| Media theorist Doug Rushkoff, author of the newly released “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” explores what he calls “presentism,” a concept based on “everything is real-time, always-on, pervasive, and constant.” This concept also presents challenges — from investors expecting a quick return to the inability for startups to scale to their true potential to consumers becoming wary of permanency to altering how startup culture is formed. |
According to author Douglas Rushkoff, “If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.”
This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead we remain poised and frozen, overwhelmed by an always-on, live-streamed reality that our human bodies and minds can never truly inhabit. And our failure to do so has had wide-ranging effects on every aspect of our lives.
Rushkoff explores these ideas in his new book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.
As Rushkoff told Pando Daily, "'Present Shock' isn’t about speeding up. It’s about moving into the present. It’s a kind of timelessness. We are becoming an a-historical society, with no sense of story, no sense of goals. We’re going from a world where we find meaning over time to one where we do it in the moment. It’s a digital society, where everything is a sample or a duration. And it’s not a question of whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It just is. And we’ve likely got a century or even a few like this ahead of us."
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Rushkoff says, the future’s arrived. We live in a continuous now enabled by Twitter, email, and a so-called real-time technological shift. Yet this “now” is an elusive goal that we can never quite reach. And the dissonance between our digital selves and our analog bodies has thrown us into a new state of anxiety: present shock.
Rushkoff weaves together seemingly disparate events and trends into a rich, nuanced portrait of how life in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture. He explains how the rise of zombie apocalypse fiction signals our intense desire for an ending; how the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; how corporate investing in the future has been replaced by futile efforts to game the stock market in real time; why social networks make people anxious and email can feel like an assault.
Rushkoff examines how the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, and delves into why conspiracy theories actually comfort us.
As both individuals and communities, we have a choice. We can struggle through the onslaught of information and play an eternal game of catch-up. Or we can choose to live in the present: favor eye contact over texting; quality over speed; and human quirks over digital perfection. Rushkoff offers hope for anyone seeking to transcend the false now.
Absorbing and thought-provoking, Present Shock is a wide-ranging, deeply thought meditation on what it means to be human in real time.
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