Notes from ‘Present Shock’

In Present Shock, Douglas Rushkoff presents a convincing story about how we are living in the first present-minded world:

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.
The looking forward so prevalent in the 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now.

… But is quick to point out the many negatives that comes with such a worldview, chief among them the distraction this type of life causes:

We tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to create a plan — much less follow through on it — is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment. Instead of finding a stable foothold in the here and now, we end up reacting to the ever-presents assault of simultaneous impulses and commands.

A perfect example of the present mentality? A television’s remote control. It used to be that whatever story was being told to us was our only option (as he says later, “The word ‘entertainment’ literally means ‘to hold within,’ or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this…”), but this is no longer the case, and storytelling has shifted because of this new dynamic:

Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don’t click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don’t trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today’s television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moment on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show’s long commercial break to catch the end of the basketball game’s second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show b enforce the aliens show up.
Deconstructed in this fashion, television loses its ability to tell stories over time. It’s as if the linear narrative structure had been so misused and abused by television’s incompetent or manipulative storytellers that it simply stopped working, particularly on younger people who were raised in the more interactive media environment and equipped with defensive technologies. And so the content of television, and the greater popular culture it leads, adapted to the new situation.

Technology, and this present-mentality, isn’t all bad though, to Rushkoff’s surprise, as he witnessed the benefits first-hand through a pretty amazing company using video game technology to help patients (particularly soldiers) with PTSD:

Rizzo operated the simulation as I described a car accident that had occurred many years ago, in which I lost my best friend. I was originally planning on criticizing the technology for getting in the way of the human contact between therapists and their patients — but I was wrong. I had told the story of my car accident to many people, even a few psychotherapists, Burt never felt anything about the incident had been resolved. Just telling the story somehow was not enough. But in the simulator, I was able to tell Dr. Rizzo that the sky was a bit darker — it wasn’t quite dawn. He darkened the sky. Pinker, I said. He made it pinker. And there were some thinned-out shrubs on the side of the road. He added them. And my friend had a paler complexion. Done. Rizzo used another device to generate the smell of the desert and the juniper bushes I described. It was as if I were there again.
More important, Rizzo was there with me the whole time. He wasn’t just making the simulation for me; he was in the simulation with me. The human connection was actually more profound than when I had told the story to friends and even a therapist before, because I knew fore sure that he could see what I meant — because he was literally seeing and hearing and smelling what I was. By bringing a traumatically archived narrative into the present, the game simulation allowed me to reexperience it in real time instead of the artificiality of my story about it. It became real, and I have to admit, I was changed and even largely healed through the experience, which was meant only to doe the technology and not treat my own PTSD. But I never underestimated the potential of computer games again.

I particularly liked this point about how stories help drive values. What kind of values are driven by our current, present-minded mentality?

As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we leave those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries.

So many modern stories are references of references. Fittingly, he references Hampton Stevens referencing the master of the genre, Community, when diving into this concept, who says the show:

…isn’t actually a sitcom — any more than The Onion is an actual news-gathering organization. Community, instead, is a weekly satire of the sitcom genre, a spoof of pop culture in general.”

Though fun in the moment, Rushkoff worries that this form of entertainment is non-sustainable:

There is certainly a freedom associated with the collapse of narrative, but it is very easily surrendered to the bases forms of spectacle and abuse.

… But he finds hope in the next generation’s ability to find story all around them:

Young people raised in this environment are among the first to take back what has been lost. Instead of finding new storytellers, they become the equivalent of storytellers themselves. Snowboarders score their own paths down a slope, while skateboarders reinterpret the urban landscape as an obstacle course. Like their peers in other pursuits, they are playing winnerless, infinite games. This growing improvisatory subculture of players also abandons the single-minded effort of political parties to win offices; they instead write their own set of behavioral norms for activism and economic justice. Instead of looking to TV and film to inform them about the world and its values, they turn to computers and games to choose their own adventures and find their own answers.

Rushkoff then goes way, way back to the beginning of text itself to look at the way it alone changed communication:

With the invention of text came the ability to draft contracts, which were some of the first documents ever written, and described agreements that endured over time. With contracts came accountability, and some ability to control what lay ahead. The notion of a future was born. Religion, in the oral tradition, came from the mouth of a leader or pharaoh, himself a stand-in for God. Text transformed this passive relationship to God or nature with a contract, or, more precisely, a covenant between people and God. What God demands was no longer a matter of a tyrants whim or the randomness of nature, but a set of written commandments. Do this and you will get that.
This resonated well with people who were learning agriculture and developing a “reap what you sow” approach to their world. Seeds planted and tended now yield a crop in the future. Scriptural laws obeyed now earn God’s good graces in the future. The world was no longer just an endless churn of cycles, but a place with a past and a future. Time didn’t merely come around; it flowed more like a river, forming a history of all that went before. In the new historical sense of time, one year came after the other. Human beings had a story that could be told — and it was, in the Torah and other written creation myths.

With this shift on how time itself comes into play when we care about the present, the author considers our relationship with it:

…digital watches have not replaced their analog counterparts — though wristwatches are primarily ornamental for most wearers, who now read the time on a smart phone.
That is, if the smart phone only sat there and waited for us to read it. More often than not, it’s the phone or laptop demanding our attention, alerting us to the upcoming event in our schedule or unpacking one of a seemingly infinite number of its processes into our attention. Indeed, if the Axial Age was coordinated by the calendar, and the clockwork universe by the schedule, the digital era subjects us to the authority of code. Our children may have their afternoons scheduled, but we adults live in a world that is increasingly understood as a program.

… And continues making Biblical references that intrigue me, even if they’re a bit heavy-handed:

Our leading consumer-technology brand, Apple, makes this all too clear: using these devices is akin to taking a bite of the forbidden fruit, exchanging the ignorant holism of Eden for the self-aware choice making of adulthood. The “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” as the myth calls it, introduced humanity to the binary universe of active choice that computers now amplify for us today. As a downside, the new freedom of choice created self-consciousness and shame. Adam and Eve became self-aware and ashamed of their nudity. They were banished from the holism of Eden and went out into the world of yes and no, this and that, Cain and Abel, and good and evil.
The same is true for us today. Our digital technologies empower us to make so many choices about so many things. But the staccato nature of digital choice also thwarts our efforts to stay fully connected to our greater throughlines and to one another. Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix. I am with my daughter, but the phone is vibrating with a new instant message. Even if I choose to ignore the message and be with her, I have been yanked from the intimate moment by the very need to make a choice. Of course, IU can also choose to turn off the phone — which involved pulling it out of my pocket and changing a setting — or just leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again.

Rushkoff wonders what will become of those experiencing present shock, and looks to ‘Doomsday Preppers’ as a people-group who might represent those shocked to the extreme:

This missile silo repurposed as a bomb shelter isn’t a Plan B at all, but a fantasy. Whether Dan ever has to — or gets to — live in this place, its mere creation may be its truest purpose. Where the basement model railroad once gave the underachiever a chance to build and run a world, the doomsday apartment gives the overwhelmed present-shock victim the chance to experience the relief of finality and a return to old-fashioned time.

Finding balance and making peace with the present, past, and future, seems to be key.