 All right welcome everyone to the New America Foundation. I'm Marvin Amore. I am a future tense fellow here I tend to write about the internet and the First Amendment and how people communicate through new technology I'm really excited about this discussion with two authors Christine Rosen as a forthcoming book on how technology mediates our relationship with reality and Doug Rushkoff the author of the book out there and this book right here present shock when everything happens now And we're really excited to have both of these thinkers because one of the One of the things I've noticed in the last few years is sort of wave of books about how technology Changes the way we think right isn't making us smarter is making a stummer is it making our thinking more shallow or less shallow And I think you know this is an issue Doug. You've thought about quite a bit and your book really kind of tries to think through You know how the human mind changes in light of new technology, so let me sort of talk a little bit about your thoughts sure It's interesting. I mean I don't see present shock as as Certainly not entirely a technological Book or issue, you know, I think we are we are in a digital age So things are different, but it's not just technology that that makes things different The reason I called it present shock was you know I was raised in the era of future shock when that was the sort of the seminal text and where that was the Kind of the prevailing cultural attitude was this leaning forward towards the new millennium We had all these shows remember before Walt Disney was on there was this show on the 21st century that was about you know monorails and jetpacks and the late 1990s then was so much about you know the long boom and the dot-com boom and Speculation and what's gonna happen in the y2k bug and planes falling out of the sky and the Millennium approaching and harmonic convergence and 2012 it was all where we go What's gonna happen? There was this palpable sort of leaning forward that then when we hit the year? 2000 felt like all of a sudden everything kind of stopped that we weren't in a forward leaning Moment anymore, but in a present based one that we weren't really in the industrial age anymore with its Expansion and requirement for growth and new territories and new conquests and you thickened flags on the moon and getting to big projects, but we were kind of like Here you know now what? and that's why the market crashed in February March of 2000 that's why people started to look at Alternatives to growth and started to consider things like sustainability as as compared to growth you know and coupled with that was the emergence of digital technology which Originally, I thought was gonna be a way for people to take back their time You know I was part of the slacker generation So we were looking for ways to increase slack which meant time just spent reading philosophy or having fun as opposed to punching the clock and working and being some kind of a yuppie scum, you know get a job person and Digital technology seemed like a great answer a tool for us because now we could work in our own time in our underwear from home and Do it directly with other people rather than even working for the man You know we would have some kind of an Etsy burning man like peer-to-peer trading future and instead it seemed like what we did Around the turn of the century is wired magazine sort of announces that we're in an attention economy and the internet becomes the salvation of the kind of dying industrial age model and Rather than having new territories to expand to we decide that human attention and human time is the new commodity And we take these time-saving devices and strap them to our bodies and have them ping us every time Someone wants to alert us or Facebook us or tweet about us or send us an ad or do this We end up in the state of constant emergency interruption where we no longer Are really in in full control of our nervous systems we end up in the state that used to be endured only by 9-1-1 operators and and and air traffic controllers and That's It's not only you know dangerous or bad for the mind and frying of the nervous system But it's it's missing the opportunity of digital technology So I'm pro digital technology, but anti the way we use digital technology because we're just using it I think to amplify and extend the obsolete kind of growth imperatives of the industrial age Rather than using it to embrace or experiment with with the new possibilities of of a digital age and present shock is really just that That one way of dealing with in a shocked way with the temporal compression with the world without beginnings middles and ends Without goals without sort of long-range goals when this sense of your future and your past Just careening into you like your second grade friends on Facebook and the ads that are coming to you from a big data Future that you didn't even know you were going to have you know that that shock could also be a Kind of a present ism a positive present ism where we we embrace the humanity of the real moment that we're in and Kind of reclaim home field advantage over the temporal landscape So Christine this is something you've thought about quite a bit In terms of the effect of alerts and constant notifications on our life What do you have to say about? About what Doug said comments. Um, well, I highly recommend the book I have to say it was such a fun read and you are an optimist which is nice It's a nice change to read about technology and a thoughtful optimist I would say I kept thinking I jotted down this pulmonary quote the trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used To be and that's what I kept thinking of when I was reading Doug's book because he's not saying Oh, we're all going to hell in a handbasket, but he was saying, you know things haven't turned out the way we'd hope So how do we change that and that's I think a very optimistic it gives us some room for agency So having said all those nice things now I want to push you a little bit on how we do that because one the other thing that kept coming up You have excellent discussion of attention and sort of how our internal clocks work about multi-tasking and it's and it's Negative side effects the fact that we actually can't multitask and this whole idea that our Society in some ways particularly in the business world is trying to turn us to the rules of the machine rather than having the machines adapt to human needs But I kept thinking then about and I agree with everything you say about not being 24 7 available to everyone all the time And and then I kept thinking about that new Facebook home commercial series Have you seen these where there's a girl sitting at her boring family meal and you know She's she instead takes herself away by touching Facebook home and engaging with her friends through the screen rather than with the people Right in front of her and this is a message that a lot of large companies in Silicon Valley are aggressively Pursuing and encouraging us to pursue So how do we square that circle between the more balanced approach you would like us to have and the fact that the Companies who are creating the software and technologies we use every day want us to do the opposite It's hard to balance it. I mean the funny thing about those Facebook commercials I mean and there's also one of a guy at work that he's at the meeting where this new tools being announced And he's not paying attention to a Zuckerberg and it's as if to say all the jokes on us or you know So so now we can all laugh about it But what they're doing is taking the weakness and just advertising it as a strength right the problem with this stuff Is it's going to distract you from whatever it is you should be doing? But it's oh, no, that's a good thing Is it you know and of course it's not but if you don't like your life Then it is a good thing if you don't like your neighbors Then it is a good thing not to know who they are if you don't like your family Then it is a good thing to get to talk to other people and this is I mean as I see if this is what the the the downside of you know can sort of consumer driven capitalism is that the growth of To sell more objects to people in less time we need people not to like each other You know it's sort of it's it when you know went when it's true though on a certain level right a certain kind of growth You know when I was a kid I was raising in a in a middle-class neighborhood of Queens where there was one barbecue pit at the end of the block that Everybody used and we were all friends with our neighbors was a whole thing We moved to Scarsdale, which is this rich Westchester suburb and now there's one barbecue in everybody's yard You know and that's better for the grill company, but we weren't barbecuing with the Joneses anymore Now we were barbecuing against the Joneses in that sort of competitive way. So I feel like the the our Technological companies for the most part are going to make more money as long as our communications and interactions are mediated by their Devices by their interfaces because even if we're not paying to use it at least they're scraping data from Those interactions if I'm just talking to you in real life They don't get that so don't know I mean I don't believe that these are Real choices that they're giving us. Oh now you don't like where you are you have the choice To leave you know and where I actually think that it's real life That's getting interrupted by almost the intrusive choice of the possibility of leaving It's tricky though, you know, it's like this is the same debate that in some ways We had late 90s. I was at this synagogue and they brought me in to discuss whether it was ethical according to Jewish law Come back to Zionism. I'm sorry whether it was ethical. I said anything but Zionism as a joke Whether it was ethical in Jewish law to have old people get to watch Shabbat service through a computer rather than going and it's like yeah I can count for their Shabbat, but it's not ethical for the community to stop going to that old person's house to bring them To the Shabbat because they now have a technology that's good enough. So it's sort of that it's that Yes, we have new choices, but those choices new choices sort of force us to look at whether We really want to be taking them Okay on the issue of choice the other thing that popped up is that you have a lot of examples of You know things sites like Etsy where people are you know cranking out the artisanal pickles and every basement in Brooklyn And you know, this is all for the good, you know, people can make a living doing creative work and selling it online But I was thinking and you have I think a really good model for how the different approaches one could take to Set up a day where you can get your creative work done and not be distracted And and you have the example of a friend who makes candles and sells them on Etsy But I kept thinking in my you know my earliest jobs I would I had a time punch card and I had a very obnoxious boss and I had no control over when I did my work I did it when I was told and that's the reality and the truth for a lot of workers in this country If they're lucky enough even to have jobs And so I was thinking if you look at the way technology is being integrated into the workplace It's not just in a way to manage and control our productivity as creative workers or knowledge class workers But look at a factory or look at people who who have to wash their hands food service workers Who are now being tracked with sensors to make sure they're standing in front of the sink and washing their hands every time They use the bathroom. So again, it goes to this point of technology can be good or bad What are your thoughts about that level of control when it's imposed by a corporation or in the previous week's news the government? The kind of surveillance is going on both at the domestic and They're different in different ways. I mean in in terms of the temporal control over people I would argue the companies that exercise it are making a mistake They're actually making a productivity and a profit mistake on a certain level that Again what the what one of the great things we got in the industrial age was the clock You know, that's when the clock really replaced the calendar as the as as the way we organize and with the clock We got to break up the day into all these units with the clock We got the ability now to pay people for their time rather than to pay people for the value They created I mean marks and I'll talk about this If this was sort of the beginning of the alienation of the worker from the value they created, right? So now I'm not getting paid to make a shoe I'm getting paid for an hour or two hours or three hours of shoe Making so now I know I'm no longer connected to the value of the shoe just the time that I put into it It's also when we changed money right so money instead of money being a reflection of how much grain came in from the fields And we're going to use a receipt to say that grain now money is something that's issued with interest It's it's a product of the clock time quite literally became money I'm going to issue this money has to be paid back with interest in this amount of time So in every dollar there's this clock that's also running. So that's why the the bias then of A management goes from you know innovation and quality goes to time management and scientific management of people and stopwatch management and Sort of became that was was right before computers and now we're using computers to extend that yet What we're finding when we do treat people in that way as cogs of the machine not only does their ability to innovate and and come up with new ideas and Their quality go down, but their quality of life goes down shift workers have more cancer You know there when you when you're changing them around they get more stress and more post-traumatic stress Whereas if you and this is where it starts to sound new agey But if you start looking at how does human time work how do biological clocks work underneath the way people are well What are circadian rhythms? What is the day night balance and in work? What are the weeks during a lunar cycle when people are more creative? When do they want to rest? How do neurotransmitters change over the course of a month when you start looking at that like I did just I looked at the tip Of the iceberg for this book. I started to find out Oh the first week of a new moon people's acetylcholine is higher second week There's serotonin goes up third week their dopamine goes up fourth week their norepinephrine goes up Well, acetylcholine is good for meeting people good for new ideas great for launching a new product into the marketplace Serotonin is great for working for head down gonna push through dopamine is great for parties concerts This is when you have your your retreat you do your off-site during a dopamine week norepinephrine is very analytical It's cold. It's a fight-or-flight response great for doing that this week You do your organ for me We organize the chapters of a book and the structure, you know So if you understand that as either an employer or a marketer all of a sudden you're now Optimizing your company to sort of human moods and and culture moods. We're going through this collectively everybody's in the same week It's like well whoa now we have actually more power out of them less So it's it's sort of it's sort of that in terms of total surveillance control and all that It's dark I mean I think what happened to government now is governments in present shop government looks and says look Facebook has all This big data they could predict when someone's going to get pregnant when they're going to turn gay when they're going to buy a car You know and Google can predict all this I want in on some of that I got some needs of prediction here, right? So they end up employing the technology automatically the technology just grows so fast and let's use this Let's use that it's uses they they just like a person Unthinkingly putting email on his arm and having it vibrate every time anybody emails him rather than learning how the technology works and deciding Oh, I'm gonna let it vibrate when it's my wife or my kid But not let it vibrate when it's anybody else rather than doing that Government does the same thing they just grab the thing Let's just take it all and do it all and total control and see what everything we can They're like well wait a minute. You need to use this in a in a more intelligent way so the story you tell about the clock the story of the clock becoming a tool of Management and of divorcing workers from their value and then tying it to their time You know what I've thought about in terms of the last 20 years with the internet, you know to me It feels like a very liberating Mindset change that now, you know, there was a time, you know 20 years ago when you know, there was There are people who wrote the paper for the New York for the papers people who sent letters into the editor Hoping to get published then we move to a moment where all of us can just hit the word publish And they just became like revolution and there was a time when like you couldn't be a publisher now all of us We publishers but there's a time when you know people had Encyclopedia Britannica and you'd read it if you could afford it and now everyone in the world has an encyclopedia and Can edit it and contribute to it? and When I sort of read about the sort of thinking about innovation and motivating employers and sort of getting them to innovate The idea is that now even people who use your product can be innovators Including also people at the bottom of the employment chain can innovate you want to make sure they can communicate up And it's no longer just management telling people what to do and a sort of top-down Structure of you know daddy knows best in media in in jobs There's sort of there's sort of I think a reawakening of the idea that Everyone has a certain amount of creativity and can contribute and that we should structure Jobs in that way and just use one example for a long time Google had a 20% Project for every engineer every engineer could spend 20% of their time every week on whatever they wanted right the Whatever they created would be owned by Google but right because it was all but yeah But it was on Google it was on Google's time But they are health insurers but the idea no the idea was simple the idea was we want our workers to innovate and The way best way they'll innovate is by letting them do whatever they want right and so they created I think Gmail and a whole bunch of other really popular products through Having no management and just letting people innovate so so when I see sort of the flip side of You're sort of the positive story a way of tellurization. I see you sort of a sort of More confidence in the imagination of the average human now that we have the Internet Yeah, I mean and there's some of that there's some of that to go around on on the other hand I feel like what often happens is a new medium comes around and An elite Seizes the new capability on offer where most people really just sees the capability of the last renaissance right so we get reading you know and we we get text and God says to Abraham you will be a nation of priests right meaning you'll all be able to read this stuff And you're gonna be able and what did we get you know by the Middle Ages? We've got rabbis going to the town square reading Torah to people who stand there listening So people can now hear the word of God like Pharaoh could centuries before But only the elite the rabbis can read then we get the printing press We think oh did we get a nation of writers? No, now we got people who could read but an elite who had who had access to the press They could write now we get computers and the people can write We can all blog but can the people program know the people can't program the elite program the elite programs the Interfaces through which all of this interactivity takes place So you know as long as we're blogging on blogger or as long as we're tweeting on Twitter as long as we're updating on Facebook You know, that's fine. So we're great We've got the great 13th century capability of Gutenberg But we have so little understanding of the platforms on which on which this is happening. We think it's free Oh, it's free. We get to do this for free. Why is Gmail free? We found out last week why Gmail is free, right? Because we're paying with our data. We've been paying All along so, you know, so there's that on on on the other hand I absolutely agree the the pop the real opportunity here is to transcend jobs altogether Right. This is the part of the book that gets all supposedly lefty, but it's not lefty. It's righty If anything it's it's it's post righty is Obama and everybody are out there saying we need to create more jobs. We need to create more jobs Why do we need to create more jobs? Who wants a job? I don't want a job. Do you want a job? Does anybody want a job jobs are an artifact of the industrial age? There weren't jobs before then there was just work people made stuff people did things jobs only came around after corporate charters and Corporate monopolies when you had to work for a company in order to create value because you weren't allowed to have your own Little company unless it was registered of registered monopoly You weren't able to borrow money unless you were able to you weren't it will start a business less You could borrow money because local currencies were legal now. We're finally in a landscape where First off we have enough technology that we don't need as many people employed to make all the stuff We need right the jobs problem is that we can't figure out stuff for people to do because we've gotten so efficient at making stuff It's like what do we do with the toll collectors now that we don't need them anymore? Oh, well kick them out of their houses first because they don't have any money to pay for them And then what are we gonna do with the houses? Well, let's tear down the houses because prices will go down if we let them sit empty and foreclosure Let's burn the food that we don't need because we can't just let people have it because they don't have jobs Where we don't actually need jobs anymore at all in this sort of at to I mean in the Etsy handcrafted Whatever if making artisanal beers is gonna actually give you something to do of meaning then you should be doing that You know, it's where we're actually past the point We're in the place that Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush and all the early theorists were Futurizing about what if we get to a place where we actually do have robots that can tell the fields and And Googles that can drive the cars, you know, whatever they're called, you know Google bots or do they have a name for it? So if the other you go sound driving car, what do we do? What do we do with the cab drivers? You know, we let them to have fun You know is what we do we let them write video games We let them, you know, do do creative tasks for one another Our real problem is that we're running a digital economy on a 13th century economic operating system All right, we're stuck on a printing press era scarcity-based growth mandated bank based central currency OS Which is why you look at companies as a funny part you look at Google and Facebook and Twitter these digital age Companies they're not the first digital age companies. These are the last industrial age companies these people. They're so happy to disrupt Newspapers, they're happy to disrupt TV. They're happy to disrupt politics. They're happy to disrupt everybody's industry Right, but what do they do the first chance they get they go to Goldman Sachs? And they say oh daddy give me a series B, you know They want to have an IPO right they wanted to go back to the oldest thing oldest thing in the book and Sell their company to the man You know the first digital age companies are going to be the ones that flip that and say oh We don't actually even need to do that if you got six kids and two laptops you can Grow your whole business you can scale your whole thing you can actually do it now I have to interrupt because okay. You're not a righty That's not the capital is all right But what about what about let's talk about the things that don't do so well under a free market system things like if you're a poet or For example any of the non-market humanities based in very deeply humane Important work. I was a history PhD you can see you know I can also say would you like fries with that which is basically what to do if you have a man of these PhD this this day and age There is every time I have my UK publisher I remember walking into their offices and on one wall with a big blown-up picture of Julian Barnes's latest novel Which I really enjoyed on the other wall with a big blown-up picture of 50 shades of gray And you know what one would not exist without the other Many of us who write for a living whether it's online or not are heavily subsidized by the 50 shades of grays of the world There are but there is use and value in publishing excellent poetry and in and having a whole generation of new Composers of music these things do not necessarily give you a market return and you can't just turn them out in your basement with any hope of long-term The ability to support a family for example, I mean you can try but it's it's really really a challenge So the people who want to make pickles I say go for it But if you want to make poetry it's going to be a bit harder to make a living for yourself you can get published Yeah, but you're not going to necessarily be able to sustain yourself. So Not again to be the pessimist here But what about the non-market activities that we've always valued as a culture in a society that can't quite find a footing in this new Presence is that you were thinking of radically changing all of society to let taxi drivers out of jobs play and write video games You're not thinking that they they can actually make money as poets you would change society somehow Well, I would I would Yeah, if I were in charge Yeah, I would say, you know food and shelter the basic food and shelters is a Given at this point that we are we are actually rich enough as not just as a nation But as a planet to to supply all that pretty readily, you know our our main obstacles I think our market obstacles we can't have free energy because what would the oil companies do? I mean there's a lot we can't do right now because we don't have a way to justify Distribution and I do think that they're that there would be in some sense more of a market for poetry And alternative video games which could be looked at it as a kind of poetry In a world where the taxi driver didn't have to drive the cab to stay alive I Mean it's about it to be a slow transition to an economy of meaning and and learning rather than economy of production Okay, this is he loves Occupy Wall Street. You have a good section in the book actually not love is too strong a word You there's like there's a really interesting Analysis that Doug does in his book about Occupy Wall Street in a comparison to the Tea Party and in a discussion about how presentist-minded political movements are undermining themselves I Disagreed with your take on the Occupy Wall Street movement I think a lot of the problems that they had were in fact present as problems this this unwilling this kind of it was cloaked in an idealism that was of course, you know very media friendly at that point in time But basically if you can't get together organize a some sort of Platform and get a candidate out there to run either in a third-party system or even in the two-party system How are you going to accomplish your goals? I mean yelling and screaming about stuff is important It's always had a place in a democracy, but then what do you do? How do you implement change? Well, this is a thing I mean that occupiers and I I Think they feel this way. I certainly feel this way. Um, I Often feel that the best path towards the things I want to see happen are not Political action, but our activism, you know direct activism, so it's not activism in order to change some policy thing But let's just get this thing done and see if they arrest us, you know And you know for just getting water to the right people are doing the you know sort of occupy sandy Let's just deal with this problem You know because politics certainly national politics feels so again so industrial age so branded so removed so abstracted It's so big. I mean yeah, it does matter. I know it matters. Who's the president, but who is the president? It feels like a big kind of a coke Pepsi decision more than how are we going to get our local community less dependent on Pathmark and more able to create its own Sort of you know Agricultural reality. How do we get people to support a community supported agriculture system? How do we improve our own public school? I mean, I just don't see The the state So effective in In solving these things. I mean what I liked about Occupy was Its approach to present ism seem to be one of okay We're gonna be here now in other words We're gonna be less about the sort of eyes on the prize ends justify the means campaign to victory and much more about Process, I mean it was also unbearable, right because it was so boring or you'd sit there and do your general assembly We're gonna sit here until everybody agrees that this is where we're okay. We're all okay good We're all there. We're all agreeing that was meaning what's when they agree. We're all gonna We're all gonna be there unless unless somebody stops It's like oh my god, but it was it was at least more Genuinely presentist and less present shock than I thought the Tea Party was or is which is the Tea Party's that kind of Impatience of present shock. Oh, I want it right now. Okay. Let's want this thing They don't want to go through, you know, they don't have this sort of the patience for for politics the way it works So as a as a lawyer, you know when I think of Presentism present shock and the Tea Party and Occupy I just think if I were part of the Occupy movement I wouldn't worry about building a political party because the entire legal infrastructure is stacked against them If you just go through all the Supreme Court cases very hard to start a third party The party primary system in every state has been sort of gutted by Supreme Court decisions. You have Citizens United You have mad redistricting You have what people call, you know first pass the post voting you have an entire legal infrastructure that makes you think G It felt like a democracy and then the banks defrauded everyone tanked our economy and still run everything, right? So I'm just gonna go protest because what what else am I gonna do not protest though? That's the idea there wasn't I don't think I don't think of Occupy as much as protest as Prototype right for a new political process for a new kind of process that is less about Representative democracy and more about kind of direct action right to democracy was never direct I think direct democracy is kind of silly democracy is not meant to be direct democracy is meant to be Indirect you know and and activism can be direct So it's sort of a flat if you've ever had to vote in the state of California, which I family members who do direct democracy I mean if you try to graft one of those systems on to the other you're gonna have a real problem My sister can't get potholes covered on her street because it's gonna take a ballot initiative I mean that the the lengths that they have to go to because of this sort of yeah And then people directly vote for things that you can't actually do like we're gonna go for insurance should be zero So I do think I mean one of the arguments that's been raised about technologies role in democracy is that it tends to be uniquely generally positive transparency good openness, you know direct Contact with one's representatives, but I mean there's it's now an old example But when all the offices in Congress got email addresses everyone said this is a huge boon for democracy You can you don't have to sit there and write a letter You don't have to even you can be less, you know You can go to the public library and send an email to your representative and get feedback Well, it actually led to more distance between people and the representatives because they were so inundated with at you know Organized groups sending spam tons of mail But now it's often harder to get through the system you have to know someone who's going to pick up the phone You've got it it was an ideal that had an unintended consequence and I think with a lot of these discussions of Presentism I mean that the thing that you you do a lot in this book Which I another reason I really enjoyed is that there's a lot of history in here There's a lot of none of this is new a lot of these challenges are old We're looking at them in a different way and we're succeeding and failing and in new in different ways But the challenges are still deeply human what it means to be an embodied human being who has an internal clock What it means to want to do meaningful productive work and also make a living doing it and support your family doing it So in the sense of the historical knowledge Americans are notoriously bad at knowing their own history not to mention the rest of the World how much of what I mean I get the sort of we should know how to code We should be able to control our own technologies But how much of this is actually a bigger cultural issue of kind of a cultural vast cultural illiteracy of our own history And how that hobbles us in the present it is I mean and then we get even more illiterate when there's a wobble right when there's a Transition moment, I mean what I'm really writing about is a very very old Dynamic or conflict between the two kinds of time what the Greeks called Kronos Which is time of the clock and what they called Kairos, which is human time or timing right Kronos is I crashed the car at 402 Right, what's the best time to tell dad? I crashed the car 415. No, it's after he's had his drink Before he's opened the bills, right? So it has nothing to do with the time on the clock, right? so the Kronos the time on the clock has changed over time right the initial Kronos was when we got writing We had the calendar with the invention of the calendar humans were taken out of that sort of purely organic natural time And now they had a past and a future right now We had history that we could write down and we had a future in contracts that we could be accountable for Religion changed from the sort of polytheism to you know a future-based Moshe-ach oriented back to Zionism Moshe-ach oriented Religion right where now we can now we kind of a monotheism There's one God and the world's not right yet because it's going to be right someday in the future That's that's why we wrote a contract with God as Torah. It's a covenants a contract We do this now you do that later and we built a society around that right up until the invention of the clock Then we got a new Kronos. We got Kronos of time of mechanical Kronos and mechanical Kronos led to great Efficiencies and expansion and money and all that what we were talking about now. We get digital Kronos Digital Kronos is different from analog Kronos But you think about the the analog clock I had next to my bed when I was a kid the clock radio with a sweep second hand They called it and it went around it each minute had a narrative had a beginning a middle and an end There's a fresh minute and then it goes around the middle then it's coming up around the back And then oh, it's a new fresh 902 a new fresh minute But it was it was I remember I watched it and it had that circular feeling to it when I got my first digital clock It was the kind with the little flip cards remember those and it'd be like 901 Bob 902 903 right so time now is no longer this thing that moves right over circle now time is something that stands still it's Absolute what is a minute in the analog universe a minute is the 60th of an hour? What is a minute in the digital universe? It's an absolute. It's a duration Who would wait a minute to load something if it's loading up It's that pinwheel of death you get if you're a mac user, you know Exactly it just sits and you don't know if the pinwheel that it might just be sitting there right there Or it might be you don't know if something's passing or not anymore. It's just there and that's It's it's a totally differences totally different society that you're gonna live in it's a presentist society Which is why and it doesn't mean we're not gonna have any goals We're not ever gonna ever do anything on a campaign or an ends justify the means things, but it means that the the Bias of a digital media landscape as McLuhan might call what we're in now But the bias of this media environment is going to be presentist rather than futurist. It's going to be in now-based things rather than in goal-based things and it's good on a certain level because it can get us off the growth Spiral and into some sort of sustainable things. How do we? Sustain it's kind of like middle age where it's less about where am I going then all right? How am I gonna just hang on for these teeth, you know another few another few decades, you know, but it's it's unbearable, right? It's unbearable to just be if we're not comfortable with ourselves as human beings Okay, so when you when you talked about the difference between you know the first clock I know I have a digital clock The transformation you're talking about when it comes to the first clock strikes me as you know It's like a big disruption in how we see the world how we see time And in the examples that you use in the book at least a lot of the examples Regarding sort of the present shock are sort of things that like are happening in our society that are just sort of optimized a little better With new technology, so it doesn't feel so disruptive so much as we're just doing the same stuff a little faster No, I mean I'll just use a few examples. I'd written down One you know you talk about black box trading so really fast algorithm trading, you know the entire sort of stock market infrastructure Isn't all that different. It's just we do everything Faster about 30-year mortgages, you know people have these 30-year mortgages They can't afford because they because they think about today and they don't think about the lifetime of a 30-year payment That's something we've had for decades We can just sort of fool people better about them and package them and sell them on the on the financial markets better You talk about you know behavioral economy economics have been around a long time burning crops that we don't need this whole So I you know black Friday consumerism. These are all things we've had for a long time They're sort of part of our society and now technology just lets It just sort of makes us more have less agency in the face of them It doesn't feel disruptive so much as I mean I would think Does the emphasis I guess the emphasis changes to the point where we flip into a different mode Right what futures were always around stock futures people use them, right? Now we though we live in a world where I think most people they're not buying stocks in order to hold them until They're valuable in some future They're buying stocks to make money on the trade Facebook had its catastrophic IPO because people bought that stock in the morning Thinking they could sell it by noon and make money and at noon It hadn't made any money and they go oh my god What's gone on and they sell it right when people can't make money on a stock by buying it the normal way They buy the stock 30 days in the future right while by the derivative of that stock So I can buy it 30 days from now and Compress that time into this moment if I'm not happy with that I can buy a derivative of the derivative So I can buy the derivative 30 days in the future then derivatives trading This is where it's different derivatives training got so big that the derivatives market three four months ago now Bought the New York Stock Exchange, right? So that's the flip It's that not the derivatives didn't exist before but the derivatives exchange the abstraction eight The stock market which itself was an abstraction of the marketplace Which itself is an abstraction of human activity trading and sharing, right? Which we don't even really need money anyway if we will fall loved each other and all but yeah We don't no matter evil and so will keep using money keep track of everything So that's where I would argue is the flip happened there's a moment in somebody's life where you where Email is no longer this thing that you're going to get to at the end of the day and Answer I mean email used to be a place where I sounded smarter than I did in real life Because I would have an email and I would take an hour to and think how am I gonna what am I gonna do? And I did it in my time when email goes on your body, and it's this thing We all flip to that place where email is a place where you're dumber than you are in real life Because you're no longer exploiting the atemporal bias of the technology you're being you're being Disoriented by by that and and there's subtle But I do think that it's a it is a a shift in in character and quality the quality of the digital landscape is different where where one was time management and the other is being carried along by a program where the program enacts and you You follow the timing of it It's like the difference between going to a museum and they say you have an hour to look at this room And to look at the paintings and you can go around and see the paintings You've got an hour then you're done ding and you leave that's old time new time is You get strapped into the cart at Disney World and you're conveyed through this thing for an hour the way it Convays you it's the same hour right, but there's a one of them is sort of programmed and the other one has at least some sense of freedom within within the within the unit of time Okay, so I'm glad you brought up Disney World actually because this goes back to I love that the technology We're talking about the most today is the clock But it but much of this book is actually about time and I think there's a sub theme there Which is about patience and our lack of it So I was at Disney recently with my two young kids and you know everyone knows about fast-pass You know it used to be I grew up in Florida for my sense And I used to go to Disney on the off-season as Florida residents can do and there was no such thing as fast-pass And you stood there broiling in the Sun everyone was equal unless you were in a wheelchair And then you went to the front of the line that was it and you don't hire people to do that No now yeah now you can actually hire someone to drive you around in a scooter. It's terrible But worse than that and there was just a story in the New York Times business section the other day about this is going on at Universal Studios as well. It's now a VI you can get a VIP pass for 300 bucks You can get to the front of every line you can get a special buffet breakfast So there but what I I'm using all these examples not to say that anything's different This is a deeply human impulse. I want to be at the front of the line. This is a human impulse, right? So when you see I think if you look at how people queue even in different nations people line up differently And there are all kinds of rules of social behavior But I do think to Marvin's earlier point the one big difference is the acceleration that our Tolerance for weight for example for anything has dramatically shrunk and in just a decade Our tolerance for the sorts of things that we used to take for granted It's just being part of the human experience has almost disappeared in some context And I think that that is something that technology has an active role to play and it's not necessarily one that we can Step back from right hunger. It's tricky and and I would argue. It's not that our hunger for the experience For the future experience has gotten stronger. I would argue it's that our intolerance for our present Experience has grown bigger Right. It's it's not that that thing is so great. It's really not. I don't I don't think we're there I think it's that we don't somehow everything between here and that doesn't seem to exist. It's some weird Existential nothing. It's like I used to describe it to to like excellent type people is it's like It's like if the it's like time only matters when you're in the tick of the clock tick Tick tock tick tock and all that space in between each tick in that tock is just Existential wasteland. Oh my god There's nothing without that sense of traction of friction getting from thing to thing to thing, you know, and that's to my mind That's end state industrial age thinking when we were all about the metrics and all you know Whatever metric we put on the wall, whether it was GNP or time or this over that, you know The sort of hockey stick like way that we've now interpret internet growth That's the wrong way of thinking about a digital age because a digital age is going to be spent the majority of our digital time is going to be in the It is in that pulse it's in that space between the things so it's like It's how we are online, you know, you are online, but that's where life is spent Life is spent on the line not on the ride in a sense So what have we done and then you start looking around but where is the line line is my neighborhood? Line are the people who live next door to me who I don't know because I'm so busy driving to get to those people I really do want to see as opposed to these ones. I happen to live with You know, so it's sort of it's sort of that and it gets I know it sounds sort of home spun or Or you know Lake Wobe gone or something, but I do think it's a matter of people Looking around who do I live with who who's in my life? Who who are the other humans, you know Something that used to be difficult to achieve but that we actually now all have more of which is leisure time and the ability to be idle And that interstitial time those little moments used to be when people did things like daydream when people had creative discoveries I mean some famous scientists throughout history had their aha moments while sitting on the bus looking out the window or think you know We or in their fever or in their feet or in the shower. I mean literally in the shower I mean the or in the bath. I mean these are moments that we now can occupy constantly with other stimulation and But we can and it's actually in fact become a compulsion to do so and so there is something lost that again You can't you can't monetize what's lost whereas you can monetize the time you spend on the phone sending an email to your boss right and that's again, it's the it's the The improper amplification of the agenda of the industrial age Which is to monetize every possible moment in every possible thing and somehow pulling back from that and saying no This time is valuable even though it's not contributing to the GNP right now, even though I'm not producing or consuming It's all that kind of Sabbath stuff, you know It's one the first thing the Jews gave themselves when they learn how to write was one day off You know one day a week, you know, what was that about they kind of saw the writing on the wall So the line it's a small world after all Which takes about half a day because it doesn't have fast-pass. Sorry. I'm still traumatized Small world was the shortest line, but no one the interesting thing was when I was online for goofy Runaway or the runway was at stormboard barnstormer. Yeah, it was a great. There's a great ride in the tuner It's a little roller-coaster. We're online for that and this girl I heard her ask her father We're looking at the sign It said 90 minutes till I mean come my god to get on the 30-second roller coaster 90 minutes and she looks up and she goes dad What's a minute and I was wondering how is he going to respond right in a digital age a minute? What is a minute he goes? Oh, it's a minute is a 60th of an hour. It was nice a 60th of an hour or 60 seconds. I think he said 60 seconds. What's that 60th of an hour? At least he didn't give her a smartphone and say play cut the rope then you'll know like yeah. Well, you see them. Yeah So I mean to some extent the things we're talking about feel like The things that are not good for us for example Trying to try to buy Facebook in the morning and trying to sell it in the afternoon But that's certainly not how Warren Buffett trade what Warren Buffett does Whatever third wealthiest man is 90 years old and years old. He buys He always bought and hold right and then there's an entire school of thought around buying and holding right And then there's a whole entire school around just buy long-term index funds and that'll work not sexy very not sexy Yeah, just do what they're doing and they succeed and then there are all these people who take you know Email holidays or they turn off their phones. It's that I mean to what extent is this sort of you know? The there's a sucker born every moment and the suckers are the ones who are being caught up in the technology But you can actually get off the train If you know better Yeah, except it's the suckers at this point are not just individuals But are the institutions governments and companies that we work for and with and When the new America foundation of course not but when we're twice Removed from the operating system as we are in many cases it becomes even that much less Accessible to us right so we're once removed and that we don't understand the technology and then we're twice removed And that we think that the institutional bias can't be changed So you know the people I meet with now are CEOs who literally ask me questions like how can I Transform this company from a growth company into a sustainable company. How can I liberate it from? The shareholders who need to see quarter-up or quarter-up How can I convince my board that this is a company that needs to expand and contract over time that we've reached a sustainable state? You know those are those are the kinds of questions that they should be asking and that those are big And they're really hard. They're really hard to how does a politician say look Frank? You know Frank Luntz, you know, you're a good guy But I don't want to know the second to second people meter response of the CNN Audience of 12 to my speech as it's being said. I really don't care I really really don't care and I don't want to broadcast to the public as if they should care about that It ends up being this feedback loop. You know see oh look Obama failed the debate because I saw the little red line go down When he talked about that thing You know it's it's that's that's The faux present is and that's that's killing us So in your book you sort of set out five different Principles for present shock and you give them great something like Greek names. They're like hard to pronounce even I made them off So So there's a narrative collapse digifrenia Overwinding fractalia fractal no, yeah, fractal. No, yeah, I'm missing an N and then Apocalypse Apocalypse tell us about apocalypto that has the best name like a superhero name. Yeah Apocalypto is what happens when when you're living in a present-day's world It becomes kind of unbearable, right? You don't want to just be in the now So you imagine you'd rather imagine a future apocalypse a terrible thing coming then nothing at all Right, which is why I think there's so much sort of zombie apocalypse lore right now People would rap it's easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than it is to imagine what's gonna happen five years from now I mean it genuinely is and there's almost a simplicity to the zombie apocalypse people long for that You're just in a cabin with your family on the top of the hill with a shotgun Taken down slow-moving zombies. I mean there's no Twitter feed. There's no Facebook There's no phone to answer. It's it's this back-to-nature sort of Kaczynski It's a sort of unabomber fantasy of ultra simplicity, you know, but the the The the dark side of it is that it's human-loathing right the apocalypto of zombie apocalypse is the question of those movies is always what's the difference between a human and a Zombie what that you can't even tell right? They're always staring off at zombies walking going What's the difference between that zombie and me they want to eat they want to survive and so do we and we Kill things what really is the difference right and that's a dangerous question for people to ask or not be able to answer And that's where I feel like my peers are at my sort of cyber pundit peers you know Ray Kurzweil and Richard Dawkins and and Kevin Kelly and James Glick that they that they understand the digital age with a Industrial age Christian narrative overlay that this isn't just the digital age moving into the sustainable presentism thing We're moving towards the singularity. This is part of a journey Information has been on an evolutionary journey from simplicity to complexity and it's a very long journey and human beings are only Important in so far as we can contribute to information's journey But once computers are better at it than we are then humans can sort of fade into the background and Computers can continue this journey for us right and that moment is coming and it's the singularity. No, that's also human loathing That's a zombie apocalypse though, right? I mean Ray Kurzweil literally wants to upload your brain And he's like downing vitamins to stay alive Your brain is easy as long as there's no such thing as a true human as long as there's no human as long as we Are just information then you may as well upload us in but I would argue that's got the medium and the message reversed Right, we are not the carriers of information Information is the is the representation of human consciousness But Kurzweil is like what number three now he's way way high up at Google now Creating artificial intelligence right technology for them. I mean he's you know Yeah, and it goes back to the early 1970s debates between like Timothy Leary and Marvin Minsky where Minsky was doing artificial intelligence and Leary and his folks were into Intelligence augmentation right the idea was that you use technology to augment human intelligence rather than to recreate or simulate Human intelligence. I don't and I am on the leery team not just because I was psychedelic But I'm on the leery team because I'm on team human right and and and Kurzweil and Dawkins call it hubris Why do you think humans matter? Why should humans matter because I am a human You know and I'm gonna fight for team human as a human in the face of this even being wrong because it's my team Right, this is the one I'm on And I genuinely do believe that there are aspect of the human experience that are not recreated in second life And that won't be and then in some ways the beauty of all these digital simulations is they help Reify what is different about humans than that, you know, which is again How do we reify what's going on at the table with your horrible family? You know, I am a terrible dad. How is that better than what's going on? You know on on the iPad right now? As a kid growing up at every family meal I would run off and read a book I'm not sure. I'm sure it was looked at, you know back when it's just as bad, right? My mom would always complain about my book, but you probably complain more about about the iPhone Yeah, when you're a kid You know adults can be boring So We have about 20 minutes for questions and we have a few questions Wait, you should you should wait for the microphone and then say your name and an affiliation even though we know We all done we've done retinal scans on everybody secretly My name is Richard Miller, and I don't have any affiliation. I'm somewhat retired Doug, I think you get it. I think you understand it I think you understand not just now, but where we got there and all the rest of it I'm curious about what you've done with your life The one part you do say in the book is when you were writing it how you did certain weeks of certain things But beyond that, what are you if you learn to share it? What have you done to cope with? present shock I Mean for each of us that there's a different Kind of dominant Trouble spot right So for me it always has to do with kind of personal achievement and making money Versus spending time with my family and doing what my wife wants Right, and there's really just so lean in. Oh, yeah It's hard. It's hard. So it's like, you know, the Snowden thing happens And I'm coming back home on the train from New York to Westchester Exhausted and only I'm gonna get up at five in the morning to come here for this And they're paying it all paying in my phone. I'm not gonna look I'm not gonna look they're paying in my phone Ping all right who what and it's a wolf blitzer the situation room Will you come on and talk about you know present shock and Snowden and all that? And I'm like, you know no And it was hard and I still was tossing and turning at night Am I sacrificing book sales and aspects of my career? Could I have gotten to the next level or done the thing but it was like enough already so for it in one sense It's sort of the work-home balance. It's learning how to make that choice and and really leave it leave it go That's sort of the big area for me I mean in little things it was just like leaving Facebook Right seeing that no Facebook does not offer as much value as it extracts from me and all these ways I don't like being Panged by people I knew way back when I spent 20 30 40 years getting away from them. I don't I don't want them coming back I don't trust Zuckerberg I don't want to be there asking for likes from people when I don't know how those likes are gonna be used against them I Use the VIP features on my phone now so that my wife can vibrate my phone But no one else can you know cuz you can have it you can you can sort of select things I learned how to code not well, but well enough to feel like I understand Algorithmic thinking and sort of at I can think critically about these these things I've Learned to value my local reality more than the kind of long-distance reality. I see the net as a great thing I love the net. I'm all for it, but I I look at the net less as the way to Develop these giant scaled models for things and instead to model local Local solutions to things So a lot of it has to do with for me just learning to say Learning to say no learning. What's enough trying to trust my human connections with other people more than the long-term value of my portfolio You know it's things like that It's it's a lot of it has to do with with abandoning certain amount of abstraction whenever possible and and and doing Going into real real world That's a few Hi, my name is Dave price. I'm a retired journalist and interesting about time because when you retire time has a whole different meaning to Obviously of control, but what I would be interested in any of the three of you Especially you don't talk about this a group of us are going to put together a small easy Okay, I'll retire people what you can do and I think back when I started in newspapers President Nixon was president then and it took in the small paper that I started with Give or take 90 people to do what one of us can do now So my question is it's not like we're talking about a future. We're here now What about those other 89 people that once had a job? Okay, same product better differ. You know, I can argue all that but what what happens to them I mean you started to touch on it, you know, whether it's at sea or whatever But what happens to those people in this time as we move? Toward, you know toward the direction. We're moving. We haven't replaced the industrial jobs. We can talk about it all day They're not coming back. It's meaningless. So what about those people? How do they survive? You know, what do they do in the interim while they're creating this poetry, which would be great but what happens Well, we don't really want to pay journalists now is the thing there's not enough employee to do the job that we need done You know, it's like Britney Spears pops a zit and there's 40 news vans outside her house When I bet two's news vans could actually cover it sufficiently and meanwhile There's like some, you know, the zillion people getting killed in in Burma or something Whatever we're supposed to call it and and and there's nobody there It's like the closest guys in New Guinea, you know going on a cell phone trying to talk to CNN can't even speak English or something It's like what the heck is going on? And it's because whenever I go to colleges and talk they'll say well Why should you be paid to do journalism when I have a blog and nobody's paying me? You know, it's like why should there be a White House press corps? Why should there be anybody? It's like why should we pay anybody because corporations and governments are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create fake stories And we need to pay somebody a couple hundred bucks to spend a week to figure out What's actually going on, you know, and that that argument needs to be made to the public and then I think they will they will value it I mean, I think Oddly enough, I think so does Warren Buffett. By the way, I think newspapers are a growth industry I think that they've They've diminished because people have lost sight of what the what the point and value of professional journalism is But it weren't Warren Buffett invests in newspapers because they're a monopoly and he likes monopolies He used to be local monopolies and they're very profitable and secure But um, and I think you know the challenge of what do we do with both the future of media and the future of jobs? I think is is hugely important and hard to answer So when it comes to the future of journalism, it's not just that there are bloggers It's that there was an arrow when there were three TV show three TV channels And you could essentially subsidize the news through the other through the other Profit-making enterprises of the of the business and now you get to a point where you know news is supposed to sort of sit on its own Bottom I guess and you know news doesn't have some of the benefits that entertainment has in terms of profitability You can't syndicate it and show you can show Seinfeld over and over 10 years later You can't show news 10 years later expensive to gather Unlike a reality show where people will do it for free So it's sort of more expensive and on the one end and then harder to make enough money from on the other end Then we've had all this massive consolidation just a few companies own the media a lot of the media companies And so they don't have to compete as aggressively and so we have this entire You know sort of economic story as to what we do about the future of news There's been I go to panels all the time and conferences How do you know what happens with the future of news? Do we get you know government funding when that has issues do we get? some sort of non-profit for profit combination there's something called the b-corp, which is like a corporation that also has a social good component to it and Etsy actually is one of those and so people have been trying to figure out You know how do we solve the problem of the future of journalism and I don't think I've really seen a great answer There are lots of different experiments On the question of what do you do about the jobs? We could go to a world where all of us get food and shelter and then play video games I would love that It would be a great world we get some shelter But then if you want above basic is when you figure out how to innovate and sell things and actually do things of greater value Okay, but this but so that but there's another underlying question here about which the media Conundrum I think there was into high relief Which is there is such a thing as expertise and this goes to the present is an expertise takes time to cultivate It takes experience to learn it requires often other experts to train you and then to review your work And that sort of expertise I think there is an idea that any kid who you talk to on a college campus who has a blog is doing the same thing that You know a BBC news reporters doing and they are not and they don't have the same sources They don't the same access to sources for a reason. You know, they're 21 year old, you know bloggers they now some bloggers break news We've seen this this week with with basically Glenn Greenwald a blogger broke this big story So it's not that that can't happen But that I think there's a huge denigration of the even idea of expertise and professionalism Yeah, but this technology has killed as the culture of expertise dies as that ecosystem goes away So does it's your connection as a journalist to the 2,000 years of journalism that's happened before? You know like an easy example is when when clear channel came and kind of destroyed the FM ecology FM radio ecology You know and they you know what they did they had long distance basically they had to you know I have a guy sitting in a computer sitting in Los Angeles broadcasting out all the local radio to everybody else They stopped making money with it So they sell back all the stations, but now the people are gone the culture was stopped So you can't just grow back, you know 50 years of a developing FM radio Expertise and same thing with journalism. We if we really scorched earth the whole thing then we don't have that connection to To the past so I just agree with everything you just said other than that We shouldn't squirt truth the past there hasn't been 2,000 years of journalism journalism change repeatedly and the ethics of journalism Come partly from economics come from the 1800s when you had the telegraph and the newswires which needed to have Objective-sounding news and that displaced the old party politics and very non-objective news before who's too expensive to have a whole Two different newswires sending the lefty news and writing news They became this idea that Objectivism was what journalists should do, but it was an economic imperative advertising and they also do with advertising so a lot of the journalism has always been sort of subject to Economics and the things that we valorize around expertise of journalists often and Glenn Greenwald's a great example Often there are bloggers who have more expertise than any journalist in that area Because I wouldn't say he has more expertise in the area He's now covering I think he lucked out with a source who decided to leak something to him He's written three books on the subject. He is a constitutional lawyer, but he knows what he's talking about He's not objective. Oh, he's not objective, but I know none of them. I said he has expertise He's like that my name's part McDougal. I'm a 21 year old blogger Welcome Did you graduate junior high school? Yes, I did I did So it sounded to me like a lot of the problems you were describing were structural rather than individual in nature And I'm not sure if you're familiar with slovoizie Jack, but he gave a talk at the subversive festival a week or two ago And he was sort of talking about the participatory democracy is this Orgasmic type moment where everyone comes together and there's a commune and for two months and no one has to work and they hang out in the park or whatever but It doesn't really do anything and then 20 years down the line. They're sorry They're meeting in a coffee shop or a bar and talking and about the good old days when they got together and protested And then one guy says, oh, my boss is calling me I got to go back to my job at the bank or driving a truck or doing whatever and It's this pressure valve for people to get out there frustration against the system or whatever, but nothing is really accomplished that might Change people situation and you guys kind of talked about People opting out you know saying I'm just gonna put away my cell phone But if you're someone on the bottom end of the economic ladder, maybe you don't have that option You know, maybe your boss is gonna fire you if you're not on call or whatever. So I Guess just maybe talk about the I'm interested in the politics of this and how you see I guess the You know changing individual attitudes as something that's going to Make what you're talking about a possibility or reality for most people or most Americans and I'm working it on three on three access points Most simply I'm trying to tell bosses that they're gonna make less money if they treat their workers like that That their workers are gonna have worse health. They're gonna get cancer. They're gonna lose their efficiency There's a better way that sort of appeal to their appeal to their pocketbook Second, I'm trying to tell them they're gonna have more fun If they can liberate their company from the requirement to make their workers be that way In other words, do you want to buy back your company from your shareholders like Michael Dell? Although he didn't do it really to for the real reasons. He's gonna resell it to the IPO later Do you wanted to buy back your company? Do you want to do something and to make that and then I'm looking at it from a Structural level, how do we help communities develop their own economies if you've got people with skills and you've got people with needs then you don't necessarily need a bank to lend money to a factory to put a Plant in a town to give people jobs so they have money to buy stuff from each other You can actually have local currencies and local favor banks and all sorts of things that you can start to develop now in a digital age We've got cell phones with authentication It's not I mean maybe a decade to four eight decades away But peer-to-peer transaction and local currencies and alternative currencies are are actually going to happen and free people up In a different way, you know, so there will be options for people other than jobs in order to create exchange value So this reminds me that we had The CEO of Etsy actually Etsy's come up several times He spoke here about a year ago, and I remember him saying we might be moving into an era where people don't have Jobs and careers but do stuff to get by and then you know play video games, right? And so you have people who make things on Etsy and sell them who? Rent out their second bedroom on Airbnb get some cash Who I don't know do tasks grab it do some tasks for people and make a little bit of cash It doesn't really sound like a glamorous Lifestyle it's sort of we're moving towards a moment where people might create their own little personal brand Slash job on Etsy and Airbnb and not not aspire to create Jobs for others or build a business just be sort of micro entrepreneurs, you know sort of being self-sustaining I don't know how you could food have good sex enjoy each other with Bitcoin Turns out there's all this stuff that might actually be more fun than getting to be rich and famous and important I wouldn't know the experience dog, but I think yeah Because it's a cobalt blitzer. Yeah Back on that track. Maybe we'll take a few we got like four or five minutes. Maybe you know back there There's a woman who had her hand up for a while Hi, I'm Jenny Holm with internews Jonathan Safran foyer had an op-ed in the New York Times a couple of days ago about how our technology has allowed us to retreat from our obligations for caring for others That I think resonates a lot with this talk But and I liked it very much and I agree with it on most points But I'm also thinking that now the way that the world is we have ethical obligations to care for one another Online as well a lot of you know close relationships because of the way our society is are mediated online so Just to decide to just say leave Facebook or you know do whatever it is on an individual level without a collective agreement that this is what we're gonna do is may also be kind of a Your you're retreating from your ethical responsibilities and your moral responsibilities to one another there so how do we mediate that and What what do we do I guess given the situation one more question You got hi airy shulman with the new Atlantis I'm just wondering this is sort of Popping into my head just now, so it's not fully formulated, but the which you're talking about a lot You seem to be coming back to You know eating food and having sacks and basically all of these Basically having all of our of our lower level Maslovia needs supplied for us so that we can do the things that are at the top of the pyramid That seems to that echoes to me a sort of utopianism. That's been around since the industrial era Of of having all of those basic needs supplied and to me that sounds like a utopianism that is Of a same kind with the kind of digital presentism that doesn't have any sort of sense of purpose or meaning Pushing towards the future. I can see ways in which those could be opposed, but they seem more similar I'm wondering what what is your vision of a sort of? alternative social and economic structure What is the the meaning of personal striving in that in that alternative that you're trying to articulate? Let me work backwards What I can what I can state is true is That the bias of a digital media environment will be less towards future goals Where are we going as a people? What is our direction? Then it is Presidentist right that that the the bias of an industrial age is towards the future and usually towards Branding a future right the branding. Oh the French deserve the South of America Or you know you brand it as something else as some Triumphalism or you your rebranding Colonialization by another name and yeah, we've had some good goals too like oh, we're gonna say people we're gonna do this but in a in a Presentist environment what we need to do right is figure out. How do we create ethical containers? How do we? evolve Human human behavior without the emphasis and without the bearings that eyes on the prize long-term Targeted goals used to give us is there another place from which we can derive and eat those You know the the the some people would say oh that's you know I can feel it in my gut You know, but usually the gut people are doing sort of impulsive panic fear stuff too not true sort of long Terms sustainable something so we end up rather than being governed by our gut We're governed by the community which is sort of what Occupy was going for saying okay rather than having goals Let's see sort of what emerges in some sort of rave like You know Connective Collaborative fashion as far as Maslow I think Maslow was wrong and Maslow at the end of his career kind of poo-pooed on his own Hierarchy of needs the problem with the hierarchy of needs. It's a consumerist fantasy. What's at the very top self? actualization There is no self right the self is a construction of the Renaissance the self was invented around dr. Faustus time There's so there is no self right. There's only the others. There's only people. There's only humanity is a is a Collective it's not You're not an individual will will die pretty fast if he's disconnected from from the group or he'll go crazy So I think I'm not into Maslow being utopianism, but I am into helping describe visions that Allow people to embrace the reality they're in rather than panic and run most people are in a state of panic now and they're using their devices to try to orient to this Presentist world and the devices are throwing them even further away from whatever compass they might have So I'm trying to tell people and if it sounds utopian. I apologize. I'm just trying to tell people it's okay It's okay where people there's other people looking to their eyes and you're gonna feel connected to them learn Reestablished rapport which used to be when you'd sort of breathe and rhythm with another person Take a look at the other 94% of human communication that happens non-verbally and experience yourself in a room It's okay. It's right. No, you're not making money right now. I know I know I know your nose is ten minutes You're not gonna make money. It's okay. Oh You know, so I'm doing that and that sounds utopian, but I don't mean it to be I mean it to just be As far as Facebook, I mean I've never I've been I got horrified responses when I wrote this piece saying I'm leaving Facebook But none of them said it was unethical to leave Facebook And I think it is it's not I'm I'm not yeah I mean the the thing is I think I think being on Facebook is actually unethical right for a whole bunch of reasons and as a Public figure as a public figure you know on the internet who many people sort of are modeling I would think modeling my internet behaviors as appropriate or not my presence on Facebook particularly as a self-promotional author is Inexcusable it just can't it cannot it can't be justified because Facebook is going to use other people's pictures To advertise not just me but things I might have liked. I mean the flow through sponsored story False representation of others is something I can't condone or invite from people But the the beauty of leaving the net of not leaving Facebook is that so many emails I got were from people saying you're really going to leave the internet You're really going offline and I was like oh no turns out Facebook is just one website There's this other internet out there and for people to just even learn that was really instructive for them Because it is it is true and I do think and everyone always says oh if you don't like the TV don't turn it off Right well if you don't like Facebook then I'm turning that off and it's yes You know there could be an old lady who is dying But she should reach to her neighbors not to me, you know and my old ladies in my world know how to get me without Facebook, you know, so I don't feel like I've Shut someone out. I'm available. I'm more available than anyone should be it's just I feel that the the restrictions on my availability and The the price people have to pay for my availability on Facebook isn't isn't worth it So I think we're out of time all that talk about Maslow's hierarchy of needs reminds me that I thought there'd be lunch The basic needs were not met So there's probably a long hour and a half for you in terms of time, but we Hope that you go and buy the food by the book have lots of sex