Present shock
"An award-winning author explores how the world works in our age of "continuous now". Back in the 1970s, futurism was all the rage. But looking forward is becoming a thing of the past. According to Douglas Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Guided by neither history nor long term goals, we navigate a sea of media that blend the past and future into a mash-up of instantaneous experience. Rushkoff shows how this trend is both disorienting and exhilarating. Without linear narrative we get both the humiliations of reality TV and the associative brilliance of The Simpsons. With no time for long term investing, we invent dangerously compressed derivatives yet also revive sustainable local businesses. In politics, presentism drives both the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. In many ways, this was the goal of digital technology--outsourcing our memory was supposed to free us up to focus on the present. But we are in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on trivia. Rushkoff shows how we can instead ground ourselves in the reality of the present tense. "-- "In the 1970s futurism was in. But looking forward has become a thing of the past. According to Rushkoff, "presentism" is the new ethos of a society that's always on, in real time, updating live. Rushkoff shows how this trend is both exhilarating and disorienting.
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What Hacker News says
- We live in a post-post-modern world. These days it's more relevant to read Rushkoff and look into his 'present shock' idea: http://www.rushkoff.com/books/present-shock/
> In his new book, PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now (Current; March 15, 2013), Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – present shock. Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new challenge. Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.
- I wrote about this recently: http://blog.higg.im/2015/01/02/2014-the-year-of-feeling-burn...
We are awash in information. Douglas Rushkoff documents this recent phenomenon very well. His book Present Shock articulates the problem / dilemma really well. Worth a read - if you haven't already added it to your Amazon wishlist and is not another book in your digital bucket list.
My personal solution was to let go. Tech and computers are now the apex predator. Just swim in the ocean, don't resist it. In terms of your path - who am I to judge? I dropped out of a C.S course because tech was moving too fast and the course material was out of sync with how fast tech was moving. Enjoy tech on your own terms.
Note: 'Letting go' also has the paradoxical effect of getting more done with tech. When you get out of your own way, tech works for you, rather than against you. I learned this from the raw data. It's up to you to experience this for yourself.
- Any relationship between TheBrain and org-brain, other than concept?
Curiously, I'd just run across Jerry Michalski's mind-mapping via Doug Rushkoff's Present Shock a couple of days ago.
- Yeah it does, but it's a corruption of the previous attempts at labeling decades and doesn't really solve the problem of labeling decades. A decade is actually meaningless in terms of what it represents culturally, and since the explosion of The Internet, culture is now smeared and has no basis in a decade anymore. We've reached a post-post-post-post modern era. Rushkoff goes into this more in his 'present shock' theory https://www.theverge.com/2013/3/21/4131130/obsessed-with-now...
- "Present Shock" by Douglas Rushkoff
"Super Forecasting" by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
"The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins
"The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control" by Walter Mischel
"Precision: Statistical and Mathematical Methods in Horse Racing" by C X Wong
"Functional Swift" by Chris Eidhof, Florian Kugler, and Wouter Swierstra
__ DIDN'T FINISH __
"Thinking in Forth" by Leo Brodie
"The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick
__ QUEUED FOR READING __
"Porcelain" by Moby
"Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Harari
- The writers and commentators of today tend to fall into niche categories or just write fiction. There is Nicholas Carr's and Douglas Rushkoff. The latter even wrote a book called Present Shock.
Most people I can think of are also of the past such as Vinge, Marshall McLuhan or Freeman Dyson (who came up with the idea of the Dyson sphere, not the vacuum) who were also brilliant. McLuhan is a joy to read or listen to. He has several interviews on YouTube.
Esther Dyson (Freeman's daughter) and Nicholas Negroponte were others I read growing up along the lines of Toffler. I remember the latter's Being Digital as being profound at the time but passe in today's world since all of the marvels of the future he talks about came to fruition. Negroponte also came up with the One Laptop Per Child which lost it's relevance in a world of smartphones.
Others I thought of were Neal Stephenson (his non-fiction works are awesome, especially In the Beginning... was the Command Line and that book-long article he wrote for Wired about wiring Cambodia). Stephenson's fiction is great too and puts William Gibson to shame when it comes to cyberpunk, but Gibson wrote his prior to the PC era. Rudy Rucker was also quite good at the time but his best non-fiction works such as Infinity and the Mind (a must read for you math geeks) are out of print. I also liked The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra a lot growing up.
I looked on Goodreads for authors that are similar to Toffler and while I recognized a couple of them I didn't see anyone worth mentioning.
Toffler's works were mostly dated after the mid 2000's, but predicted the consumer as producer (pro-sumer) culture we live in today and Revolutionary Wealth described how we would make a living with services like Patreon and GoFundMe in such a society.
I recommend everyone read The Third Wave. It provides great historical context for the present machinations of society, the media, and the political machine controlling the masses. Powershift discuss the shift of power to the masses and is also good if you like the idea of the death of the establishment.
Other people that come to mind are Nicholas Carr, Douglas Rushkoff, and Ray Kurzweil.
