Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  At least our virtual selves enjoy this freedom. We flesh-and-blood humans living back in the real world have still aged four hours, missed lunch, denied ourselves bathroom breaks, and allowed our eyes to dry up and turn red. Like an astronaut traveling at light speed for just a few seconds who returns to an Earth on which ninety years have passed, our digital selves exist in a time unhinged from that of our bodies. Eventually the two realities conflict, leading to present shock. If tribal humans lived in the “total” time of the rotating Earth, digital humans attempt to live in the “no” time of the computer. We simply can’t succeed at it if we bring our bodies along for the ride. Yet when we try to leave them behind, both nature and time come back to reassert their authority over us.

  Digital technology is not solely to blame. Indeed, the microchip may be less the cause of this effort to defeat time than its result. Since the prehistoric age, humankind has been using technology to overcome the dictates of nature’s rhythms. Fire allowed us to travel to colder climates and defeat the tyranny of the seasons. It also gave us the ability to sit up past sundown and cook food or tell stories. In the early 1800s, the proliferation of gaslight utterly changed the landscape and culture of London, making the night streets safer and illuminating the urban environment at all hours. New cultures emerged, with new relations to time of day and other activities. Nighttime cafés and bars led to new musics and entertainments. New flexibility of work scheduling allowed for around-the-clock shifts and factories whose stacks emitted smoke day and night. The invention of jet planes gave us even more authority over time, allowing us to traverse multiple time zones in a single day.

  But no matter how well technology overcame the limits of natural time, our bodies had difficulty keeping up. Stress and fatigue among night workers and those whose shifts are changed frequently is only now being recognized as more than a ploy by labor unions, and if it weren’t for the rather obvious symptoms of jet lag, we may still not have acknowledged the existence of biological clocks underlying our bodies’ rhythms. For jet lag is more than just a woozy feeling, and it took many years until scientists realized it had a real influence over our effectiveness. Back in the 1950s, for example, when jet passenger service was still quite novel, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew to Egypt to negotiate the Aswan Dam treaty. His minders assumed he would sleep on the plane, and they scheduled his first meeting for shortly after he arrived. He was incapable of thinking straight, his compromised perceptual and negotiating skills were overtaxed, and he failed utterly. The USSR won the contract instead, and many still blame this one episode of jet lag for provoking the Cold War.

  A decade later, in 1965, the FAA finally began to study the effects of air travel on what were now admitted to be human biological rhythms. For some unknown reason, subjects traveling east to west experienced much greater decline in “psychological performance” than those traveling in other directions.13 The next year, the New York Times Sports section acknowledged the little-understood effects of jet lag on Major League Baseball players: “The Jet Lag can make a recently debarked team too logy for at least the first game of any given series.”14 Coaches became aware of the various behavior patterns associated with travel in each direction, but no one could tell them the mechanisms at play or how to counteract them.

  By the 1980s, NASA got on the case. Its Ames Fatigue/Jet Lag Program was established to “collect systematic, scientific information on fatigue, sleep, circadian rhythms, and performance in flight operations.”15 Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person’s biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens it. Most important, however, the studies showed that there were clocks inside us, somehow governed by the body, its metabolism, and its chemical processes. Or perhaps we were syncing to something unseen, like the moon, or shifting magnetic fields. Or both. Circadian rhythms, as they came to be called, were real.

  The phenomenon had been discovered and measured in plants centuries earlier. In the 1700s, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus designed a garden that told time by planting adjacent sections of flowers that opened and closed their blossoms an hour apart, around the clock. But if human activities were really governed by the same mysterious cycles as tulips and cicada, we would have to consider whether our ability to transcend nature through technology was limited by forces beyond our control.

  The relatively new field of chronobiology hopes to unravel some of these mysteries, but each new discovery seems to lead to even bigger questions. Some biological cues are clearly governed by simple changes in sunlight. The eye’s photoreceptors sense the darkening sky, sending a signal to release melatonin, which makes us sleepy. Watching TV or staring at a bright computer screen in the evening delays or prevents this reaction, leading to sleeplessness. But if sunlight were the only cue through which the body regulated, then why and how does a person who can set his own hours find the twenty-five-hour day?

  It is because we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of relationships between all these clocks. Body temperature rises during the daylight hours, but some people’s rise faster than others, making them morning people, while those whose temperature rises more slowly over the course of the day reach their most effective state of consciousness in the early evening. Meanwhile, when our body temperature rises, we perceive of time as passing more slowly. This is because our internal clocks are counting faster, while time is actually passing at the same rate as always.

  Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—some variation on energy in Einstein’s equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock at the center of the universe, we are not unhinged from one another. In a biosystem or a culture, timing is everything.

  For instance, the daily orbit of the moon generates two high tides every twenty-four hours. Twice each month, at the full and new moons, the tide is higher than normal, creating the fifteen-day-cycle spring tides that dictate the life and mating cycles of marine life. The human menstrual cycle is approximately twenty-eight days, the same cycle as the moon, for reasons and through mechanisms no one has yet figured out. In other chronobiology research, we learn that people treated with chemotherapy at one hour of the day respond significantly better than those treated at another hour.

  The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more productive in the early morning, while in the next week we are more effective in the early afternoon.16

  Technology gives us the ability to ride roughshod over all these nooks and crannies of time. We can fly through ten time zones in as many hours. We can take melatonin or Ambien to fall asleep when we’ve arrived at our destination, and later take one of our attention deficit disorder–afflicted son’s Ritalin pills to wake up the next morning. Then maybe get a prescription for Prozac or Lexapro to counteract the depression and anxiety associated with this lifestyle, and one for a good tranquilizer to calm the mind at night with all those mood enhancers in our bloodstream, and maybe one for Viagra to counteract the sexual side effects.

  We can screw up our biological clocks a lot easier than that, too. Shift work, where employees alternate between days and nights on the job, leads to a significantly higher rate of violence, mood disorders, depression, and suicide. If a shift worker is scheduled even just one night on duty, urinary
electrolytes take five days to adjust and eight days for the heart rate to return to normal. The World Health Organization has suggested that shift work is a “possible” carcinogen.17 Women who work night shifts, for example, may have up to a 60 percent greater risk of contracting breast cancer. Even that midnight snack cues your body to believe it’s daytime, reducing the effectiveness of your sleep.

  Technology gives us more choice over how and when we do things. What we often forget is that our bodies are not quite as programmable as our schedules. Where our technologies may be evolving as fast as we can imagine new ones, our bodies evolved over millennia, and in concert with forces and phenomena we barely understand. It’s not simply that we need to give the body rhythms; we can’t simply declare noon to be midnight and expect the body to conform to the new scheme. If only it were as simple as a single clock for which we could change the settings—but it’s not. The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different clocks, all listening to and relating to and syncing with everyone and everything else’s. Human beings just can’t evolve that quickly. Our bodies are changing on a much different timescale.

  PACING AND LEADING

  Luckily, our technologies and programs are as fungible as our bodies are resistant. Yes, we are in a chronobiological crisis of depression, suicides, cancers, poor productivity, and social malaise as a result of abusing and defeating the rhythms keeping us alive and in sync with nature and one another. But what we are learning gives us the ability to turn this crisis into an opportunity. Instead of attempting to retrain the body to match the artificial rhythms of our digital technologies and their artifacts, we can instead use our digital technologies to reschedule our lives in a manner consistent with our physiology.

  Technology may have given us the choice to defeat our natural rhythms, but we then built a society and economic order around these choices, making them seemingly irreversible. The only answer seemed to be to speed up, and the microchip might well be the poster child for this race to catch up with ourselves. If only we could offload the time-intensive tasks to silicon, we would regain the time—what technology analyst Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus”18—that we need to do our thinking again.

  But our microchips don’t seem to be serving us in that way. Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our free time answering email or tending to our social networks. Staring into screens, we are less attuned to the light of day and the physiological rhythms of our housemates and coworkers. We are more likely to accept the false digital premise that all time is equivalent and interchangeable.

  The always-on philosophy works well for many businesses. During overnight hours when traditional broadcast television networks used to go off the air, cable channels like Home Shopping Network and QVC are still buzzing. Where traditional department stores may wait until the fourth quarter of the year for one of the store’s buyers to walk the floor and find out how certain product lines are doing, executives at QVC get sales reports as they happen. “It’s instant gratification,” explained one merchandiser using QVC to push product. “You learn and react constantly.”19

  Their salespeople sure do. Mostly former (or, one could argue, still-working) actors, these shopping-channel salespeople make pitches for zirconium diamonds and designer handbags while receiving constant, real-time feedback on their success. Computer screens indicate the number of items sold, how many remain in inventory, and whether the pace of sales is increasing or decreasing—allowing the announcer to shift strategies and intensity instantaneously. They also receive feedback through an earpiece, about everything from the quality of their pitch, merchandiser satisfaction with the on-air delivery style, and whether phone lines are jammed. If a sweater is selling best in red, the host sees this on the screen, then picks up the green one and talks about its beautiful shade, or how “only fifty are left in stock. Make that forty-five—better hurry!” The salespeople almost universally feel that these technological links allow them to forge an emotional connection with their audiences, even though most of the feedback they get is in numbers. Rick Domeier, a ten-year veteran salesman, explains, “If you go too hard, they’ll let you know.” Their skill at reading and digesting multiple sources of information on the fly has led many to compare them with air traffic controllers. As far as the hosts are concerned, they are living outside time: “This is kind of like Vegas—you don’t know if it’s two o’clock in the afternoon or two o’clock in the morning,” adds Domeier. “When I’m on, it’s prime time.”20

  Many of us aspire to this ability to be “on” at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all access, all the time, to everything—and to be capable of matching this intensity and availability ourselves. Isn’t this what it would mean to be truly digital citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps? A cell phone can be charged at any hour of the day, just as a person can take a power nap. Ultraefficiency advocate Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Body teaches readers how to “hack sleep.” Rather than sleeping six to nine hours in one stretch, those practicing polyphasic sleep are supposed to get by with twenty-minute naps every four hours. It’s an approach to the human-body-as-lithium-ion-battery that Ferriss says has proved successful for several high-tech CEOs.21 It’s also indicative of a set of aspirations that may be more appropriate for machines, or markets, than for people.

  Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies. We compete to process more emails or attract more social networking connections than our colleagues, as if more to do on the computer meant something good. We misapply the clockwork era’s goals of efficiency and productivity over time to a digital culture’s asynchronous landscape. Instead of working inside the machine, as we did before, we must become the machine.

  We fetishize concepts such as the cyborg or human technological enhancement, looking to bring our personal evolution up to the pace of Apple system updates. We answer our email in the morning before we brush our teeth,22 we trust the computers at Echemistry.com to calculate our best mates, and we line up for new iPhones even though our old ones still work. We obsessed over the first day a social networking website called Facebook sold its stock on the NASDAQ exchange, which had less to do with any interest in the value of the stock than an acknowledgment of social networking as central to our lives: the online network as the default mode of human connectivity and one’s profile as the new form of self-representation as well as the mirror in which to primp. Our algorithmically generated Klout scores stand in for what used to be social status. The NikeFuel bands strapped around our wrists track our motions and change colors as we approach our fitness goal for the day, then upload our results with other cyber-enhanced exercisers in our network, for mutual motivation.

  Some of this activity happens so self-consciously that it amounts to what digital-arts theorists call the New Aesthetic23 of everything from drone photography and ubiquitous surveillance to 8-bit game nostalgia and pixilated herringbone fabric. It is a blending of the language of digital technology with that of the physical world, perhaps best exemplified by the most advanced form of dubstep dancing, called glitch. Taking up where robot dancers and pop-and-lockers left off, glitch dancers imitate the glitchy stutter of low-resolution video streaming over the Internet. Their movements imitate those of a dancer as rendered by a malfunctioning video device, complete with dropouts and stutters.

  Internet workers are expected to accept the cyborg ethos as a given circumstance. Google and Facebook welcome their engineers to work ar
ound the clock; the companies provide food, showers, and even laundry service for their programmers—who are assumed to have no life beyond the company. The bathroom stall doors at Google have daily programming tips for employees to read while sitting on the toilet. These campuses are lovely, to be sure, and the food and facilities are of a higher standard than most of us get at home. And everyone appears to be having a good time. But these places may as well be space stations, meticulously stocked and arranged, and utterly cut off from the passage of time.

  The culture of the Internet is informed by this sensibility, which then trickles back into its content and programs. Programmers who are always-on naturally assume their users would want to live this way as well. Likewise, Internet writers whose lives must conform to the dictates of online publishing and economics end up espousing values consistent with the always-on hyperactivity of the Web. The most trafficked sites have new posts going up every few minutes, and their writers feel the pressure. Blog publisher Nick Denton has grown famous—and wealthy—exploiting this phenomenon in the way he runs his own properties, Gawker, Gizmodo, and Jezebel, among others. The formula is to hire young writers, subject them to almost impossible time constraints, and then let them go if they develop a reputation and merit higher pay. Writers for Denton’s publications are required to post twelve pieces per day—which often keeps them working around the clock (or, as I have witnessed myself, posting via smart phones from “real” life activities). The blog’s content exudes this sense of desperate immediacy and always-on urgency. No celebrities are safe or should be safe, wherever and whenever they are. A reputation-busting story about almost anyone can break while he or she is asleep, and spread all over the net before morning. As if to respond to the culture these blogs created, Denton implemented a computer program at Gawker that assigned stories based on trending Internet terms, creating a closed feedback loop between the net’s writers and readers.