However, new technologies and global supply chains are turning formerly seasonal commodities into year-round products. And consumers’ decreasing awareness of seasons is changing what we expect to find at our local market and when. This longer now of both supply and demand cycles is doing to many commodities traders what twenty-four-hour cable did to the evening news: in a world of constant flow, the ability to compress time becomes superfluous.
The pork belly commodity pits fell to this form of present shock just a few years ago. The pork belly trade—conducted primarily in a trading pit at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange—allowed investors to bet on the ebbs and flows of supply and demand. Hogs were slaughtered in certain seasons, and bacon was consumed most heavily in others. Commodity traders served to spring-load and unwind both sides of the trade. They bought up shares of frozen bellies and stored them in Chicago warehouses, and then sold them off when demand rose in March and April for Easter brunch and then again in late summer for the tomato harvest and everyone’s BLT sandwiches. The traders created storage when there was only flow, and flow when there was only storage. Pork bellies became the most popular product on the Chicago trading floor.
Consumers no longer understand why they should settle for frozen bacon during certain parts of the year, and pork suppliers have learned how to accommodate the demand for constant flow. With no need for their ability to translate flow into storage and back again, commodity traders left the pork bellies pit, and the oldest existing livestock futures contract was delisted. Futures traders became disintermediated by a marketplace looking for direct access to an always-on reality.
So while local merchants in depressed European economies are abandoning storage-based euros because it is too expensive for them to use, the pork industry stopped using futures because their focus on freshness and flow was no longer compatible with a spring-loaded strategy. Still other businesses are learning that moving from storage to flow helps them reduce their overleveraged dependence on the past and to take advantage of feedback occurring in the moment.
Walt Disney’s theme parks, for just one great example, began losing their luster and profit margins in the mid-1990s. Disney’s CEO at the time, Michael Eisner, wasn’t quite sure what was going wrong. He had been milking Walt Disney’s treasure trove of icons and intellectual property quite successfully in media for some time, but back in the real world, competition from Six Flags, Universal Studios, and other theme parks appeared to be moving in on Disney’s iconic theme park business. Walt Disney had died in 1966, long before most of the current staff at the parks had been born. Perhaps a new chief of Disney’s theme parks company could revive the spirit of Disney and teach the park’s people how to exude more of Walt’s trademark magic?
Eisner tapped his CFO, Judson Green, to put the parks on a growth track consonant with the greater studio’s expansion into radio, television, and sports. Could Green release the stored-up potential of Mickey, Donald, and the rest of Disney’s fabled intellectual property? Green took a completely different tack. Instead of relying on Disney’s spring-loaded century of content, he realized that a theme park always exists in the present. The key to reviving its sagging spirit was not to disinter and channel Uncle Walt, but to break the parks’ absolute dependence on the stored genius and brand value of the legendary animator.
Instead, Green turned the theme parks into an entirely presentist operation. This had less to do with updating rides or rebuilding Tomorrowland (both of which he did) than it did with changing the way communication and innovation occurred on the ground. Green’s philosophy of business was that innovation doesn’t come from the top or even from stored past experience, but from people working in the moment on the front lines. Management’s job is not to fill current employees with the collected, compressed wisdom of the ages, but rather to support them in the jobs only they are actually charged with doing. Management becomes a bit like a customer service department for the employees, who are the ones responsible for the business.
For example, a few years ago Disneyworld guests began complaining that they couldn’t fit their rented strollers onto the little railroad train that goes around the park. Traditionally, a company might look to solve the problem from the top down by, say, redesigning the trains. But the company tasked its employees with finding a solution. And sure enough, an employee came upon the obvious fix: let the guest turn his stroller in at one train location and then pick up a new one at the next. Removable stroller name cards were created, and the problem was solved. To the Disney guest, Walt’s magic was alive and well in the continual flow of solutions, and every service metric went through the roof along with efficiency and revenue. Green’s management style differed from Eisner’s, however, and the executive who transformed the parks from historical landmarks to innovation laboratories was terminated.36
Understandably, Michael Eisner was nervous about letting go of his company’s ample hard drive and living completely in RAM. After all, he had begun his tenure at the helm by reviving the Wonderful World of Disney television show on Sunday evenings and then introducing the show on camera, in the style of Walt himself. He also licensed Disney imagery, seemingly everywhere, and traded on the Disney name and brand to make business deals that may not have been entirely in keeping with Disney’s tradition of putting quality over profit. His impulse to squander so much of Disney’s stored legacy all at once did boost Disney’s stock price but horrified Disney’s heirs. Roy E. Disney claimed Eisner had turned Disney into a “rapacious, soul-less” company, resigned from the board, and began the process that led to Eisner’s own resignation a few years later.37 In his own book on the period, Eisner still seems oblivious to the fundamental issue at play, preferring to see it as a clash of management styles and personalities than a culturewide case of present shock.
Balancing the needs of the present against the stored leverage of the past is a tricky proposition, and where so many of us get confused. How many generations before our own asked people to earn and save enough money while young in order to accumulate a nest egg big enough to live off for the last third of one’s life? It’s a bit like asking an animal to get fat enough not to have to eat again for the rest of its natural life.
But the opposite (however attractive from a survivalist’s perspective) doesn’t really work, either. Living completely in RAM is a bit like living on an Atkins diet. Everything just goes through you. With no bread, no starch, there’s nothing to hang on to. There’s no storage, no accumulation. There’s never any leverage, just constant motion—all flow. An absolutely presentist approach to business, or life for that matter, is untenable. Except for a Buddhist monk, literally walking the streets with nothing but a bowl in hand, who can live this way much less run a business or organization? No one.
Instead, we learn to spring-load appropriately. We compress and unpack time in ways that support the present moment without robbing from the future or depleting our reserves. We don’t pack so much in that we horde and weigh down the present, but we don’t get so lean that we cannot survive without uninterrupted access to new flow. We learn to spring-load without overwinding.
WINDING UP
Instead of avoiding all time compression whatsoever, we can use our knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses to our advantage. There are ways to pack time into projects in advance, so that the vast hours or years of preparation unfold in the instant they are needed.
As the first fire-using cave people realized, the natural world is spring-loaded with energy that can be released in the present as heat. A tree is a few hundred years of sun energy, stored in wood. Oil stores still more years of energy, and coal even more. That’s why they’re called fossil fuels. We release the densely packed investment of millennia of life in order to power our world right now. In doing so, we deplete the reserves available for the future faster than they can be replenished. We also pollute the future faster than it can be cleaned.
When storage fails, we turn to flow. In the face of fossil fuel’s s
hortcomings, we are attracted to sustainable and renewable energy resources such as wind and solar. They don’t appear to deplete anything: the sun keeps shining and wind keeps blowing. They don’t leave any residue for our grandchildren to breathe in or clean up. The problem is that they are not truly continuous. The sun goes away at night, and winds are irregular. The answer, again, is to compress and store the energy of one moment to use at another.
This is harder than it seems. The current barrier to renewable energy (other than reluctance to disrupt today’s fossil fuel markets with a free alternative) is our inability to store and distribute energy efficiently. Current battery technology is not only inadequate to the job, it also requires the mining of rare earth metals such as lithium and molybdenum, which are as easy to deplete as oil. We end up weaning our cars off oil only to make them dependent on other even more leveraged and scarce battery materials. The solution lies in our ability to find ways to compress and unwind energy in as close to real time as possible, so that the materials we require for battery storage needn’t be as concentrated as lithium. It also involves learning to spend our energy more frugally than we did in the twentieth century, when we had no idea coal and oil—or that atmosphere—may be in limited supply. Nature stores energy on a very different timescale than human combustion technologies can burn it.
Maybe this is why Prometheus was punished by the gods for bringing fire to mortals. Perhaps the tellers of this myth sensed that fire was unwinding the stored time of the gods—of nature—and unleashing a force beyond human understanding or control. Interestingly, his punishment was a torturous present shock: he was tied to a cliff where an eagle consumed his liver, perpetually.
We humans cannot live entirely in the short forever, however. Building a civilization has meant learning to store time and spring-load things carefully and deliberately. We can do so without angering the gods or destroying our world. Spring-loading doesn’t even have to be an artifact of the fossil record; it can be an entirely intentional and predictable strategy.
Taking their cue from nature, many businesses and organizations have learned to pack time into one phase of their work so that it can spring out like a fully formed pup tent when it is needed. The Shaare Zadek Medical Center employed this strategy to erect an instant set of operating rooms, clinics, and wards in a soccer field in Japan, serving victims of the 2011 tsunami. Although field hospitals have been used by the military for close to a century now, the doctors at Shaare Zadek took this concept to a whole new level by creating ready-to-ship, expandable medical centers that can be air-dropped virtually anywhere. “If you drop our group in the middle of a desert, we can work,” explains one of the hospital’s cardiac surgeons.38
Shaare Zadek has been working on the process since 1979 but reached public attention after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. The Israeli hospital achieved mythic status, providing earthquake victims with a level of care that wasn’t accessible to them even under normal circumstances, such as modern respirators and properly cross-matched blood transfusions. In Japan, Shaare Zadek was not only the first field hospital on the ground, it was also the most equipped, offering everything from obstetrics to ophthalmology. The field hospital has gone on twelve missions so far, each one serving as a new iteration that compounds upon the previous ones. As a time-management scheme, Shaare Zadek models spring-loading at its best: weeks of physical loading and preparation plus years of experience and learning are all packed into shipping containers that open and expand instantaneously on site, where they can be used in an emergency—when there is no time to spare.
We see new forms of spring-loading occurring across many different sectors of society, particularly as we move into increasingly digital spaces. Joichi Ito, Internet entrepreneur and director of MIT’s Media Lab, for example, believes that the development cycle of new technologies needs to be compressed. The formerly distinct processes of prototyping a product and releasing it onto the net have become the same thing. Arguing for flow over deliberation, Ito explains, “It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map.”39 In other words, instead of researching the market, prototyping a product, testing it, and then building a real version later, the developer compresses these processes into a single flow—planning, building, testing, and releasing simultaneously. It’s the Tao of unwinding the past while winding the future, all in the same present.
Such a strategy depends on a community willing to help. Customers must see themselves as beneficiaries of their own investment in alpha- and beta-level software, competitors must see themselves as participants in the overall value creation unleashed by the project, and the initial developers must trust in their ongoing ability to innovate even after what they have shared is copied by others. It requires some underlying commons for it to work, because only the commons has a stake in the long-term repercussions of our actions. So far, most of us seem incapable of thinking this way.
That’s what is meant by the tragedy of the commons. A bunch of individuals, acting independently and out of self-interest, may deplete a shared resource even though it hurts everyone in the long run. It applies to corporations that externalize costs such as pollution, but it’s what happens when net users illegally download music and movies, expecting others to pick up the tab. It is in each person’s short-term self-interest to steal the music. Only the sucker pays. But when everyone thinks that way, there’s no one left to pay for the musician, and the music stops altogether.
The individualistic act of stealing the music or depleting the resource is a form of compression, robbing from the future to enjoy something in the present at no cost. As long as we live as individuals, the distant future doesn’t really matter so much. The philosophy of the long now would suggest that the only way to see past this immediate, consumer-era self-satisfaction is to look further in the future. Have kids. Once we see that our long-term self-interest is no longer served, we may all, individually, change our behaviors. Even if we are thinking selfishly, prioritizing “me in the long run” isn’t quite so bad as “me right now.”
There’s some good evidence that long-term thinking—even self-interested long-term thinking—pushes people to more collaborative solutions. In Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments, for example, individuals are likely to testify against their accomplices in return for lighter sentences. The game is simple: two people are arrested and separated. If one testifies against his partner and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent one goes to jail for a year. If both remain silent, they both get just one month in jail. If both betray, they each get three months.
So the worst possible outcome for an individual is to stay silent while the partner rats him out. This leads many to seek the safest, seemingly most self-interested way out—betray the opponent. The more times people play the game, however, the more likely they are to choose the more collaborative solution. They realize that they will have to play each other again and again, so it is now in their self-interest to demonstrate that they won’t betray the opponent. The collaborating team gets the shortest total sentence if both stay silent. This sense of cooperation increases the greater the possibility of having to play again. As political scientist Robert Axelrod explains it, once “the shadow of the future”40 lengthens, we have the basis for more durable relationships.
And that’s certainly a step in the right direction. We are no longer content burning the past to pay for the present, because all of a sudden there’s a future to worry about. I didn’t truly start worrying about global warming or the depletion of water until I had a daughter, who by her very existence extended my mental timeline. But the more we ponder the future in this way, the more paralyzed we become by the prospect of the long now—frozen with that plastic bottle over the trash can.
Inconvenient truths tend to create more anxious
neurotics than they do enlightened stakeholders. Those most successfully navigating the short forever seem to be the ones who learn to think wider, not longer. We must be able to expand our awareness beyond the zero-sum game of individual self-interest. It’s not the longer time horizon that matters so much to alleviating our present shock as it is our awareness of all the other prisoners in the same dilemma. This is why the commons offers us not only the justification for transcending self-interested behavior but also the means to mitigating the anxiety of the short forever. The greater community becomes the way we bank our time and experience.
Or think of it this way: the individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time. In presentist interactions, such as those conducted through alternative currencies in Greece, the individual can no longer horde value. But the greater community is activated, and more goods and services move between people. The town that had no merchants, restaurants, or service providers now gets them, debt-free. Meanwhile, the community’s experience with each vendor becomes part of its shared, stored, knowledge bank.
In a living community, one’s reputation becomes the purest form of time binding and the easiest way of benefiting from the commons. The number of successful transactions next to your username on eBay is the community’s accumulated experience with you as a seller and buyer, all boiled down into one number. In a network of self-interested individuals, such as the music stealers online, the files may be rated but not the people who uploaded them. They remain anonymous, not just because they are breaking the law, but because they understand that they are violating the commons.
The way to move beyond the paralyzing effects of the short forever is to stop trying to look so far into the individual futures of people or businesses, and instead to become more aware of what connects them to everyone and everything else right now.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Page 20