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Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

Page 29

by Douglas Rushkoff


  26. “Corelogic Reports Negative Equity Increase in Q4 2011,” BizJournals, March 1, 2012, http://assets.bizjournals.com/orlando/pdf/CoreLogic%20underwater%20mortgage%20list.pdf. Also: “Despite Home Value Gains, Underwater Homeowners Owe $1.2 Trillion More than Homes’ Worth,” Zillow Real Estate Research, May 24, 2012, www.zillow.com/blog/research/2012/05/24/despite-home-value-gains-underwater-homeowners-owe-1-2-trillion-more-than-homes-worth.

  27. For a quick explanation and confirmation of these facts, see Serena Ng and Carrick Mollenkamp, “Goldman Fueled AIG Gambles,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2009. For a lengthy but compelling account of the entire Goldman Sachs saga, see Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon (New York: Times Books, 2011).

  28. See gaming and Internet analyst Kevin Slavin’s terrific presentation on this history to the Lift11 Conference at www.livestream.com/liftconference/video?clipId=pla_08a3016b-47e9-4e4f-8ef7-ce71c168a5a8.

  29. Kevin Slavin, “How Algorithms Shape Our World,” TedTalks, July 2011, www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html.

  30. Nina Mehta, “Automatic Futures Trade Drove May Stock Crash, Report Says,” Bloomberg Businessweek, October 4, 2010. See also Graham Bowley. “Lone $4.1 Billion Sale Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May,” New York Times, October 1, 2010.

  31. Brian Bremner, “The Bats Affair: When Machines Humiliate their Masters,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 23, 1012, www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-23/the-bats-affair-when-machines-humiliate-their-masters.

  32. For the basics, see Alexandra Zendrian, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Pools,” Forbes, May 18, 2009.

  33. John Henley, “Greece on the Breadline: Cashless Currency Takes Off,” Guardian, March 16, 2012.

  34. Ibid.

  35. Eric Westervelt, “Fiscal Localism on Rise in Germany,” NPR, All Things Considered, July 15, 2010.

  36. Judson Green’s history and philosophies are taught at the Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, which I attended as part of my research for this book. For more, see The Disney Institute and Theodore Kinni, Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service (Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2011).

  37. Michael McCarthy, “War of Words Erupts at Walt Disney,” USA Today, December 2, 2003.

  38. Dr. Ofer Merin, quoted in Catherine Porter, “Israeli Field Hospital Carries on Inspiring Work in Japan,” Toronto Star, April 4, 2011.

  39. Joichi Ito, “Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants,” New York Times, December 6, 2011.

  40. Robert Axelrod, The Evolution of Cooperation (New York: Basic Books, 1984).

  CHAPTER 4: FRACTALNOIA: FINDING PATTERNS IN THE FEEDBACK

  1. Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From (New York: Riverhead, 2010).

  2. Kevin Dunbar, “How Scientists Build Models: InVivo Science as a Window on the Scientific Mind,” www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/KDMBR99.pdf.

  3. Kevin Roberts, interviewed in Barak Goodman, Rachel Dretzin, and Douglas Rushkoff, The Persuaders, PBS, Frontline, 2004.

  4. “Chevy Tahoe, Trump Create Open Source Fun,” Oil Drum, April 3, 2006, http://energyandourfuture.org/story/2006/4/3/164232/5126.

  5. In a later riff on the same phenomenon, Shell’s website for people to create advertisements promoting drilling for oil in the Arctic—http://arcticready.com—was eventually revealed to be a fake but not before hundreds of attack ads were created which utilities people thought had been provided by Shell. See the media-activist site http://YesLab.org for more on this.

  6. See the website for the company at http://valvesoftware.com.

  7. http://boingboing.net/2012/04/22/valve-employee-manual-describe.html.

  8. Ibid.

  9. László Méro, Moral Calculations (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998).

  10. See my book Life Inc. (New York: Random House, 2009).

  11. Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,” New York Times, December 25, 1968, p. 1.

  12. Lenora Foerstal and Angela Gilliam, Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 126–27.

  13. Steven Pinker, quoted in Nick Gillespie, “Hayek’s Legacy,” Reason, January 2005.

  14. James Surowiecki, quoted in Gillespie, ibid.

  15. See Manuel De Landa, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

  16. Jeff Sommer, “A Market Forecast That Says ‘Take Cover,’” New York Times, July 3, 2010.

  17. Philip E. Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  18. Walter Kirn, Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever (New York: Doubleday, 2009).

  19. Richard Nisbett, quoted in Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable (New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

  20. Ramo, Age of the Unthinkable.

  21. Ibid.

  22. You can find out more or download the demo at www.thebrain.com.

  23. You can see Jerry’s Brain at http://jerrysbrain.com.

  24. April Rinne and Jerry Michalski, “Polymaths, Bumblebees and the ‘Expert’ Myth,” Washington Post, March 28, 2011.

  25. Gordon Bell, Gordon Bell home page, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/ (accessed August 11, 2011).

  CHAPTER 5: APOCALYPTO

  1. Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles, The Last Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012).

  2. Rocco Castoro, “Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy,” Vice, April 1, 2009, www.vice.com.

  3. John Brockman, “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: A Talk with Kevin Kelly,” Edge, July 19, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly07/kelly07_index.html.

  4. Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (New York: Viking, 2010), 187.

  5. Ibid., 188.

  6. Ibid., 189.

  7. Ibid., 356.

  8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

  9. See my book Program or Be Programmed (New York: Or Books, 2010).

  10. For a great chronicle and analysis of the apocalypse meme, see John Michael Greer, Apocalypse Not (Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press, 2011).

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Axelrod, Robert. The Evolution of Cooperation. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

  Barbrook, Richard. Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village. London: Pluto, 2007.

  Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream. New York: Atheneum, 1962.

  Brand, Stewart. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

  Brockman, John. Afterwords: Explorations of the Mystical Limits of Contemporary Reality. New York: Anchor, 1973.

  Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

  Carse, James P. Finite and Infinite Games. New York: Ballantine, 1986.

  Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  De Landa, Manuel. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

  Eriksen, Thomas Hyllard. Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age. London: Pluto Press, 2001.

  Fogg, B. J. Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

  Fuller, R. Buckminster. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

  Greer, John Michael. Apocalypse Not: A History of the End of Time. Berkeley, CA: Viva Editions, an Imprint of Cleis, 2011.

  Gross, Mathew Barrett and Mel Gilles. The Last Myth. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012.

  Innis, Harold Adams. Changing Concepts of Time. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

  Jacobs, Jane. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of
Commerce and Politics. New York: Random House, 1992.

  Johnson, Steven. Where Good Ideas Come From. New York: Riverhead, 2010.

  Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking, 2010.

  Korzybski, Alfred. Selections from Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. 5th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2005.

  Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. New York: Viking, 1999.

  ———. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking, 2005.

  Landes, David S. Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1983.

  Lanier, Jaron. You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

  Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

  Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

  Levine, Robert. A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

  McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Critical Edition. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003.

  Méro, László. Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty. New York: Copernicus, 1998.

  Montgomery, David. The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

  Mumford, Lewis. Technics and Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

  Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

  Ramo, Joshua Cooper. The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What to Do About It. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

  Rifkin, Jeremy. Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History. New York: Henry Holt, 1987.

  Rushkoff, Douglas. Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back. New York: Random House, 2009.

  ———. Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: Or Books, 2010.

  Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. New York: Penguin, 2008.

  Strate, Lance. Introductory Note to “Eine Steine Nacht Muzak.” KronoScope 10, no. 1–2 (2010).

  Strate, Lance, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson. Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment. 2nd ed. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2003.

  Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

  Wiener, Norbert. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.

  Zimbardo, Philip G., and John Boyd. The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life. New York: Free Press, 2008.

  INDEX

  The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader. Note that not all terms may be searchable.

  Abstractions, 138–39

  acting now, 159–69f

  Acxiom, 158

  advertising, 28, 128, 167, 210, 245.

  See also commercials; marketing/market research

  age/aging, 149–52

  agriculture, 100–101, 185

  Agriculture Department, U.S., 170

  air travel, 89–90

  Al Jazeera, 216

  algorithms, 8, 178–79, 180, 181, 182, 183, 229, 257, 264

  Alhurra (cable news channel), 216

  Alpha-Omega framework, 262–64

  “always-on,” 1–2, 73–74, 85, 94–95, 97–98, 186, 211

  America: adolescence of, 45–46; futurism and character of, 12

  American Dream, 12–13

  An American Family (documentary), 35

  American Idol (TV show), 37, 54, 213

  American Psychiatric Association, 166

  American Psychological Association, 38

  animated TV shows, 23–24, 25–26

  answering machines, 128

  apocalypto: appropriate approach to, 264–66; bunkers for, 243–45; change and, 264–65; choices and, 256, 257–58, 260; conflation of apocalypse scenarios and, 246; definition/characteristics of, 2, 245, 261; digiphrenia and, 245; emergence of Armageddon concept and, 261–62; fear of the future and, 246; fractalnoia and, 245–46, 264; human limits and, 254–60; as manifestation of present shock, 7, 243–66; modern problems and, 246–47; narrative collapse and, 245; new “now” and, 3; overwinding and, 245, 261; transcending humanity and, 251–54; zombies and, 247–50, 264

  See also specific topic

  Apple Corporation, 13, 108, 111, 167–68, 182, 203, 218, 239

  Arab Spring, 52, 55, 203, 216

  Aristotle, 19, 23

  arms race, 178–79

  art works, overwinding and, 153–55

  artistic visionaries, 231–32

  Asia, clocks and timing in, 80

  athletes. See sports

  attention, competition for, 124, 265–66

  attention deficit disorder, 124

  audience: captive, 21, 31, 36; participation in creation of story by, 61, 63, 64, 65; sophistication of public, 45;

  authenticity, 152–53; authority, 80–81, 84–85, 88, 225–26.;

  See also control

  Axelrod, Robert, 193

  Axial Age, 77, 83

  Bachmann, Michele, 53

  Baker, James, 47

  balance, change and, 265

  Barrett, Mark, 246

  basketball, 41, 131–32, 134

  Bateson, Gregory, 225, 228

  BATS Global Market, 181–82

  Baudrillard, Jean, 113

  Baum, Frank, 165–66

  The Beatles, 154, 168

  Beavis and Butt-head (TV show), 23–24

  Becker, Ernest, 171

  behavioral finance, 5–6, 174–75

  Bell, Gordon, 239, 240–41

  bell ringing, 80

  Benedictine monks, 79

  Benjamin, Walter, 153

  Berlin, Isaiah, 232

  Bernays, Edward, 45

  Better Alternative Trading System (BATS), 181–82

  Bible, 19

  Big Bang, 263–64

  biofeedback, 106

  biological clocks, 89–93, 102

  biology, apocalypto and, 255

  biometric devices, 84

  Birkenstock, 108

  black box trading, 179, 180

  Black Friday (shopping day), 159–61

  blogs, 2, 52, 97–98, 114, 265

  Bly, Robert, 39

  Bohm, David, 103

  Bonds, Barry, 41

  box of chocolates analogy, 29–30

  brain, 3–4, 5–6, 102–3, 204, 255

  Brand, Stewart, 133–34, 135, 139, 141, 223

  brands/branding, 64, 167, 209, 210, 212.

  See also specific brand

  bunkers, apocalypse, 243–45

  Burnett, Erin, 55

  burnout, 99, 121

  Bush, George W., 48, 54

  Bush, Vannevar, 4, 239

  business/corporations: big data, 158–59; Black Friday and, 159–61; communication campaigns of, 51; digiphrenia and, 85–86, 99, 107–8, 128; fractalnoia and, 202, 205–17, 220, 222–23; futurism and, 16–17; Great Exhibition and, 164–65; hiring by, 156; in Industrial Age, 87, 161–65; money as time and, 172, 173; narrative collapse and, 66; new “now” and, 4; overwinding and, 7, 134, 159–66, 169, 170–80, 184, 191, 192, 245; stages in human development and, 82; time as money and, 170–80.

  See also specific business/corporation

  calendars,
78–79, 81, 83, 262, 264

  call waiting, 115

  caller ID, 115–16

  Campbell, Joseph, 13, 20, 39

  Canseco, José, 41

  capitalism, 226, 258

  captive audiences, 21, 31, 36

  car accident, Rushkoff’s, 65–66

  Carse, James, 59

  Case, Amber, 69

  cashless societies, 183–84

  catallaxy, 226, 227, 228

  cell phones, 95, 116

  Chainmail (game), 60n

  change: apocalypto and, 264–65; as changing, 86–87; chronobiology and, 88–89; consumers and, 167; digiphrenia and, 73, 86–87, 88–89; fractalnoia and, 224, 235–37; management of, 86, 87, 235–36; narrative collapse and, 9–10, 14–16; new “now” and, 4; overwinding and, 141, 167; stages in human evolution and, 76; as steady state of existence, 87.

  See also growth; progress

  chaos, 200, 202, 209, 219–30, 251, 261, 262–63

  Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de, 254

  chemtrails, 197–98, 201

  children: digiphrenia and, 125; intelligence of, 125; kleptomania of, 166; TV shows for, 23–24

  China, clocks and timing in, 80

  choices: apocalypto and, 256, 257–58, 260; digiphrenia and, 110–12, 115–16, 119–20, 124; fractalnoia and, 202, 215, 227; new “now” and, 5; overwinding and, 145

  chronobiology, 87–93, 101, 103–7, 133

  chronos time, 112–20, 235–36, 259

  circadian rhythms, 89–93, 95, 106–7

  Civilization (game), 62

  Clinton, Hillary, 212–13

  clocks: analog, 83, 113, 128–29; apocalypto and, 262; Benedictine, 79–80; biological, 89–93, 102; characteristics of universe associated with, 81–82; circadian rhythms and, 89–93, 95; clock towers and, 80–81, 82, 85; connectivity and, 112; digiphrenia and, 80–82, 85, 89–93, 95, 102, 112; kinds of time and, 112; of the “long now,” 134; as metaphor for human beings, 81, 82; stages in human development and, 79–82, 83, 84, 85, 95; as time, 259

  CNN, 46–50, 54, 55, 250

  codes, 84–85, 263

  cognitive science, 3–4, 5–6, 102–3, 143, 204, 255

  Colber, Jean-Baptiste, 173

  Cold War, 89, 220–21, 223, 224, 226

  collaboration. See cooperation/collaboration

  colonialism, 162–64, 172, 173, 261

  commercials, 20–21, 22, 36, 167, 213–14, 223.

 

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