 So, we're actually starting on time. This is a measure of our guest's presentism, having him present and having a large room full of people who want to have a chance to talk with them and to hear them. Our guest today is Douglas Rushkoff, of course. This is a Berkman lunch. My name is David Weinberger. There are a few little housekeeping things, and then we will begin. So, first of all, this is being webcast. It will be out on the net in the infinite present, and so anything you say, say whatever you would like, but just be aware that there's no taking it back because it's the internet. There will be books available by Douglas for sale over in this corner. If you are in this room, if you are watching a webcast, then you know how to get books and you should. Normally, for an event that draws fewer people, we like to go around. Everybody says who they are and why they're here, but obviously we're not going to do that this afternoon. But if you do participate, if you talk, then it would be helpful if you said your name, if you so choose, and also two words of attribution. My two words of attribution would be I'm a senior researcher at the Berkman Center, so something along those lines. I'm not going to spend a lot of time introducing Douglas, A, because you are here because you already have an idea who he is, and B, because I'm really, really bad at it. He is a writer, an author, and a media theorist, and I'm going to leave it at that. We're going to, rather than having Douglas go through a deck of slides, which would be, I've seen you present, it would be fabulous. We figured instead that we would do this entirely conversationally, with the one slight exception of, we've agreed that I will ask you a leading question and then you can expiate for, expiate does not mean, I think it means you're going to apologize. I think it's probably not what I had in mind. I thought it was people who leave your football team. Yeah, yeah. So you will hold forth for a bit about the book or whatever you actually, whatever is on your mind. The book, of course, Present Shock. Wonderful title, by the way. I love the title. Really interesting book, too, but the title's fantastic. So do you want to tell us what led you to write Present Shock and where it's leading you now? Yeah, it's funny. The thing that led me to write Present Shock was the same thing that led me to Berkman. I think before it was called Berkman. It was called, remember the Harvard Conference on the Internet and Society? And a bunch of us young, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, techno-enthusiast came to do a panel called Technorealism, where Charlie Nesson put up this big slide saying, is Technorealism bullshit? And this was the first thing we didn't even know if it was bullshit or not. But the, God bless him. I know his name's been coming up for me a lot lately because of the whole Ellsberg NSA WikiLeaks-like. Charlie's what, just to be clear, is one of the founders of, I know you know I'm actually speaking to the... He's a big Harvard law professor who defended Ellsberg in the Pentagon Papers and then is one of the first founder guys of Berkman and still teaches here to this day and does everything, Internet law, things and ideas. But what pushed us to develop those ideas was the same thing that pushed me to develop this. Only now, 20 years hindsight, I can understand what it was that I was, that at least I was really trying to get at. And it has to do with balancing, kind of techno-dystopianism with techno-utopianism. Oh, turn this on? For the web. For the web. All right. NSA is in on the rest of this. NSA doesn't need our stinking microphones. Come on. Is there already in this room, or two of you, or NSA bots in human disguise? One of the signs. When the net first came around, I saw it as a great boon for slackerdom. And for those of you who weren't around for slackerdom, slacker... We were a people of the early and mid-1980s who wanted to create more time to have fun and read and think. And we didn't want to become yuppie scum, which it looked like everyone was becoming. And the net looked like this great way to create time. We were all, in the early visions, we were all going to get to work at home in our underwear in our own time and exchange and transact directly in some kind of an Etsy burning men like rave of culture and intellect. And something else really happened on the way home from Wired Magazine is that the internet instead became the poster child for the dying Nasdaq stock exchange and, as I see it, the dying industrial age economy. So instead of using the net to create more time for people, what we used the net for was to turn human attention into the next commodity. Corporate capitalism had expanded through every physical territory of the planet to the point where the planet was kind of fighting back, whether it was geopolitically or environmentally. But human attention seemed to be this tremendous untapped resource because people were only spending maybe eight hours a day working and maybe two hours a day consuming. Couldn't they spend 48 hours a day working and consuming and socializing? So if you broke up people's attention or somehow created four parallel attention tracks and had them running 24 hours a day and had several other ones running automatically, couldn't we mind time really for more present? And instead of getting this internet which gave us more time to think, instead of having an internet that worked not like a phone but like an asynchronous technology that would sit and wait until we were damn well ready to deal with it, you know, instead of having these great asynchronous sequential conferences and topics on places like The Well and other bulletin boards where you would take hours to craft a response to something and sound smarter online than you did in real life, we ended up with a digital space where we were constantly being interrupted with emergency pings from, you know, someone changing their Facebook ID photo or something. And the kinds of interruptions that used to only come into our lives when grandma was dying in the hospital now come to us several times a minute. And we end up in this state of perpetual emergency interruption which I don't think is healthy neurologically or culturally. So I end up writing this book, Present Shock, which is looking at the notion of what happens when we live in an eternal present. And what I'm exploring, this is really, you know, the media theorist side of me, what I'm exploring is whether the digital media environment is genuinely asynchronous. Does it take us out of the world that we've been in for 2,000 years with beginnings, middles and ends, with an analog clock with a monetary system that is based on time really with money that's lent into existence and has to be paid back in interest with interest over time. With a corporate and work ethos, a time is money ethos where efficiency and increase in production are the prime motivators. Are we moving into a political landscape where we no longer have ends justify the means goal-oriented future-based campaigns but rather some kind of a presentist, process-oriented, consensus-building kind of politic, maybe more embodied by something like Occupy than it is by a two-party ideological debate. And, you know, finally are the folks who should be helping us think about this, the kind of techno theorist, scientist people who should be understanding this. Are they really just taking a very 20th century, almost biblical template and superimposing it on this presentist world that we're living in? In other words, are they so intolerant of a world that doesn't have a defined conclusion that doesn't have a goal that we're not leading towards some climax that they overlay this bizarre notion of a singularity through which technology is going to outpace humanity, achieve consciousness and then leave us behind, this notion of the history of the universe is information's inexorable evolution towards greater states of complexity and information has used humanity to get to higher states but now the computers can do it better, we can leave humans behind and any reaction against that is some kind of a species hubris. You know, and I kind of, in the book I kind of pair that with the zombie apocalypse fantasy. This, you know, the notion that it's easier for us to imagine a zombie apocalypse than it is for us to imagine how are we going to be getting on 10 or 12 years in the future because it's kind of that difficult for us to look ahead and that these visions, whether it's a singularity sort of Kurzweilian vision or whether it's the zombie apocalypse, they all kind of loathe humans. There's really the underlying theme of the zombie movies and TV shows is, you know, the question of what makes us different from the zombies. You know, when the answer in these shows is nothing, finally. And if nothing makes us different from the zombies then why should we demand our place? Why shouldn't we just have our consciousness uploaded to a silicon chip? What makes humans better? So ultimately, Present Shock is a humanist book. I'm declaring myself as on team human and deciding that this is okay. You know, because I'm a human, I mean, why not? And that I do, and this is where I guess I would be more like almost a kind of a Jaron Lanier or any of the other humanists out there. I do believe that there's something special about people that we don't quite understand and that our efforts to upload ourselves or to simulate our reality in a second life or any other kind of even a genomic human model will fall short of what it actually is to be human. And that's why what I argue is that our best defense against Present Shock is to be in the genuine present. That there are certain very good things about transcending our industrial age models, about transcending these kinds of stories that have been used for, I would argue, a couple of thousand years to motivate people to get us to buy things, believe things, do things. I grew up coming to understand that the sorts of promises that were made to my father and people of his generation weren't delivered upon, the pensions, all those things didn't happen. And I mean those of us who were kind of, you know, the slacker sort of bebis and butthead Bart Simpson type people understood that the promises made by commercial culture aren't true either. So coming out of that doesn't need to land us into present shock. It could land us into a genuinely human present, but it does require us to distinguish between our virtual states, our digital states, and our real ones. I think it requires us to be in real places with real people, making eye contact, establishing rapport, learning how to breathe with another person, literally conspire, breathe together, and to come to some understanding of what that sort of human local reality is, how it empowers us against the abstract entities that really depend on our isolation and our alienation from ourselves. And looking at that sort of that local human body-based sensibility as an opening to start to understand the kinds of times that can't be measured on a calendar, can't be measured on a clock, and can't be measured by computer, the underlying human rhythms of which things like jet lag were the very beginning of people understanding that there were biological clocks that were being kind of violated by industrial technology. Well, there's other, I would argue there's other biological and social rhythms that we're not taking into account when we just take corporate capitalism and try to amplify it through digital technology and make all human time generic or programmed. And that there's other very biological and socially derived temporal landscapes that we can learn about in access, not just through New Age mumbo jumbo but quite scientifically and experientially. And it behooves us to do those before we kind of lose our bearings, lose our human bearings in our lives and in our culture. So that's sort of the gist of what I'm writing about. Yeah, that's a pretty rich statement. I have a lot of things I want to ask you about and we'll all talk with you as well, of course. It's hard to know exactly where to start. One sort of, I think, easy place just for in terms of clarification is, so you've, I think lambasted I think is a good word, the singularity folks. The singularity, more than the folks. Oh, fine. We can lambest them, too, though. People who believe that growth now is so exponential technologically and the initial idea anyway was that sometime in the near future, it's very Kurzweil stuff that we'll be able to download our brains into a computer and forever or whatever. So roughly there's a singularity. That's a class of one particular sect on the net. And then you contrasted that with Jaren Lanier, who has I am not a gadget and many other essays and books, a strong case for the human in some sense. But that leaves a whole lot of ground. So I suspect there are not a tremendous number of singularity supporters here. I'm sure there are some, but it's not like, no. Between Lanier and singularity, there's a lot of tech and a lot of web. And that part of the web that's neither sort of withdrawn from it in the way that Lanier hasn't has, because he's still involved. And the singularity stuff we're going to take as one extreme. That broad swath of the web, your critique applies there as well and you feel it also is a type of very serious threat to our humanity, to our being, to our humanness, however we want to put it. Is that correct? I want to get the landscape of complaint and fear. The web is no more a threat to our humanity than a gun is. I mean, tech doesn't kill people. People kill people. So I love digital technology. I think it's a great thing. I just think we're misapplying it when we use it to amplify the obsolete agenda of a 13th century economic operating system, which is what we're doing. There was an emerging peer-to-peer economic landscape in the 11th and 12th century in Europe through which people were developing local currencies. They were trading in local markets and bazaars. And we had the rise of a middle class like we've never seen in history. And the problem with this is that the feudal lords, the sort of proto-kings of that era, weren't being included in this massive creation of wealth. So they made local commerce illegal. They created charter monopolies and you had to have a charter monopoly in order to have one of the big industries. Instead of creating an exchanging value yourself, you went and you got a job. Instead of being paid for something you made, you got paid for the hours that you put in. This is a temporal shift, the invention of the clock, the invention of currency. Of that kind of currency, it didn't happen coincidentally. I mean, they happened at the same time, which I guess is what coincidence really means. But not as randomly put it that way. And it worked. It worked as long as you had an expanding economy because more money had to be paid back than was lent out. So as long as you had new little regions and other little brown people and stuff to pull out of the ground and places to grow, it worked. And that stopped. And it looked, I remember in the 80s, my dad, he was worked in a hospital, we thought that the biotech revolution was going to save capitalism. In the late 80s, they really thought it was going to be it. And the biotech stocks crashed, when was that, 87, 88? That crashed and everybody thought this was really going to be the end. Then the net came around and people thought, yay, the net, right? And we got the dot com boom and the long boom and all these great ideas that the net was going to allow us to have that infinite expansion. But what we did was we took a technology that would have allowed us to, I think, that would have allowed us to liberate from the industrial age clock, from the requirement of expansion and to adopt a different kind of temporal landscape and then a different kind of money and transaction. That would be much more real time based. That we could once again adopt currencies that were less biased towards storage and savings over time and much more biased towards transaction, towards increasing the velocity of money in real time, or have both at least, but we could have some bias towards peer to peer exchange and transaction that we get very good things. And then because of my cell phone, I can do authentication without Bernacke and the Fed getting in the middle of my transaction. I can have currencies that don't require me or someone else to borrow money and pay it back to the bank. We can have transactions that are earned into existence. So no, the net is not the bad thing. Technology is not the bad thing. I would argue that the problem is that the people who are developing technologies are very happy to disrupt some individual industry. They're more than happy to disrupt the newspaper industry. Ooh, we got them. Or we're going to disrupt the music industry. Ooh, and the book writing industry. And any, they're happy to put their first thing these kids do after they've disrupted their industry is they go to Goldman Sachs. They go back to Daddy and the oldest system around. And they say, oh, Daddy, give me a series B or a series A and let me go do that thing like you all did. They're not willing to actually undermine the operating system that they're sitting on top of. Which Facebook's sitting on, and Google's sitting on, and Twitter's sitting on. What I want these guys to do is to break that operating system or challenge it or actually come up with an alternative. Why do you need to go to that? Why do you need to go back to them? Why do you need to go get the corporate capital and put the clock back into businesses that weren't on the clock? So it's not the technology that's doing it because you're not a techno determinist. It's not tech makes us do things. There's something about us or our institutions that lead us to do it and you've pointed to, I don't know what to call it, a certain craven, money grubbing. An addiction to an economic model and the inability to see that this is one economic operating system invented in the 12th and 13th century by people with a very specific agenda who have long since left the building and the folks in the bankers and institutional financiers I talked to are unaware that this is the case. Maybe they read a little Marx. They haven't read John Stuart Mill. They haven't read even Adam Smith for that matter. They really just don't know. There's a disconnect between basic economics and practical money creation. So let's take as an example the newspaper just has something to focus on. If it turns out it's not a good example, we can switch. I'm going to give you an hypothesis. You'll obviously disagree with it if you want to, which is that the newspaper industry was killed to a large degree by Craigslist which did not view itself as a mailing list, a local mailing list that would have utility if it got bigger and then it became the Craigslist that we know. It was killed by Twitter which was started primarily. The use case was some 20-year-olds are trying to find each other so they can go out drinking that night and then it turned into something that has, for those of us who were in Boston during the chase down of the killers, the marathon bombers, many of us were watching CNN and had the Twitter stream and were watching the Twitter stream be both more up-to-date and more accurate in correcting CNN and correcting itself too because the Twitter stream would veer off all over the place. Twitter was not built as a newspaper killer but it's doing something to kill newspapers. So granting that sort of, and if you don't want to grant it, then don't but if that's the sort of thing that's killing newspapers who should have been thinking in digging down deep enough and recognizing that they're still adhering to old capitalist modes, old economic modes and thinking deeper? Where is that thought supposed to occur? Well, I would have loved that there are times to consider that before they went and bought one of the biggest buildings in New York City during the height of a real estate boom. I mean, that would have been nice. I mean, when I look at the death of the book industry, the real problem with the book industry is that most publishers got bought by big media companies looking to create the illusion of growth but they went ahead and they bought these non-growth industries. The book business is not a growth industry. It's a sustainable industry. It can't work as a growth industry, so then they're going to create the illusion of growth after they bought these things by firing people and when they fire people, they end up hurting the editorial reach of the book companies and the book companies get worse and worse and worse. So in that case, I feel like it's the same thing as the music industry. You know, the Sony and other corporations go ahead and they buy record companies right after the invention of CDs, right after the invention of the CD, all the yuppies, not the yuppies, the boomers, boomer yuppies, went out and re-bought their record collections. So there's this huge spike in CD sales. All the media conglomerates go, oh, look, this is a growth industry and they go buy all those companies, then the spike goes down and then they're like, oh, my God, our asset that we just bought doesn't work and they fire all the middle people and then the asset becomes less and less valuable. But the alternative model in all three of those cases, which is the web, you're also finding not satisfactorily disruptive of the existing economic models? I find them locally disruptive. So Pandora, which we were trying to get to work before, Pandora is locally disruptive to radio. It's locally disruptive to the music industry or something like that, but it's not fundamentally disruptive in that what do the Pandora people do is they're going to go to the New York Stock Exchange to try to get funded in order to make money for their founding investors. I would prefer them to try to find a sustainable economic model for themselves rather than jumping into VC. So let's say Pandora jumps into VC and let's also say, this is often the case, it stays basically the same or they use the money and they expand the service but it's still from the end user's point of view, it's still you pay your eight bucks a month or whatever it is now and you get their set of music, the same set of features. Why does the action of the owners of Pandora really matter to the cultural, to the media, to you as a media theorist? Because... Or to us as users? Once their primary obligation is no longer to their employees and their users, but to their shareholders or their debt structure, then the actions they take are no longer geared toward the constituency. Now their actions are geared toward rather than how do I serve Douglas with this music, how do I get Douglas to pay more attention through our service to other things? How do I get him to buy his groceries through Pandora? How do I get him to do this through there so I can serve that? And that's when it's... Oh, Pandora is pinging me for this. Open Error wants out, hold on, I've got to get my Pandora. It's going to... Okay. And they're hiring the best kids out of Stanford, not Harvard, of course. They're hiring the best kids out of Stanford to figure out how to make that interface more compelling, more addictive, more dopamine releasing, or endorphin releasing per minute. So this does express this way. The technology side of it has dropped out of your critique entirely. This is a critique of capitalism. Oh, it's dropped out of this conversation. Yes. Well, that's what I'm trying to get back to. So is there something about the technology? Yeah, because the ability to transcend the industrial age model is being made possible by this technology. So what should they do in order to... What would it look like to transcend it if you're Pandora? You don't take the VC money. You do focus on your end user services. You don't treat them like cattle. And through long-term, Pandora would become a peer-to-peer music sharing application. And I don't mean peer-to-peer sharing of Sony music. I mean, peer-to-peer sharing of music that we make, that we would create a different kind of social marketplace for music. And music would slowly, not to get new age on you, but music would slowly begin to retrieve some of its sacred value as opposed to its monetary value. And why is it okay that it's retrieving its sacred value? Because it turns out we don't really need everybody making money because we don't really need to get to full employment because we don't all really need jobs because we have more than enough stuff really already and we could probably have 10, 15% of us working at the kinds of jobs that are required. I mean, it really goes back to another economic argument, which is that jobs is not the problem. We don't really all need jobs or want jobs. I don't want a job. I want stuff. I don't want a job. And is there stuff? There's a lot of stuff out there. I would like to make a meaningful contribution to my society, but what is a job? A job is another artifact of the industrial age. A job is from a time when, not that we decided it was more efficient, but that we could extract more value from people if they were working by the hour for a company than if they were creating value and exchanging it. So can I ask you a quick question, which I sort of know the answer to, because we talked about what is your next book about? Economics. I want to look at what are the possibilities for a digital economy. Can we get there? Can we have one? I mean, but the real thing, I mean, in present job, what I'm looking at in terms of technology, what I'm looking at is the difference in, and it's what McLuhan would call media environments created by different technologies. So we get way back when we have the invention of text. The invention of text is what put us in time to begin with. Before text, there was just things spinning around in day and night and seasons and cold and warm and get to warm places, get away from cold, plant some stuff, see if it grows. We got text, what did we get? We got accountability. Now I could write down what happened yesterday and I can write down what I intend for tomorrow. With text, we got a religion that was based on accountability. It was a covenant, a contract with God. If we do this, you will do that. With text, we get Mosheach, right? We get Messiah, we get the future, right? So with text, we get the calendar. We get a past, we get a future, we get progress, we get goals, we get laws, we get Sabbath. With the clock, we get the industrial age, we get efficiency. We get a day that's now broken up into little pieces. But that's what an hour is, is the segment of the day. And we got interest-bearing currency and we got the idea of trying to do more in less. We got a time-is-money efficiency-based culture. With digital time, with the digital technology, we get a very different relationship to time. If you think about it, you look at that clock there with the second hand that's going around, the sweep second hand that goes around. I remember I used to go to sleep watching the clock. And it would be 9-0-1 and I'd watch that, the second hand go around the clock slowly and it was like 9-0-1, 9-0-1. Then we're halfway through 9-0-1. Then we move all the way through and we get almost to the end of 9-0-1 and we're almost to the 9-0-2 and it's a new minute, a fresh new minute, and we're here. So every minute had this sense of story, this sense of beginning, middle, and an end and a goal and a change and a transition to something else. When my dad changed my sweep second hand alarm clock for a digital one, and it was the old kind with the flipping numbers before they lit up, like a train sign, 9-0-1, 9-0-2. So each minute is no longer a journey from one minute to the other, it's a duration. It's an independently derived absolute duration. We're just there. It's 9-0-1, it's 9-0-2, it's 9-0-3. And I would argue that media environment of living in a digital media environment where time is sequence, where we move instead of through time, we move from choice to choice to choice to choice. It's not worse, it's different. So when we move from choice to choice to choice to choice, interruption to interruption to interruption to interruption, all of a sudden, Aristotle's great linear arc no longer functions. This is a world of remote controls and DVRs and asynchronous behavior where we're not going to grind towards the eyes on the prize, ends justify the means, where's Arnold Schwarzenegger going to take us, will he get the gun, will Homer Simpson get out of the power plant in time before we don't care. We don't care about that. We care about what scene is being satired. What connections can we make? How is this going meta on that, going meta on that? And that's what I would argue is it's a digital sensibility. It's a very different, presentist approach to problems where we move through media much more like a video game in real time, first person choice to choice to choice to choice. But, so that's beautifully said. But it's also the age of, as Stephen Johnson calls it, the 100-hour narrative, the 100-hour story. It's arguably, in fact, it's arguably the greatest age of television ever. Movies that have an arc, movies still are basically structured around an arc. You can find some examples. Movies are basically structured around an arc. But TV has gotten more and more complex and more narrative. And less and less three-act structure. The reason why movies suck so bad is because you go in there and it's like, oh, I feel that's page 28 in Sid Feld's arc structure. I can feel the gears just falling into place. Enter the hero. Oh, there's the protagonist. You can feel it where you're watching Game of Thrones. What is that like? It's like a fantasy role-playing game. You're not watching Game of Thrones to see who's going to win the war. You're not watching it to get to the end. No, it's... Because I am watching it to see who wins the war. And why are there spoilers, interestingly enough? Why are there spoilers in modern television? Because we don't watch it at the same time. We watch it in an asynchronous way. I'm watching House of Cards. I'm on episode five. You're on episode... You have ads now for Netflix where they're going around holding their thing in their ear. Douglas, I don't see how you can complain about... I'm not complaining. I'm saying the way it is. I don't see how you can point that out. Yeah. And at the same time say that we don't care about narrative. I'm not. I'm not. I'm saying that there's a kind of narrative. There's more narrative than ever. I'm not. This is the thing I'm saying. This is the thing that's not working anymore. Create a character. Put that character through a series of trials. Enter the hero into the hero's journey until he gets to the point where we can't take it anymore. And he makes his decision. And then he has his crisis and his climax and his recognition and denouement, that sort of crisis-climax-sleep-male-orgasm curve of Western narrative is giving way to a different kind of narrative, which is maybe just as long. I mean, what would Game of Thrones look like? Oh, jeez. You can't do that, right? It's going to be here. Oh, and then there's this parallel track here. And then there's those ones and these creatures that come over here as we move through. I said no spoilers. Oh, my God. You know, so there. And yeah, this is great. And this can go on and on and on. What we're talking about, it's, you know, our experience of excitement doesn't go away. It just shifts from a one-pointed get-to-the-goal, who wins, who loses. There's sinners and the winners, the vanquished and the conquistadors. All of those great since-aristotle, industrial-age sort of models of winners and losers shifts to a fantasy role-playing game-like storytelling, which is just as narrative, right? It's just as continuous, but it's no longer just groping towards one big bang. So why is that? I don't want to say the word bad. You seem very exercised about this. Why is this bad? Why would it be bad? Why would it be? Because this is more complex and complicated. And it doesn't depend on single heroes. I mean, what's bad about it is it's very hard to rally a people, especially an uneducated people or a stupid people. It's hard to rally them if you don't have a single charismatic leader to follow and a single goal and all that. It's hard for people, right? They'd look at something like Occupy and say, what the fuck are these kids doing, right? That's what they do, but it's more complex. So shouldn't we look at... Here's an alternative reading. Same phenomena. I actually want to put Game of Thrones in a box because I agree it is structured more like a video game, but look at the other 100-hour narratives. This is what is shaping our popular culture to some extent, starting with the Sopranos and moving on, and even a show like Friends. Sopranos is so extraordinarily presentist, right? How did that end? Cut to black. Existential, no end. We will not give you that ending because what were they saying? They were saying, miss. We're not going to give you... Life doesn't work like that. And if it does end in a big thing, you're not even going to know it because you're going to be dead, right? Boof. It was beautiful. That was a show where he refused to give it. Lost is the one they tried to give it, and then everyone got mad, right? Because Lost is what? Lost is presentist narrative. It worked more like the video game, Missed, where you're on this island and you're just trying to figure out the puzzle and draw connections between different things. You're uncovering the reality rather than moving through a singular narrative. So would you agree, disagree, or something else, with the notion that part of what is driving presentism is a recognition that the future is way more complex and emergent. Something that you write at some length about in the book, that it is, in fact, way less predictable than we had thought. This is whether you go to the black swan world or to the wolfram world, that it is so dependent upon starting conditions and small changes and the complex relations that the future has become much... You know the ancient Greeks thought of the future as being behind us, which is really weird because it's not how we view it. We have this arc idea. What you just drew is not... For the Greeks, it was behind us because that's the one thing you can't see. You can see the present, you can see the past. Future really don't know when the turtle's going to drop on your head out of the sky and kill you. One of the Greek playwrights that happened to, apparently. So is presentism simply a reflection of a growing recognition of how complex and losing the illusion that we can actually predict the future? And so what we're left with is... Yeah, and on top of that is a decrease in our fetishization of the future. The 90s, particularly because of the way the numbers were and the end of the millennium, we were all leaning into the future. What's going to happen? We had our dot-com boom and our long boom and our millennium bug and our harmonic convergence and our 2012 and just all of these bizarre, bizarre things that were going to happen. And I feel like we got to the year 2000 and then all of a sudden we were there. It's February, March, in the year 2000. The market crashed. People were like, well, I don't really care what pets.com is going to be worth some day according to this business plan. I want to know what's it worth now. The shift to presentism had a lot to do with... Yeah, in some ways realizing that the future is unknowable but also the future is the place where we get fooled. The future is the place that because we can't know it, people screw with us there. It's where all of those life insurance policies can get all sketchy on you. This end has annualized interest of, oh, it's all going to be that. You work hard now and when your pension doesn't happen and you see other people's pension funds dissolving, all of a sudden the future becomes much less of a motivational. But yeah, it goes along. The death of the future also goes with the death of the past, though. I feel like people are growing less tolerant of the Big Bang because if we give you the Big Bang, then all your physics works out. It's kind of like, well, no, actually, I feel like we're less willing to just give me that one. Okay, so we've gone from the Big Bang to the Singularity, the end of time, of course, and Moshe, as I said, showed up. It's just trying to put that over that. And this doesn't work over that. It ends up much more fractal, right? It turns out we don't have to have an end of reality. Yeah, yeah, that's what I was trying to move towards. Yes, sir? The web wants a microphone. Sorry. Yeah, so I'm curious if this is a new problem. I mean, you know, so 2,500 years ago in the Asian subcontinent, people sat beneath a tree. They meditated. They developed Buddhism, which is sort of an entire system for dealing with present shock, to some extent, you know, keeping you in the present. And, you know, so is this really that revolutionary of a change? Or is this something that's sort of very evolutionary and now we have the, you know, has this problem been around forever, essentially? The problem has been around forever, but the form of distraction from the present changes. Right? So, yeah, the Greeks talked about chronos and chyros. Chronos is time of the clock. Chyros is human timing. Chronos is I crashed the car at 4.02. Chyros is what time do I tell dad I crashed the car? 4.07? No, it's after he's had his drink before he's opened the bills. It's much more about timing. So, yeah, text took us out of chyros and into the calendar. The clock took us out of chyros and into efficiency in contracts and money. And digital technology takes us out of chyros and into the interrupted tweet and update. So, and in each of these cases, yeah, the answer is the same. It's to fall back into the present and to be here now, you know, if you want to get Ram Dass about it. But the trick to being here now in an industrial era is different than the trick to being here now in a digital era. And I feel like the obstacles and distractions from that now are different. You know, so as a culture, we are living in a digital sequence landscape. Do we need a new spiritual practice to figure this out? Essentially, do we need some new spiritual practice for this new age of distraction and present shock? Well, I don't know. I hate to ghettoize the spiritual in the spiritual. You know what I mean? Because then it makes it as if it's like, oh, this thing that you go to the spiritual store for. And I think that there are ways to reinvest in our humanity that are particular to our age, yeah. And one of them is just as simple as trying to optimize our technology for our growing sense of humanity rather than surrendering, you know, what's left of our humanity to our growing sense of the technological. Why don't we queue up the next person with the microphone? It might be him, for example. It's really interesting to hear what you have to say. It sounds a little bit like you're saying that there's not a lot of... We're not using technology in a creative sense, that we're not expanding our role in creativity in the world. And it seems like a lot of public money is going to fix pictures and roaches instead of doing the WPA, like, you know, where they gave it up for creativity. And short of that, how do you think that we can change that and use technology to enhance creativity? I mean, some of it... It's easier to get the upper middle class to do stuff than to get government to do stuff. So, I mean, some of my arguments, I think, are directed to my peers in that sense. And I think it's as simple as, you know, we all know two kids with a laptop can create an application that changes the world. And it's just how do you help them see that the first thing to do after they start to get some success and traction, the first thing to do may not be to sell that thing to people who are going to use it against its original purposes. I mean, and a few realize it, usually they take some mistake and then they go do it, like Scott Heppermitt. He does this stuff and he sells it and he goes, oh my God, that's what they do with it. Then he goes and he does meet up and he just won't. And people are like, oh, well, it's not successful. It's like, it's successful. It depends what you mean by success. You know, it's growing, but it's not growing. It's not hockey stick growth anymore. And it's not hockey stick. Then it's not going to get your series A. Well, he's in series B or whatever. He doesn't need it. You know, he's decided it's okay to have a business that supports its employees and its users. You know, whether or not the landscape can tolerate that is sort of what we're going to see. I think it can. Hello. My name is Greg Bayer and I'm the director of sustainability at the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center, which is the largest digital Tibetan library in the world located in Harvard Square. What is your view of preserving cultures, particularly languages that are dying out in this age of reduced diversity? I hope people do it. You know, again, it's a matter of, you know, it can be done artificially to some extent, but retrieved, you know, retrieved embalmed culture are not the same as cultures that have managed some form of continuity over time. You know, it's a big thing I got in with the Jews, of which I'm one. You know, whenever we'd get into these issues of Jewish continuity and they're like, oh, we've got to get Jews marrying Jews and we've got to get people going to temple so they equate a lot of the institutional Jews equate Jewish continuity with Jewish institutions rather than the Jewish project or Jewish inquiry or Jewish discussion. So I think it's a matter of some of maintaining those conversations and those conversations tend, although digital resources are great for them to happen, they tend to still happen thankfully in a human-to-human fashion. So how, the bigger question is how do you help people to reclaim the time necessary to have human-to-human events? I mean, as you know in Buddhism, you've got to sit with people. You've got to sit or it's not happening. You know, so it's again, it's about, it's about, you know, and I'll try to do my part in that on the other side saying, you know, this is not, it's not happening on your Twitter feed right now. It's not happening in your Snapchat. It's not there, you know, and hopefully there's enough, at least initially, shiny objects, you know, to get people interested in pursuing, you know, something that's much less immediately endorphin-releasing. I was really interested in your description or your contrast between sort of contemporary forms of economy and maybe pre-medieval forms of economy, sort of that economy versus that one. And the idea that there might be, I get you to, understood you to be saying there might be in some level a way to return to patterns similar to the previous one. But I was curious because you used, as your example, the empowerment that comes from and you picked up your phone. And I'd sense a little bit of attention in that you can't make a phone like that by yourself. Like the medieval economy depended on the complexity that people produced was not extraordinarily great. You'd make a basket or you'd farm and these are things you can do by yourself. And so I wonder how you, is there some hybrid or some co-distance that enables people to make baskets with those but still have somebody make those? Yeah, I think you get both. You don't have to go back to medieval era in order to retrieve some of the mechanisms they had. I mean, I think that the balance might shift. But yeah, we're going to get a lot of our, at least until we all have printers, 3D printers, we're going to get our industrial goods from a big, long-distance, complex supply chain global economy and we're going to get, hopefully, our food and human services and things from a thriving local economy. And so we'll have more than one kind of currency. Just as they used in late Middle Ages, they used the florin for their long-distance transaction because they were near a port city, they can get all this up and they used local currencies for their local stuff. So yeah, I think we'll have more than one thing. I mean, we might be using square to do both. Swiping in the same card and who knows who that's going to go. But no, I think you get more than one. Well, because if you're using a bank-issued currency, then it has to be loaned into existence to come out. So it requires payback. And also, if you're using a central-issued currency, then Walmart's going to have an advantage over the local business. The only advantage a local business is going to have over the big long-distance business, because the money is more expensive for a local business, is if the local business started with local reinvestment or local investment in itself. So what I want to do, I'm trying to get to go to Chase to argue what they should do when a local business comes to them for, and this isn't even an old currency yet, but when a local business comes to them and say they want $100,000 loan to add bathrooms to a pizzeria, then Chase should say, look, we'll give you $50,000 of that loan if you can raise $50,000 from your community. And we're going to give you this tool to do it, which will be a local discount program where if someone from your town puts in $100, they'll get $120 at the pizzeria when it expands, so they get 20% back on their investment. The bank gets collateral of a sort on their loan because they can see that the town's put in $50,000. The bank's now not a purely extractive force, but is helping local reinvestment and sort of a local economic velocity. I mean, all of these things, what we're looking at is the new balance between your hard drive and RAM. What I'm saying is that we've been in a hard drive society for a whole long time, right, which is all about storage, and we're moving into RAM as individuals, too, much more present-based access to memory as opposed to just storage and hoarding of stuff. So we don't lose a hard drive altogether. You don't lose central banking in a global economy, but you can balance some of the ills of long-distance economic activity with a few mechanisms to help local economic activity compete effectively. If we are in a free-market economy, we should have free-market currencies as well, sort of all I'm arguing there. Going back to your criticism of these tech companies for selling out to Wall Street and venture capitalists, to what extent is Kickstarter and sites similar to Kickstarter a good alternative that goes to the direction you want? Can I throw Bitcoin into this mix, also, but certainly Kickstarter first? Sure, that's really a different thing entirely. Yes, I know. I'm just taking advantage of your question. So Kickstarter, for sure. Yeah. Kickstarter is interesting, isn't it? Because now we can, certainly for anybody who's had to use... I mean, when you think of something like me, when I write a book, it's like if I want the capital in advance to write the book, I've got to go to the capitalists to get the money, right? And they give me the money, and then it either does well or not. And this is, you know, if I go straight to my readers through a Kickstarter, although there's some problems with that, because it's obviously going to favor Radiohead and a famous writer over, you know, someone else. You know, some guy goes, who is it that got $2 million for his movie? Sackbrat. Right, and he's got a zillion dollars already. It's just like, what are you doing this? So there's some of that. But yeah, it's definitely, that's definitely the beginning of it. And then, what if you start to go to people, now you're not just, and there's sites for this too, where you're crowdfunding rather than, you're crowd-investing, rather than just crowdfunding the particular project, it can actually get more complex and interesting. But yeah, that's much more towards what? Real time. You're matching supply and demand in real time to see if you should even do the project, rather than having a capitalist speculate on it a year or two in advance to see, well, will the market buy this later, and we'll do research to see if the market's going to get it. You know, it's all convoluted. As far as Bitcoin, Bitcoin's a digital style currency, but it's not what I'm talking about. You know, it's a very interesting thing, but what it is is a digital way of recreating scarcity-based, essentially issued currency. You know, it's a digital model for that, and what I'm looking at would be what I'm hoping for, something much more like a let system or time dollars. You know, an actual currency that you're not trying to hoard, that you're not investing in a currency, that you're using the currency merely to promote the transactions, so that you can get the stuff you want and do the stuff you want. Thanks, very interesting. Not to harp too much on the Bitcoin, but I have a bit of a question about it, and particularly your kind of humanism. Bitcoin, of course, is an electronic medium and all that, but it's extractive in that it uses a lot of electricity to generate these coins by doing calculations, whatever. I'm curious about the humanism that you're kind of talking about. It seems that maybe that kind of humanism is part of the problem in that you have kind of active human subjects that are encountering these kind of dead or non-living inanimate objects that then can be used, and I'm kind of curious about, do you think that the kind of presentism that you're talking about is contributing to that, or that there's a way out in the future, or if you're even allowed to think about the future, is there a way out? I don't want to conflate present shock with presentism. Present shock is sort of our initial wobble at moving from a kind of a linear time-based society into this digital, choice-based, highly interruptive one. There's this initial human reaction of, ah, and panic. And that's really what the book looks at, is the five kinds of panic that we have, where presentism is really the ability to kind of now embrace and survive and reclaim our humanity on this landscape. I mean, generally, I don't see the way that almost any technologies help us reclaim our humanity, except insofar as they create time for us to be with other people. That it's the face-to-face real-time human interaction. And the more you do that, and this starts to get out there or futurist, the more you get there, the less money even needs to be a part of the equation. The more comfortable you are with other people, the more, and I always tell the story, when we were in Park Slope, the old lady down the hall offered to teach my wife how to breastfeed the baby. But you just don't do that. You hire a lactation consultant. Who is this lady? And she's going to, if we take that favor from her, what do we owe her? We don't know. Is she going to want to come in and sing Christmas carols and show tunes and who knows? And then we end up actually denying ourselves the social cohesion that we get through mutual dependency. So I feel like we can re-engage with some of that as we feel safer with each other. And that the monies for the most part, the monies we have now don't allow that. I mean, they're not supposed to. They're part of a system through which we've been taught not to trust each other, not to transact. We've been taught that money is a cleaner way to engage with each other and all that. And slowly, hopefully, we'll start to trust each other more than the staff. Thanks. Judge Schwartz, a writer. I had a question which was, this presentism or it conceals what in your view that is to say, what are the characteristic things that we should be thinking about that we aren't thinking about because we're so constantly distracted? And I'd like to suggest an answer, which you might agree with or not, and that answer is differentiated class, social class interests, which tend to be verboten, a verboten topic, a forbidden topic that is to suggest that somebody might be working class in the media to introduce somebody in the media as a working class person would be not something that these characters have not done because it would be considered to be an insult to the person. And I would just like to mention one other thing, and I've been recently reading a sociologist named Carl Monheim, whose work is from the early part of the 20th century, who suggests that the characteristic state in which class interests are fudged and smudged out and distorted is characteristic not of communism or socialism, but of fascism, and that one of our major fears is of appearing to be a communist. Very few people are afraid of being denounced as fascist. I don't know why that is, but it seems to be the way it is as far as I can see. And I don't know whether I've said too much or should turn the microphone over to somebody else. Let's get a response. I'm working on a graphic novel about a fictional occult war between Aleister Crowley and Adolf Hitler. And in the story, Crowley basically wins, but applies his magic to, basically teaches it to someone who creates the American advertising industry, which it's slowly revealed as sort of the master plan is that it's going to migrate into cyberspace, into social media, where it can finally have a body. And then it finally has, it's no longer abstract, but now it's a thing. I don't know if that answers your question. And the arc of that is more or less just like, whoop, like that. No, it's more, whoo, wah. Wah. It's more the, I'm more into Shakespeare's kind of meta-theater, where he'll be like, they'll be on stage watching a play and they'll say, I wonder if someone's watching us now. They do that in Shakespeare a few times. I wonder if someone's watching us is sort of looking over their shoulder. That's sort of my preferred. It's the Beavis and Budhead style of narrative arc, where you just open it up to the next one or to the next one. There was actually an occult war between Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Steiner, which you may know. A thought about meta, meta, meta, meta, maybe one way to think about that is in terms of resonance and overtones, because when you make a note in music, it has all of its overtones in it. Everything is present all at the same time. A lot of what I'm hearing from you reminds me of situationists and situationism. And I'm wondering if you would talk a little bit about whether that has actually been an influence on what you're thinking is. I mean, more so overtones than situationists in terms of... And the notion of... I mean, this here would be more like a soloist in a western opera, and this would be more like a gamelan. So this is more listening, and that's more shouting. This is more a subject. That's more landscape. And I talk a little bit about how to do lateral thinking, that lateral thinking is kind of the required form of pattern recognition in a presentist universe, because we no longer have a linear story to understand things. We can't go, this happened, this happened, this happened. We've got to make sense by looking, and the way you make sense by looking is by kind of softening your gaze and seeing the patterns, but not drawing too many patterns or you become a paranoid, drawing direct lines between things. How do you balance that is sort of the trick. There's a chapter in there called Fractal Noia, which is about that. When you see too many patterns, you get the Noia rather than the reassuring self-similarity of the fractal. I'm actually glad that you talked a little bit about fractal. I want to ask you about a question that is only somewhat related, if you don't mind. Actually, if you don't mind. You, at one point, I don't know, warn against links because they're drawing too many connections and they're too flat. And since it seems exactly, I see it exactly the opposite. I'm wondering if you could say a little bit more about why the, as I would say, the enriching of the world through these many, many collections is, in fact, makes you nervous or hesitant. Well, it doesn't. It's just a balance. We're moving into a world where everything's linked to everything else. Once everything's linked to everything, then there might as well be no links between anything. Then you've reached total entropy again because then there's no, once everything's linked to everything else and the link has no meaning. But if you have the ability to link anything to anything else, then, yeah, just use them wisely. Use them selectively. It's just a matter of creating balance between the sense of infinite connection and sense of holism. It's just the same problem that you can experience on any level. If you're part of a group, if you over-identify with the group, you lose yourself. If you over-identify with yourself, you lose the group. So it's just how do you strike a balance and just understanding that this is something that's required of us now to remain coherent in a presentist-linked society? So you talk about humanism and obviously part of that is being human, you're going to die. We have this limited lifespan and plenty of literary theory. We like this narrative arc because it mimics our life. We try to get as high as we possibly can before we spiral down and die. So how do you think that contributes to the anxiety of this presentism that doesn't allow us to envision this future for ourselves? It does. We reach the peak of that, of this individual arc in an individual, consumerist society. The individual was kind of invented in the Renaissance and it peaked with McDonald's. You, you're the one. It was. We didn't have the individual journey as such, the way we understand it now. And the reason we have a highly individualized society is because the more individualized we are, the more stuff we buy. You, you, we have every family on my block has its own snowblower. Which is insane, right? But it's good for the economy, right? If we didn't each buy our own snowblower, then someone at the snowblower company is going to be out of work and looking for a job. That's back to the other thing. It's that sort of peak of individuality. At the same time, we can't lose our individuality totally and we shouldn't because that's where we're at. That's how we experience the world. It's just that this arc, the anxiety of this arc is exacerbated, I would argue, by things like Gordon Bell, One My Life Bits project where you go to Microsoft and you have everything you've ever done, everything you've written, every poop you've made. Everything is recorded and you end up with this great, completely linear timeline of everything you've ever done that's a map that's as big as the territory of the timeline that you've just walked through. Which is nuts. I mean, it's going to drive you crazy. As opposed to something, and I talk about it in here, something like The Brain, which is a way of recording things that are of interest to you by drawing connections between Software called The Brain. Sorry, Jeremy Kowski. Jeremy Kowski uses it a lot. He uses it, I guess, of it. It's kind of like a worldwide web of all this stuff. You see it and you draw connections and every time you go back to it, you see a different history. It's much more like real life where every time you look back on your life, it looks different, that your history kind of changes with your perspective of it. So there's different ways to record and accumulate who you are. And some of them are more fluid when you go back to America, go to school in a system that's rooted firmly in the industrial age in both its goals and methodology. What needs to happen in your view to prepare students going through school systems now for present shock in dealing with some of these issues that you're talking about? I mean, two things. One is, I do think they should learn code. I mean, I advocate at Code Academy. I think that if you're going to be spending an increasing amount of your time on digital platforms, you should have some basic knowledge of what they are. Program or be programmed. The book before this one. And second, I think that real spaces need to be used for genuine live engagement. So all for using computers to teach computers and for using them as little as possible to teach other stuff. Because I think that there's some advantage. There's so little time in a day if you're getting people to move into a physical space together into a room, why not try to take advantage of some of the 94% of human communication that happens nonverbally and reacquaint people with that before you know, we all have a kind of a functional Asperger's. So one more question I think is going to be Willow. I'm Willow Rue. I'm with the Center for Civic Media out of the Media Lab. And I see the self-documentation and desire to categorize and link as a way of building predictability into this that we've only gotten out of quest for the upper right quadrant. And I like that you talked a little bit about how to get existing structures like Chase to start supporting more localized and focused on the chaos. But there's still a distinct lack of predictability as in I know where my next paycheck is coming while I exist in this system while building a new one. Are there any other ways besides persuading the current infrastructure to allow space for this? Yeah, take the space. Right? No, we do. You know, occupy in one way or another. Whether it's community-supported agriculture, local babysitting clubs, educational co-ops for where if you're stuck in a Prussian management coverly public school nightmare then DIY. I do think that's it's not so fanciful. You have to get your cost of living down to spend more time actually servicing yourselves in one another. But for me the strategy in both a doomsday scenario and kind of a revolutionary scenario if we call it that are the same. So if doomsday is going to come I want community-supported agriculture I want a local support structure I want some sort of local economic thing going on to support me when the long-distance supply chain crumbles because Safeway couldn't pay its bills to chase. At the same time if I want to deflate Walmart and the system that's oppressing us to use a term then I'm going to slowly spend more of my money and time getting the stuff I need in other ways. So it's sort of that. I mean for me community-supported agriculture was a big step because it turned out I joined a community-supported agriculture group just when its fields were no longer big enough to support as many people who were signing up to do it so they needed to get a new field we buy a new field and then we find out that the field was mandated for a corn-only use by a corn lobby so then we got to find out how the state legislature works and to get this thing changed it turns out so we fight this whole thing turns out it wasn't actually it was a lie that's just a lie law is just as pertinent as a real law but it just teaches you oh there is this and you've worked with legislature people before that's where I learned there are these people there in government that kind of want people to come to them with real problems they're just sort of sitting there there's the ones on top who are arguing about abortion or whatever kind of abstract to them abstract issue that's not going to get you know or change but then there's all these real ones who are just like oh you have a problem we can actually work with you and it sort of it fills you with a little bit of faith that as long as you stay out of the tops of government you can get little things done I think a little bit of faith is actually a really good place for us to end up thank you so much well we were all over the map but I think that's alright we're allowed it's Harvard