Gadgetory

Douglas rushkoff is a man after my own heart in his new book present shock he explains what the internet and modern society at large is doing to our brains and our humanity and it's not all good part of the reason I left the internet is that I found it to be overwhelming everything happens all at once and I couldn't keep up and the book rushkoff explains some of my syndromes like how I tended to synchronize myself to the digital instead of paying attention to my own biorhythms he captures the stress I felt with the endless information at my fingertips and what seemed like futile efforts to monitor my Twitter stream or wade through my email I got a chance to sit down with rushkoff and confess some of my fears to him luckily it's not all doom and gloom just mostly doing good I guess present chuck is really is the human response to living in and always on immediate real-time digital reality hmm and it's it kind of looks at two things that have happened and they've happened simultaneously in a way that supports one another you know one thing is our transition from a kind of an industrial age world to this digital world and what does that mean as we move from analog clocks and cycles and things to the digital clock which is always in the now which is a you know a minute is no longer some portion of the day it's a segment of itself you know what does that do and then at the same time we've gone from a very future based kind of movement oriented world into this 21st century this post-millennial end of time it's funny you know the Mayan calendar it didn't mean the end of of times but it kind of meant the end of time how do we deal with problems that are that are steady-state present tense problems rather than sending a man up to the moon and sticking a flag in there you know it's like how do you deal with like global warming it's like you don't win there's no victory there's no thing it's not Martin Luther King having a dream of a world without global warming it's just like we got to kind of perpetually deal with this and what does that like I feel this terror of what you described as present shock for me I actually wrote on the margins a lot stress like I was stressed out while reading this and I'd kind of get overwhelmed as you're listening things because this is stuff this really scares me just trying to keep up keep my head above water its present shock something I do to myself I've decided to immerse myself in this level of technology and therefore I'm experiencing present shock or as presence not just our status as a species and we're all dealing with it's either our status as a species or maybe more likely our status as a civilization the way the book moves is through the sort of five main syndromes that I identified you know the first one is narrative collapse what happens when time seems to stop when we get from the twentieth century to the 21st from all the forward-leaning numbers of the 19's to the standstill numbers of the 20s what happens is your movements die your stories die this sense of forward momentum dies and you you don't have goals and long term thinking to motivate you forward what do you do you end up then in a much more of a kind of a video game like world where you're making decisions and doing things in that sort of almost digital mindset of I'm programming my world rather than responding to the stories that have been left for me which leads you to didja Freni a-- when you're in a program environment what happens well you end up with more than one instance of yourself and I'm gonna now instead of being programmed by my technology I'm gonna program my technology to conform with me you know and that's then what leads to this sense of responsibility which is what I'm I'm calling you know over winding you're like calculating this whole giant thing so I renamed the long now the short forever it's sort of the paralysis of that long-term thinking and basically all these ways that we try to almost make up for a lost time work or or maximize this efficiency into this single moment you know and and mistake one time scale for another there because they're not interchangeable this is less of necessarily a symptom of present shock but something that we try to do because of president Choe yeah well over winding would be almost like OCD you know it's the sort of obsessive compulsive urge to to compress time and to be more efficient and to conform on a certain level and then you know from there I went to fractal neue which is the idea that if you are living in an eternal present how do you make meaning you know we used to make meaning through stories kind of through narrative but now if we're in the moment then we try to make sense by kind of taking a picture of where things are and drawing connections between them and you can end up drawing way too many connections and then going crazy get neue basic that's where the paranoia comes in because not everything's not connected to everything else you know but if you have no time in which to make sense of things then the only way you can make sense of something is to connect this to that to this to that this leaves us apocalyptic apocalypse Urkel right people want there to be a beginning and I think what it is is these guys particularly older guys who are enthralled with digital technology and made great careers of digital technology they are very intolerant of steady-state it's very hard to be this mean is just gonna be ive best begun to understand narrative collapse it's of left the internet i started to realize the value of a novel length idea for me dear Jeff Renia is the most dangerous of rushkoff syndromes I've always had a problem with priorities for instance email would take me ages to get through and I responded to half the ones I should over widening is why I quit text messaging in addition to the internet I just hate how text messages arrived and need to be dealt with out of step with my own reality well rushkoff calls fractal neue I call ignorant it always bothered me how I knew so little compared to what the internet India by leaving the internet I could read books and insulate myself and and wrestle with one idea at a time finally rush cops term Apocalypto was reflected in my decision to give up the Internet in the first place I was just one step away from buying an underground bunker I find the names of each of these chapters almost that they sound like names of like sci-fi contagion style diseases that wipe out mankind well in a way I mean I meant them more like almost psychological syndromes you know did you friendly and fractal Moya so it's sort of like the present estera or present shock era versions of the mental elements we've come to know and I guess I think a dick where a mental ailment couldn't wipe help you well they can I mean in a certain level yeah they can wipe out humanity at least from a subjective yeah but humanity I'm talking about I talk about wiping out humanity I don't mean that the human bodies go away necessarily I mean that humanity goes away you know what I'm fighting about right are humaneness and that you know in the Industrial Age we very much ape the machines we tried to be like the machines that were we're a kurd of guiding human experience through that millennium the more we try temporarily to keep up with an asynchronous temporal landscape which is the digital temporal landscape you talk about computers are multitasking and we fundamentally aren't right and computers go in sequence and we don't we go into continuous what we do live continuously I don't I don't I don't really buy that human beings our sample so I'm still scared of present shock but if you can't tell by now rushkoff is an entirely pessimistic in fact I plan on using some of his terms and solutions when I returned to the internet actually what rushkoff prescribes is sort of what I've been doing this year like taking time to meet people in person and dealing with data one item at a time he said you had to pause things or you said just as we can pause we can unpause if you decide to pause long enough to read my book for example you can unpause when you're done and we'll still be there you don't have to take a whole year off I mean I learned to you know dip into the digital a temporal reality and then go it's now I'm back in this one but you know when you when you maintain your own clocks even in the face of all this it's really interesting and then you start looking at things how do I make digital time conform to my time again this all sounds terrifying and horrible to me it's always it's really stressful to the extent that you refuse to take charge of your own and so how do you do that well I mean you're doing it in an extreme way right by saying okay no no I'm gone well I'm doing Apocalypto away where I'm so afraid of it I'm just gonna avoid it I haven't solved anything yet one simple thing to do is to distinguish between what I'm kind of calling flow media and stacked media you know so something like Twitter is a flow media that's just going Twitter or something you dip into to get the sort of cultural weather and then dip out of you don't try to keep up with Twitter you don't try to read all the tweets that happen between the last time you looked and now it's just it's a thing that's moving on the other hand if you're gonna get you know a book or an email or something don't just dip into those as whether those are stacked media's so that's something you actually sit and you give a period I'm gonna read this email that came from this person you know and if you rush through that email you feel stressed after it you know most of us try to deal with our inbox and it's like this awfully stressful experience because we're treating it like flow you know and it's like no it's not flow so you know you I have my phone my phone sure it could buzz me every time an email comes and then I can quickly check it or it's like no you say email is in there if someone else relegated a piece of information to the atemporal universe why should i convert it back to the temporal universe and have it zap me as soon as it arrives no this is a temporal this is this is something that waits it's not it even a text it's not a phone yeah you referred to this idea this is something I talked to people a lot I call it like a cognitive load you can put on somebody I could text somebody can you make dinner plans tonight and that took me five seconds to write that took the person at Howard well you opened a loop you know it's like the way the brain works is it's just like you know it's coprocessors and stuff it's you know you open a loop in the brain if you don't deal with that open loop right away it creates stress for you because it's sitting there open so they've basically set up even if you don't agree to do them Oh will you send me this book where you write this quick piece will you send a bio will you make sure this you've just inserted ten or twenty open loops into your brain that you're not gonna be able to get to later a part of it is realizing that the the distance and anonymity that sort of Asperger's like non emotionality afforded by digital technology frees people to lay at your doorstep that you don't really have to accept the thing that technology gives us is choice is more choice and the more you're gonna use technologies the more you're going to be making choices so you you get the freedom to choose what you want but you lose in many cases the freedom not to choose you know the freedom to just be if you're on a computer the choices are gonna come more and more and more rapidly particularly if you're living in a programmed environment where they're trying to get you to choose more because they make one money the more you choose I guess that Kutta gets back to this idea of you know humans and the uniqueness of humans and it does feel like there's a there's an humanity to what we've created and we're humans but at the same time we're the humans who created this machine thing so where does this leave us we are the humans and we did create our technologies but the difference between the industrial age and the digital age is Industrial Age technologies pretty much sat there and although they were unintended consequences like carbon emissions and slavery and things like that digital technologies are different or digital era technologies like computers nano robotics and genomics because they carry on after now there's it's not like a shovel that you make and sits there it's it's a seed that you make and then it tries to stay alive it replicates it adjusts itself and self modifies and finds others so we're launching things that have something very much like lives of their own what we're looking at in some sense is a competition between human agency and intelligent agents it's sort of the old divide was between you know Marvin Minsky and artificial intelligence versus like Timothy Leary and intelligence augmentation and these were seen as sort of the two sides of how computer technology was going to be used and I'm myself and on the side of intelligence augmentation rather than oh if we're not with ourselves too dramatically I'm more I'm more interested in humans getting smarter than just making information more complex by itself because if we don't go along for the ride I don't think anyone will be there to see what happened good good apocalyptic notes and thank you so much thank you I have a bit more than one month left before I return to the Internet to be honest I'm pretty scared I don't know if I'll be able to deal with it any better than before it could be present shock all over again except now I'll just be out of practice what gives me hope is that smart people like rushkoff are beginning to diagnose some of these problems and I think they're even starting to grasp with some solutions