Our recorded past then competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. In his book Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story of a woman who met up with an old boyfriend and made a date, thinking she might rekindle the relationship—particularly now that so much time had passed since their breakup. But she went ahead and reviewed her old email exchanges with him, archived deep in her trash folder. It brought the painful memories back into the present, and she canceled the date. However she or her former beau may have changed or grown since then—whatever connection had been forged between them when they actually reunited in the real world—was rendered irrelevant in comparison with the past magnified through technology.
Even our Facebook identities can now be unwound as timelines depicting our previous states on the site—the friends we later unfriended, the silly movies and books in which we were once interested, and the embarrassing things we said and did that we wish would recede into the distance. But in the short forever, nothing recedes. Everything relative is now also relevant.
What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future. Our Facebook profiles and Google accounts become parts of big data sets, where they can be mined for patterns and modeled against those of millions of other users. The computers at companies like the market research firm Acxiom and big data analytics specialists Opera Solutions churn data not simply to learn what we have done, but what we will do. Opera is not merely doing analytics, but what they call predictive analytics. As they put it: “We have created Vektor™—a secure and flexible Big Data analytics platform that extracts powerful signals and insights from massive amounts of data flow, and then streams analytically enriched guidance and recommendations directly to the front lines of business operations.”17
It doesn’t require smarts, just computing brawn. Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us to pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will be shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They care only about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do. Privacy has nothing to do with a particular fact they may know about you, but things they know about you that you may not even know yourself.
Now that most of us have migrated to the Internet, the number of data points available to big data companies is almost infinite. Every mouse click and navigational pathway, the lengths of our incoming and outgoing emails, the amount of time we spend with more than one window open, and so on, may not give any logical clues about our inner workings, but how they stack up against the same data points of others means everything. Comparing and contrasting all this data, modelers can identify the future sexual orientation of prepubescents, the probability of our requiring fertility treatments, the likelihood of our changing political party affiliations, or even if we’re about to come down with the flu. And with startling accuracy, they are correct.
So it’s not only our past, but our futures that are compressed into the present, as well. We end up in a short forever—a psychic mashup—filled with contradiction and paralyzed by both the weight of an indelible history and the anticipation of a preordained fate.
ACT NOW
Black Friday gets worse every year. The infamous day-after-Thanksgiving sale-a-thon, when stores launch the Christmas shopping season by offering their deepest discounts of the year, seems to get more extreme, more urgent, and more violent each time it comes around. The stakes are high, and not just for the consumers who trample one another—sometimes to death—in order to get through Walmart’s doors the second they open. Equally invested are many market analysts and economists, who now treat Black Friday’s results as reliable indicators of the nation’s financial health.
Fully aware that the Black Friday sales figures will lead the headlines and have a significant impact on the following Monday’s stock indexes, investors look to what’s happening the day before Black Friday for a hint of how to be positioned for the actual Black Friday, which is really just a way to be positioned for whatever happens on Christmas. Knowing they are being judged in advance and eager to get a jump on their competitors, retailers edge toward increasingly earlier opening times. While the earliest Black Friday sales used to begin Friday morning at 9 a.m., by the early 2000s they had moved up to 6 a.m. or even 5 a.m. Customers lined up in the cold outside their favorite big-box stores on Thursday night, and local news shows showed up to cover the spectacle.
By 2011 some of the most aggressive stores, such as Target, Best Buy, and Macy’s, decided that they would push the envelope even further and start Black Friday at midnight. Walmart rolled Black Friday all the way back to Thursday evening at 10 p.m. Shoppers showed up, but now they were complaining. Some were upset that they were being required to leave their families during Thanksgiving dinner in order to get a good place on line. Others felt the expanded hours just lengthened the shopping day beyond their endurance levels. Some even seemed aware of their complicity in overworking store clerks, and of how the fun of Black Friday had turned into more work for everyone.
Employees complained, too, and those at some of the big-box stores were fired for refusing to come in for the overnight Thanksgiving shift. Memories of late-nineteenth-century union fights over workers’ hours were retrieved by the press: “Even though it’s a desperate time doesn’t mean that we should trade all that ground that our fathers and our grandfathers, everyone that came before us, fought really hard for,” a Target worker told the New York Times.18 JCPenney, in a nod to these sentiments, kept their opening time at a respectable 4 a.m., because “we wanted to give our associates Thanksgiving Day to spend with their families.”19
The extreme overwind has pushed many shoppers and workers over the edge, and even threatened the Christmas shopping season as a whole. What was once a seasonal consumer sport now feels to many like work and an intrusion on the rest of the holiday. Having found a temporal anchor in the limbo of generic, big-box shopping, retailers couldn’t help but spring-load it until it just broke. Starting the Christmas season the day after Thanksgiving was already at the very boundary of spring-loading; pushing into Thanksgiving itself was an overwind. It broke through the patina of holiday spirit, masking this otherwise crude effort to get people to go further into credit card debt by encouraging them to purchase more electronics and other goods manufactured in Chinese plants and sold in big-box stores that kill local business. All this, we must remember, on borrowed money and borrowed time. No wonder our consumer economy went into present shock.
In the process, many consumers and workers alike came to realize the artificiality of the whole affair and simply turned away. Anticonsumerist Adbusters magazine’s “Buy Nothing Day” had already morphed into the lifelong commitment to Occupy Wall Street. This new wave of local, presentist values only reinforced the breakdown between people and the consumption they were obligated to be doing to save America’s corporations from peril.
Black Friday is just a more condensed version of the time shifting that characterizes our entire consumer economy and its current crisis. It is incumbent upon businesses to unwind the temporal compression inherent in consumer culture in order to transcend it. In short, we must come to understand where various forms of pressurized time are doing more harm than good.
On its most fundamental level, a consumer society is based on its ability to compress the time of others through mass production. Issues of exploitation and ethics aside, mass production and Industrial Age technologies were, at their core, about compressing the labor of fa
raway people into the products used at home. While, as we saw, peasants were originally able to lift themselves beyond subsistence farming by learning crafts and trading goods, the Industrial Age took this a step further. Along with their invention of central currency, the waning aristocracy of the late Middle Ages also created the chartered monopoly. The charter was a legal contract between the monarchy and a company, granting it the exclusive right to do business in a particular region or industry. A company that was granted a charter no longer had to worry about competition or going out of business due to an unforeseen setback such as bad weather or a shipwreck. The monopoly enjoyed permanence, by law. In return for this favor, the company would give the king or queen some shares.
So these big companies, with names like British East India Company or the Dutch East India Trading Company, went to the faraway places to which they owned all rights and brought back resources that could then be fabricated into clothes, foods, and other products in local factories. It was a neat trick—which robbed most everyone of the ability to do business in the present. People who once purchased locally produced goods now had to buy them from the chartered monopolies. Moreover, people who once created goods now had to go work for a company instead. The present-based reality of a normal local economy ended up superseded by something else.
This was also a perfect environment for the Industrial Age to take hold. Machines didn’t simply make things faster; they allowed companies to hire less expert labor. Where a skilled shoemaker was once required to cobble a shoe, now shoes could be assembled by machine operators who each needed to know only how to perform one small step in a shoe’s manufacture. Such laborers could be found easily, paid much less, and fired without cost, for they didn’t take any expertise away with them.
The expertise a real cobbler, or any skilled craftsperson, may have accumulated over years of apprenticeships was rendered worthless, as the time formerly invested in human training was now compressed into the mechanical processes of the machine itself. Yes, a skilled shoemaker might be required to help devise the machine in the first place, but after that he is expendable—particularly for a company that has no need to innovate, because its stature is guaranteed by its monopoly. So on the simplest level, the time compression that once allowed a craftsperson to leverage his experience is now transferred to the machine. The worker is always in the present, no more valuable on his hundredth day than on his first.
When looked at in terms of value creation, the whole industrial model starts to break down. American colonists, for example, created value by growing cotton in their fields. They were unable to reap the market value of their product, because they were forbidden by law from selling it to other colonists. They were required instead to sell it at fixed prices to the British East India Company, who shipped it back to England, where it was fabricated into clothes by another monopoly, and then shipped back to the colonists to purchase at a premium. This was not more efficient for anyone; it simply prevented anyone but a chartered monopoly from adding value to (and making money from) the cotton. America’s colonists were cut out of the value-creation equation and subjected instead to a system where their hard labor in the present was simply loaded into the production cycle of a long-term and long-distance corporate product.
America’s white colonists, or at least the educated people who led them, knew better than to accept these terms and fought a war of independence. Britain learned its lesson—but maybe not the one we would have hoped for. What they realized was that their methods of value extraction worked a whole lot better on enslaved indigenous populations who had neither the experience to envision nor the gunpowder to choose otherwise.
By around the time of Queen Victoria, colonial empires had established corporations overseas that both mined resources and fabricated them into products. These were completely closed circuits. Britain sent mechanical weaving looms to India, for example, and maintained their monopoly over production simply by forbidding hand weaving. The only way to weave was to work for one of Britain’s loom owners. While opinions vary today on exactly how this impacted India’s capacity to make money over the long term, we tend to think less about the way this impacted the habits of everyone back at home.
While people may not have been particularly concerned about Britain’s exploitative trading practices, they were not accustomed to purchasing outsourced goods. In 1851 Queen Victoria and the corporations she sponsored held the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, in a high-tech, million-square-foot glass pavilion called the Crystal Palace. It was like a world’s fair for the Industrial Revolution, where fourteen thousand exhibitors demonstrated their factory-made wares and the machines that created them. Spectators marveled at the steam hammers, hydraulic presses, barometers, and diving suits of this new, mechanized era.
As I argued in my book Life Inc., the Great Exhibition’s primary intent was to distract the domestic public from the dark underbelly of international industrial modernity. Through this spectacle, Queen Victoria and the corporations she sponsored disconnected these technologies from the human toll they inflicted on their operators. As if in a shopping mall, people gawked, their jaws dropping, at the steam pipes and gears, utterly unaware of the faces and hands the machines burned and mauled. People saw products and production, but never the producers themselves. If anything, industrial modernity was simpler and cleaner than manual labor. As much a welcome step back as a daring leap forward.20
The Great Exhibition was designed to convey precisely this sensibility and to help the British contend with the shock of the new. Organizers cleverly promoted and organized the event as a celebration of faux-medieval design and dedicated the central hall to an exhibit on Gothic revival architecture. This was part of a larger effort to disguise the industrialization of Victorian England as a throwback to feudal tradition. The era of the high-tech factory would be rebranded as the romantic revival of medieval monarchy. The Great Exhibition mythologized both free trade and the Industrial Age as a return to the best of pre–Renaissance Europe, when it was actually the extension of its very opposite. Instead of promoting a present-based, peer-to-peer economy, the spectacle was reinforcing the time-delayed, long-distance economics of international monopolies.
For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. People walking through the Crystal Palace were living in a different temporal reality than those working the looms of Delhi. This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time—that of the consumer.
The consumer lives in a present made possible by the temporal compression of others. He can consume something in minutes that may have taken months to manufacture and transport. While he may have a job himself during which the clock ticks normally, when he is in the store he is in a different time zone altogether, one that leverages the time of production into a frozen present of shopping. This new relationship between people and products no longer depended exclusively on international trade. Items manufactured three thousand miles across the country embodied the same invisible labor and time as those made overseas.
The more companies excelled at mechanized mass production, however, the more consumption needed to be done. Supply easily outstripped demand. By the early twentieth century, decorators such as Frank Baum (later the author of The Wizard of Oz) were being employed to stoke consumer desire with store displays. Baum was responsible for what we now think of as the store window, where an entire aspirational lifestyle would be represented in a single, frozen scene. Baum also devised the notion of using themes to denote different departments of the store. In the employ of John Wanamaker, Baum developed the first true bridal department, a stage set through which he defined an entire wedding aesthetic. Once a bride-to-be had ventured into this world, the only way to feel like a true participant was to purchase every item in the ensemble. Anything less
would feel incomplete.
What Baum and his counterparts at other department stores realized was that they needed to tell stories and to create feelings instantaneously. Remember, even though the items for sale may have taken time to produce, the consumer exists in no-time. In a store window, there is no linear time in which to convey a narrative. Instead, store windows must communicate through a still image—like the Nativity scene in front of a church at Christmas. Similarly, the individual departments pushed customers to act by making them feel out of place at that very moment. After World War II, these efforts focused almost entirely on women, who were being counted on to consume enough to keep returning veterans at the plants, churning out merchandise. By the 1950s, the need to consume and participate in these fantasy worlds became so highly pressurized that women began stealing compulsively—a condition called kleptomania, which was finally recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in the early 1960s. (Interestingly, women were the only identified sufferers of the condition in the 1950s and ’60s. However, after women went back to work in the 1970s and marketers turned their attention to children, teenagers became the primary sufferers of kleptomania in America.) Kleptomania is just a symptom of this chronically induced inferiority—another way of expressing overwind. In the short forever of retail shopping, we are always out of step, hoping to buy our way into these worlds.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Page 17