We’re living in the now, we no longer have a sense of future direction, and we have a completely new relationship to time. That’s the premise of Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a sort-of update to Alvin Toffler’s influential Future Shock from decades ago.

I met Rushkoff back when I was editor of the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000, when he was working on his first book about digital culture. But the original publishers canceled that book, thinking the internet was a fad and would be over by the time it hit stands. And even when it was finally published, its potential readership was still limited.

The internet is still with us (to put it mildly) ... so Rushkoff’s latest book is for everybody. Throughout the intervening years, Rushkoff and I have been in a dialogue about technology, culture, and the future that, in some ways, has never really stopped. So here we are, continuing that conversation; only now, the challenge we’re discussing is “presentism” – What happens when the future is here, now?

R.U. Sirius: You describe five symptoms – pathologies, really – of “presentist” culture. One of these is “narrative collapse.” Can you explain it for those who haven’t read the book?

Douglas Rushkoff: Narrative Collapse is what happens when we no longer have time in which to tell a story.

Think Game of Thrones. In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn’t really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax.Remote controls and DVRs give us the ability to break down narratives – particularly the more abusive ones. This is a great thing for escaping the "ends-justify-the-means" traps of 20th-century wars and religions, but it can also make it hard to convey values.

However, the inability to tell stories over time has yielded new forms – like video games and fantasy role-playing – which tell stories in the present tense. They are less about getting to some conclusion and ending the play than they are about keeping the play going. That's a better structure for a world contending less with victory than sustainability.

R.U. Sirius: So how can analog narratives negotiate a digital landscape?

Douglas Rushkoff: Think Game of Thrones. In the old days, this sort of show might be considered bad writing. It doesn't really seem to be moving toward a crisis or climax, it has no true protagonist, and it's structured less like a TV show or a movie than a soap opera.

Yet it really does capture the qualities of a fantasy role-playing game or massive multiplayer online world. Even the opening titles sequence conveys this presentist style: we move over a map, as if exploring the various worlds on the game board. Almost all the families have good justifications for "winning" the throne, and I don't think anyone wants a particular family to totally win and end the story. (Though if anyone wins, I hope it's the Khaleesi.)

The audience is voluntarily surrendering authority to the storyteller as long as he isn’t abusing it. Really, we just want the narrative to keep going. In a small way perhaps, it's suggesting a new shape of narrative that can respond to the need for sustainable solutions instead of finalizing victories. These open-ended narratives are much more consonant with the open-ended, fantasy-role-playing-like sensibility of presentism.

R.U. Sirius: Okay, so besides narrative collapse, what are the other struggles of presentism?

It’s the Botox addicts trying to lock their faces in at age 29, and in the process losing the ability to register facial reactions in the moment.

Douglas Rushkoff: One is “Overwinding”, where we try to compress huge time scales into the moment.

It's ultra-high-frequency trading: seeing how many algorithms Goldman Sachs can fit on the head of a temporal pin. Instead of investing over time, we try to make money off the trade, in the moment.

It's also the Botox addicts on Real Housewives of Orange County, trying to lock their faces in at age 29, and in the process losing the ability to register facial reactions in the moment.

There’s a bunch more syndromes identified in the book: “Digiphrenia” – not information overload, but the confused mental state that comes from having too many identities running in parallel; “Fractalnoia”, when we try to make sense in the frozen present moment without the benefit of cause and effect sequences (thus making ourselves more predictable and more paranoid); and “Apocalypto”, our intolerance for a world without endings and our attraction to finalizing myths like the singularity or worse – many of us find it easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than to imagine next week.

R.U. Sirius: Is virtual presentism unhealthy?

Douglas Rushkoff: It certainly can be. For instance, the drone pilots I’ve interacted with have higher levels of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) than pilots who are flying real planes in Afghanistan. Now what's that about?

I think they're suffering from digiphrenia. All day, they experience themselves in Kabul, flying planes and sometimes killing real people. That's bad enough in itself. But then they take off their headsets, get in their cars, and drive home to the Nevada suburbs and sit down to dinner with their wives and kids. "How was school today, honey?" They are living two very different lives at the same time.

Unlike a traditional, real-world pilot who lands his plane on an aircraft carrier or military base and then hangs out with other military people, the drone pilot is doing all this essentially from home – living two, conflicting yet simultaneous instances of himself. These two different instances are occurring in essentially the very same present. That's present shock.

R.U. Sirius: Another post-internet book out right now is Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything, Click Here. What do you think about the ongoing discussions around his attitudes about futurists, and more broadly, his criticisms of net culture?

R.U. Sirius & Douglas Rushkoff

About

R.U. Sirius is the former editor in chief of Mondo 2000 and the author of numerous books. He is currently writing a book on late 20th century cyberculture, as well as a political screed called Steal This Singularity.

Douglas Rushkoff: Too many of our best thinkers and developers fall into the trap of disrupting some institution – government, education, insert-yours-here – without acknowledging the underlying economic operating system they're still enforcing. So for the most part, I agree with Morozov's position on how the "open" possibilities of digital platforms are faux-open patches on status-quo corporate capitalism.

While I’m all for getting folks to understand the effects of these crucial compromises, I'm not sure the best way to go about it is to call them out as individuals. I get that Morozov doesn't mean it as a personal attack, but it is nonetheless cast as the story of and framed as the takedown of a Meme Hustler. It may be click-view sensational, but it becomes a non-starter for engaging the very folks whose minds need to be further opened.

I guess having been both an attacker and an attackee, I'm growing disenchanted with more combative styles of rhetoric. Morozov hates the Program-or-Be-Programmed notion I argued in my last book, equating it with insisting that people learn plumbing when I'm really just asking people to think critically about the platforms they're using.

Since the name of the game here is restoring our humanity, I feel much more comfortable engaging with "opponents" as people who mean well.

R.U. Sirius: Do you think there will be a youth dropout reaction, 1960’s style, to the stresses of presentism? Or are they too well trained now by the authoritarian turn in education (with its constant testing and so forth)?

Douglas Rushkoff: I think the overwhelming presentism of our era could motivate a healthy form of dropping out. The authoritarian turn in education only exacerbates the sense of pressure to perform in the present for some undefined future where the companies you work for don't really take care of you, anyway.

But there's also a danger in rejecting all disciplines and the lessons of history. I sometimes worry that we're devaluing lineage, history – even the time it used to take to explore a counterculture – by making it all so instantaneously available. Not everything in life needs to be on demand.

Young people certainly seem more willing to get what they want when they want it and how they want it. MOOCs are bound to be even more disruptive here than they are already. For the most part, I don't see presentism as a cause for dropping out so much as the key to liberating from the more stultifying legacies that keep us from experiencing live moments with each other.

Drone pilots have higher levels of PTSD than pilots who are flying real planes.

R.U. Sirius: Your book focuses on the challenges of presentism, obviously. But is there still a place for futurist movements to add value? For example, the singularity (which you criticize in the book), transhumanism, or even Long Now?

Douglas Rushkoff: I think there can be a positive sort of futurism even in a presentist society. But I think it's a kind of futurism that envisions augmenting human ability and intellect rather than creating some artificial machine intelligence that displaces us. It's time we begin to envision futures for ourselves, rather than the self-loathing futures in which humans are obsolesced.

As for Long Now – I loved reading it and admire Stewart Brand tremendously. But it’s really hard to put the weight of 10,000 years on every moment: it feels less like a "long now" and more like a “short forever.”

Looking at the distant horizon every time you end up with a piece of plastic for which there's no appropriate recycling bin makes me feel weighed down by history and the future, and it doesn't fit the temporal liberation of a digital age. So instead I started looking at how do we elicit the appropriate behaviors in ourselves and others, and out of the moment itself?

Education exacerbates the pressure to perform in the present for some undefined future where the companies you work for don’t really take care of you, anyway.

R.U. Sirius: Most – or maybe all – of the symptoms of present shock are viewed as pathologies. How much of this struggle is the result of a competitive economic system and lack of a social “safety net”?

Douglas Rushkoff: Almost all of it. The early cyberpunk idea was thatnetworked computers would let us do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack, allow us to apply its asynchronous, decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.

Instead of working for someone – as we had been doing since the dawn of the Industrial Age – we would be freed from the time-is-money rat race and get to be makers. Then business and marketing caught wind of this, and it shifted from a bottom-up people's renaissance to a top-down finance revolution.

So instead of using digital technology to create more time and creative space for people, we used it to take more time from people. The technologies we developed became much more about retaining the attention of consumers, monitoring employees, and keeping people engaged 24/7. Email, for example, is not intrinsically annoying. It would sit there and wait until we got to it. It's the people on the other side of the email whose expectations have been raised. And we who have agreed to keep checking, or to get pinged every time someone wants us.

And that's a primary form of Present Shock – turning these devices from asynchronous stacks into live, real-time appendages.

Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted over email between R.U. Sirius and Douglas Rushkoff, beginning with one set of questions and a series of followups mixed in. The entire Q&A was then edited for length and flow.

Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90