been. In the season three finale (the most-watched basic-cable hour ever) the protagonist murders his best friend and squad car partner—who just so happens to be in love with his wife. The writers are at pains to cast the humans as not simply responding as necessary to apocalyptic circumstances, but using these circumstances as an excuse to act upon long-repressed impulses. The zombie apocalypse not only relieves us of our highly stressed, overcivilized, and technologically determined lives, it reveals the savagery and selfishness innate to our species. We have no morality separating us from brute nature or even lifeless matter, so we humans may as well be walking dead.

  TRANSCENDING HUMANITY

  For all the flesh eating going on in the zombie genre, there’s something positively flesh loathing about the psychology underlying it. People are the bad guys. Apocalypto seems less about transforming the human species than transcending it altogether. In neither the hallucinations of psychedelic 2012 end-of-worlders nor the scenarios forecast by techno-enthusiast extropians do we humans make it through the chaos attractor at the end of time—at least not in our current form. And why should we want to, when human beings are so loathsome, smelly, and inefficient to begin with? The postnarrative future belongs to the godhead, machines, cockroaches, planetary intelligence, complexity, or information itself.

  Of course, it’s not really the future, since—according to a good many of these apocalyptans—time will have stopped entirely. To them, present shock is not a metaphor at all—not a state of confusion or a dynamic between people and their increasingly presentist society—but rather an existe
nce outside time. That’s part of what makes it so fantastic to think about, but also so inhospitable to cellular organisms such as you and me.

  To understand this strain of present shock, we have to go back to the fractal and the way it inspires people to look for patterns. My first exposure to the logic of apocalypto came through an old friend of mine, a shamanic explorer with a penchant for Irish folklore named Terence McKenna. Terence, one of the most articulate stoned heroes of the psychedelics underground, saw in fractals a way to pattern time itself. Back in the 1970s, he and his brother Dennis spent several months in the Amazonian rainforest, ingesting native mushrooms and other potent psychedelics. During these vision quests, the brothers experienced themselves traveling out of body, inside the body, and through the core of human DNA. After a particularly harrowing excursion in which one of the brothers got “lost” between dimensions, Terence became obsessed with navigating this timeless terrain. He wanted to make sense of the infinity of the fractal.

  He emerged with a new understanding of time as having an endpoint—a “teleological attractor,” as Terence put it—drawing us toward greater interconnectedness and complexity. The increasing intensity of our era can be attributed to our nearing the event horizon of this attractor. It’s basically like a waterfall or black hole in the time-space continuum that we are drawn toward, fall through, and are then utterly changed—if we make it out the other end at all. According to McKenna’s schema, things keep getting more and more complex, interconnected, and unbearably strange, like a really weird and scary acid trip, where everything becomes part of the same pattern. Once everything ends up connected to everything else, reality itself reaches a singularity—a moment of infinite complexity in which everything occurs simultaneously. It’s a moment of absolute present shock, in which history and the future and present fold into one another, ending time altogether.

  Terence immediately set upon figuring out just when this might happen and ended up using the sequence of the I Ching—the Taoist Book of Changes and divination system—as the basis for a numerical formula that maps the rise and fall of novelty over any period of time. McKenna’s Timewave Zero, as he calls it, is a shape—a linear graph—that is to be overlaid on the time line of history in order to figure out when things get weirder or less so. With a little bit of rejiggering, McKenna was able to lay out his zigzaggy repeating fractal pattern in such a way that the biggest period of the graph ended right on December 21, 2012—the same day purported to be indicated by the Mayan calendar as the end of time.

  For McKenna, who ended up dying before the prophesied end date, the increasing “novelty” in the world—from war and market crashes to disease and environmental disaster—are not signs of death but of birth. He often remarked that were a person who knew nothing of human biology to come upon a woman giving birth, he would think something terribly wrong was going on. She would appear to be dying, when she was actually giving life to a new human being. Such is the state of a civilization on the precipice of the singularity.

  The problem is, not everyone makes it through the attractor at the end of time. According to McKenna, only those who can successfully navigate the all-at-onceness of a posthistorical reality will be able to make sense of existence there. By inference, the object of the game is to do enough strong psychedelics now so that you’ll know how to navigate a landscape as precarious as the one a person visits while hallucinating on the rainforest psychedelic DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

  One person who surely qualifies is author and spiritual teacher Daniel Pinchbeck, whose own interactions with the Amazonian vision plants convinced him that he could hear the voice of the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl. The plumed serpent warned Pinchbeck of humanity’s abuse of the planet, while also confirming the imminent shift beyond time, scheduled for 2012. The signs of the next age are everywhere: crop circles, ESP experiments, particle physics, UFOs, time travelers, and so on. While Pinchbeck’s global transformation may also be an exclusive event, limited to those who “get it,” at least he has dedicated himself and his network of followers to mitigating the impact of this shift on the rest of us. Pinchbeck is an advocate of permaculture farming, local currencies, and other techniques through which we may combat the materialism currently guiding human activity.

  Again, though, making it through the attractor at the end of time requires more than mere compassion or a willingness to work together. We must abandon individuality altogether and accept our place in the new cosmic order. We surrender our illusion of distinctness and admit that we are part of nature. We sacrifice Father Time to return to Mother Earth. Human progress has been a sham—a painful, costly, and destructive detour, or, at best, a necessary stage in our release from the shackles of matter altogether.

  Such narratives find their origins in the writings of theologians such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the early-twentieth-century French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who saw human beings evolving toward an Omega Point of supreme consciousness. Just as cells joined up and evolved into organisms, we humans will evolve together into a greater single being. It’s a nice image, and one I’ve contemplated on numerous occasions, but not a stage of evolution that feels particularly imminent—no matter how many Facebook friends I happen to accumulate or how overwhelmed I become by the virtual connections.

  IT’S THE INFORMATION, STUPID

  None of this increasing complexity would be a problem if it weren’t for our darned human limits. That’s why the latest breed of apocalyptans—an increasingly influential branch of the digerati who see technology as the true harbinger of the singularity—mean to help us accept our imminent obsolescence. Echoing the sentiments of the ancient ascetic, they tend to regard the human physical form with disregard or even disdain. At best, the human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.

  The notion of a technologically precipitated singularity was popularized by futurist and electronic music engineer Ray Kurzweil. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil argues that human beings are just one stage in the evolution of matter toward higher levels of complexity. Yes, cells and organisms are more complex than mere atoms and molecules, but the human capacity for continuing development pales in the face of that of our machines. The very best thing we have to offer, in fact, is to continue to service and develop computers until the point—very soon—when they are better at improving themselves than we are. From then on, technological evolution will outpace biological evolution. Whatever it is that makes us uniquely human, such as our genome or cognitive functioning, will have been mapped and virtualized by computers in around 2050, anyway. We may as well stand aside and let it rip.

  Thanks to Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, technology develops exponentially and has been doing so since time began. But it is only getting really interesting now that we have rounded the bend of the exponential curve to a nearly vertical and infinite shot upward. The antithesis of the Law of Diminishing Returns, the Law of Accelerating Returns holds that technology will overtake humanity and nature, no matter what. In his numerous books, talks, and television appearances, Kurzweil remains unswerving in his conviction that humanity was just a temporary step in technology’s inevitable development.

  It’s not all bad. According to Kurzweil, by 2029 artificial intelligences will pass the Turing test and be able to fool us into thinking they are real people. By the 2030s, virtual-reality simulations will be “as real and compelling as ‘real’ reality, and we’ll be doing it from within the nervous system. So the nanobots in your brain—which will get to your brain through the bloodstream, noninvasively and without surgery—will shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with senses that your brain will be receiving from the virtual environment.”2 Just be sure to read the fine print in the iTunes agreement before clicking “I agree” and hope that the terms don’t change while you’re in there.

  Slowly but surely, the distinction between our real memory or experiences and our virtual
ones ceases to have any meaning. Eventually, our nonbiological mechanisms take over where our biological ones leave off. Consciousness, such as it is, is better performed by some combination of microchips and nanobots than our old carbon sacks, and what we think of as people are discontinued.

  Kurzweil may push the envelope on this line of thought, but a growing cadre of scientists and commentators have both wittingly and unwittingly gotten on his singularity bandwagon. Their credentials, intelligence, and persuasiveness make their arguments difficult to refute.

  Kevin Kelly, for instance, convincingly portrays technology as a partner in human evolution. In his book What Technology Wants, he makes the case that technology is emerging as the “seventh kingdom of life on Earth”—along with plants, insects, fungi, and so on. Although he expresses himself with greater humility and admirable self-doubt than Kurzweil, Kelly also holds that technology’s growth and development is inevitable, even desirable. Yes, certain technologies create problems, but that just opens the opportunity for yet another technology to mitigate the bad. Isn’t that just an endless loop of negative and positive outcomes, in which humanity is eventually frayed beyond repair? Kelly disagrees:

  I don’t think technology is neutral or a wash of good and bad effects. To be sure it does produce both problems and solutions, but the chief effect of technology is that it produces more possibilities. More options. More freedom, essentially. That’s really good. That is the reason why people move to cities—for more choices.3

  So, those of us who think the answer to the technological onslaught is to slow things down might want to think again. In What Technology Wants, Kelly makes quick work of both the Unabomber and the Amish, whose resistance to the growth of technology is futile, or even illusory. The Unabomber depended on bombs and the US mail system to attack technology; the Amish depend on hand tools that are, in turn, produced in high-tech factories.