Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff

  Human beings, however, can bind time. We can take the experiences of one generation and pass it on to the next generation through language and symbols. We can still teach our children things like hunting or fishing in real time, but our lessons can also be compressed into stories, instructions, and diagrams. The information acquired by one generation can be passed on more efficiently than if each subsequent generation needed to learn everything through experience. Each new generation can begin where the former generation left off. In Korzybski’s words:

  In the human class of life, we find a new factor, non-existent in any other form of life; namely, that we have a capacity to collect all known experiences of different individuals. Such a capacity increases enormously the number of observations a single individual can handle, and so our acquaintance with the world around, and in, us becomes much more refined and exact. This capacity, which I call the time-binding capacity, is only possible because, in distinction from the animals, we have evolved, or perfected, extra-neural means by which, without altering our nervous system, we can refine its operation and expand its scope.4

  A civilization makes progress by leveraging the achievements and observations of past generations. We compress history into words, stories, and symbols that allow living people to learn and benefit from the experiences of the dead. In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out. While animals may have some capacity to instruct their young, humans are unlimited in their capacity to learn from one another. Thanks to stories, books, and our symbol systems, we can learn from people we have never met. We create symbols, or what Korzybski calls abstractions, in order to represent things to one another and our descendants more efficiently. They can be icons, brands, religious symbols, familiar tropes, or anything that compresses information bigger than itself.

  And unlike animals, who can’t really abstract at all, the number of abstractions we humans can make is essentially limitless. We can speak words, come up with letters to spell them and numbers to represent them digitally. We can barter objects of value with one another. We can trade for gold, which represents value. We can trade using gold certificates, which represents the value of gold. We can even trade with modern currency, which represents value itself. Then, of course, we can buy futures on the value of currency, derivatives on the value of those futures, or still other derivatives on the volatility of those.

  Thanks to our abstract symbol systems, we can see a 28˚ in the corner of the TV screen and know to wear a coat. Everything from the ability to record temperature to the technology to broadcast images has been leveraged in order for us to make the split-second decision of what to wear. The bounty of thousands of years of civilization is reaped instantaneously. That’s the beauty of the short forever.

  Of course, all this abstraction is also potentially distancing. We don’t see the labor that went into building our railroads or the civilizations that were wiped out in order to clear the land. We don’t see the millennia of dinosaurs or plankton that went into our oil, the Chinese repetitive stress injuries that went into our iPhones, or any of the other time-intensive processes we can spend in an instant today. We tend to see math and science as a steady state of facts rather than as the accumulated knowledge of linear traditions. As Korzybski put it, we see further because we “stand on the shoulders”5 of the previous generation.

  The danger of such a position is that we can forget to put our own feet on the ground. We end up relating to our maps as if they were the territory itself instead of just representations. Depending solely on the time binding of fellow symbol makers, we lose access to the space binding of our fellow animals, or the energy binding of nature. Like overscheduled workers attempting to defeat the circadian rhythms through which our bodies self-regulate, we attempt to operate solely through our symbol systems, never getting any real feedback from the world. It’s like flying a plane without a visible horizon, depending solely on the information coming from the flight instruments.

  What we really need is access to both: we want to take advantage of all the time that has been bound for us as well as stay attuned to the real-world feedback we get from living in the now. While they often seem to be at odds, they are entirely compatible, even complementary, if we understand the benefits and drawbacks of each. It’s not solely a matter of establishing appropriate “temporal diversity,” as Stewart Brand suggests. That may work for processes that are unfolding over historical time, but it doesn’t really have anything to do with the now that we’re contending with in a presentist reality. We’re not in nature’s time nor fashion’s time. We’re in no time. All we presentists get from zooming out to ten-thousand-year time spans is vertigo.

  The stuff of time binding—all that information, however dense—is like the data on a hard drive. A presentist life takes place in something more like RAM—the active memory where processes are actually carried out.* The shift from a historical sensibility to a presentist one is like being asked to shift our awareness away from the hard drive and into RAM. It’s all processing, with no stuff to hang on to.

  A lot of what ends up feeling like overcompression and data deluge comes from expecting RAM to act like a hard drive, and vice versa. It’s like depending on the Vatican for progressive values, or on a high-tech start-up for institutional ballast. We simply can’t use one to do the other without unbinding stored time or binding up the present. Instead of a contemplative long now, we get an obsessive short forever.

  SEEDS AND FEEDS

  The concept of the long now too easily fails us because it compares different scales of time instead of different kinds of time. All the layers of pacing explored by Dyson and Brand are still aspects of the same linear process. They are just proceeding at different rates. To be sure, attending to affairs of government at the rate of fashion or addressing the needs of the planet at the rate of commerce produces problems of its own. Presidencies end up driven by daily polling results, and the future costs of pollution never find their way onto the corporate balance sheet. But these are all aspects of a cultural acceleration that has been in progress for centuries.

  Now that we have arrived in the present, we can finally see that the real schism today is less between these conflicting rates of time than it is our conflation of two very different relationships to time. There is stored time—the stuff that gets bound up by information and symbols. And then there is flowing time—the stuff that happens in the moment and then is gone. One needs to be unpacked. For the other, you have to be there.

  Stored time is more like a pond than a stream. It remains still long enough to promote life and grow cultures within it. A pond may be stagnant and unsuitable for drinking, but that only attests to its ability to support a living ecosystem within itself. A stream, on the other hand, is defined by its constant movement. It is never still. This doesn’t mean it lacks power. Over time, its flow can cut a path through solid rock. But it’s a hard place for cultures to develop. The pond creates change within itself by staying still. The stream creates change beyond itself by remaining in motion. If we think of them as media, the pond contains its content, while the stream uses the earth around itself as its content.

  Likewise, our informational content comes to us both as ponds and streams—stored data and flows of data. The encyclopedia is relatively static and stored, while the twenty-four-hour news channel is closer to flow. Yes, the encyclopedia may change every few years when a new edition comes out, and the news channel may broadcast some canned video reports. But the value of the encyclopedia rests in the durability of its assertions and the cumulative authority of its institutional history. The value of the twenty-four-hour news channel is based in the freshness of its data—the newness of its news.

  Where we get into trouble is when we treat data flows and data storage interchangeably. This is particularly easy to do in digital environments, where even fundamentally different kinds of information and activities are rendered in ways that make them all look pretty
much the same. So we scan a digital book or article with the same fleeting attention as we regard a Twitter stream or list of Facebook updates.

  This means we are likely to race through a longer text, hoping to get the gist of it, when the information is just too layered to be appreciated this way. By rushing, we relegate deep thoughts to the most transient, temporary portions of our memory and lose the ability to contemplate anything. We are overwinding, in that we are attempting to compress a lengthy, linear process into a single flow moment.

  Or just as futilely, we attempt to catch up with a Twitter feed, as if yesterday’s Tweets needed to be absorbed and comprehended like the missed episode of a television series. Instead, Twitter needs to be embraced as the stream it is—an almost live flow of facts and commentary whose relevance is conditional on the moment. Twitter is how we complain that there was no instant replay of a questionable pass reception, how we share our horror about a school shooting that just occurred, how we voice our solidarity with a protest in progress, or how we let other protesters know where the cops are stationed. Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. The value was in the now—which at this point is really just a then.

  Stored information, like a book, is usually something you want to absorb from beginning to end. It has greater longevity and is less dependent on the exact moment it comes out. We can read it in our own time, stopping and starting as we will, until we get to the end. Flowing information, like twenty-four-hour news or MTV videos, is more like the nonnarrative experience of electronic music or extreme sports. We get a textural experience, we learn the weather, or we catch the drift. We do not get to the end; we shut it off and it continues without us.

  Where it gets even harder is with information types that have the qualities of both storage and stream. An email inbox may look like a Twitter stream, but it’s not quite the same beast. Yes, they are both lists that scroll down the screen in chronological order. However, individual emails are more like stored information, while the Twitter stream is pure flow. Even if you receive a new email every minute, opening a message takes you out of the current and into a static tide pool. For the most part, the content within the message won’t continue to change. It will stay still long enough for you to take it in, form impressions about it, and even begin to compose a response. In theory (although for many of us, not in practice anymore), email is something that can be caught up with. We return to our inbox after however many minutes, hours, or days away, and then deal with whatever is inside. Of course, in that single session of email we probably won’t actually complete the tasks demanded by each message. Or even open every one. But we will at least scan the headers, deal with whatever is urgent, and make mental notes of the rest.

  It’s easy to reverse email’s biases, however, and to treat the list of messages like stored data and the messages themselves like flow. Some workflow efficiency experts have suggested that people strive for something called “inbox zero”6—the state of having answered all of one’s emails. Their argument, based on both office productivity and cognitive science, is that merely checking one’s email is inefficient. If the email is not processed—meaning answered, deleted, filed, or acted upon in some way—then it remains part of a growing to-do list. According to this logic, the time spent checking it was wasted if the message hasn’t been processed to the next stage. Worse, a new loop has been opened in the brain—there’s one more thing weighing on the consciousness.

  Backing all this up is the idea that mental stress is the result of opening up new unresolved tasks—like problem tickets on a service department’s desk. Every individual thing we haven’t figured out sits on our awareness like a live, ticking clock. Every unanswered question and every task we haven’t yet scheduled stays in the most active part of our brain, waiting for an answer. The way to reduce this mental stress is to close as many of these open, running loops as possible. This doesn’t necessarily mean accomplishing every task that we have taken on, but rather being able to visualize when and how we are going to do it. If your spouse asks you to buy some milk, this task stays open until you make a mental note to pick it up on the way home. You make sure you have enough money, you remind yourself that the store will still be open at that hour, and you consider what route will take you the least out of your way. Once you know how you’re going to accomplish the task, the loop is closed—even though the task has not yet been accomplished. There’s no more that can or need be done in the present, so the active part of the brain is freed up. This is a proved method of reducing stress.

  The inbox zero people see each message as a running loop. So they recommend we do something to create closure for each email—answer it, put a date on our calendar, add something to our to-do list, or even just delete it—rather than just leaving it sit there. According to Bit Literacy author Mark Hurst, if we don’t get our inbox empty, we won’t get that “clean feeling.”7 Given that the email inbox will nearly always refill faster than we can empty it, and that the messages arrive on everyone else’s schedule rather than our own, this clean feeling may be short-lived or even unattainable. Instead, this quest for cleanliness becomes an obsessive-compulsive loop all its own.

  Looked at in terms of flowing and static information, the email inbox is one, big, unfinishable loop. It is not a book or document that can be successfully completed. It is a flow. Sure, we can mark or move emails that are important, create priorities and sorting routines. But the initial choice to have email at all is to open a loop. The choice to open a particular email, though, constitutes entry into something more like static information. The problem is that the sender may have spring-loaded a whole lot of time and energy into that message, so that clicking on it is like opening a Pandora’s box of data and responsibilities. A week of the sender’s preparation can instantaneously unfold into our present.

  Think of how much less of an assault it may feel like if the sender simply enclosed all that spring-loaded time in a document and then attached it to that same email for you to file for later. Or even better, a link to a document online somewhere else. Of course, the savvy computer user can file away the offending email almost as easily as an attached document. But he is simply relegating information to storage that was misrepresented as flow.

  Such distinctions may seem trivial in the realm of email, but the inability to distinguish between flow and storage in other contexts can make or break businesses and economies. For just one example, take the medium of money. Or, since there were actually many kinds, the media of moneys.

  Back in the late Middle Ages, the rigid power structures of feudalism were shaken by the emergence of locally minted currencies based on grain. For close to a thousand years before that, peasants knew nothing but subsistence living, in absolute obeisance to the lord whose fields they tended. Time had been standing still; the flow of history was essentially halted as aristocratic families maintained their fiefdoms. That’s why this era was often called a dark age.

  There was a bit of barter between people, but this was a slow and inefficient form of trade. A person who had chickens but wanted shoes would have to find a shoemaker who wanted chickens. If only people had one thing of agreed-upon value they could use to trade, then everyone could get the things they wanted. Grain receipts provided people with just that form of early currency. Farmers brought their seasonal harvests to grain-storage facilities, where they were given receipts for how much grain they had deposited. A hundred pounds of grain would be acknowledged with a stamped, paper-thin foil receipt, perforated into smaller sections. Holders of the receipts could tear off little sections and use them to buy anything else at market. Even people who did not need grain could use the receipts, because the value was understood, and eventually someone would actually need grain and be able to claim the specified amount.

  Now, while we may think of these grain receipts as a storage of value, they were, in fact, biased toward flow. Their purpose was less to store the
value of the grain than to monetize and move it; they allowed for people to transact on something that would otherwise be stuck in dead storage. Pushing this de facto local currency even further to the flow side was the fact that these receipts lost value over time. The grain storer had to be paid for his services, and some of the grain would inevitably be lost over time to rodents and spoilage. In order to compensate for this, the value of a grain receipt would be lowered at regular intervals. One year it would be worth ten pounds; the next it may be worth nine. So it was to everyone’s advantage to spend the money rather than to hold it.

  And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.8 Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals.

  The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade.