CURRENT

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First published in 2013 by Current,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Douglas Rushkoff, 2013.

All rights reserved.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Rushkoff, Douglas.

Present shock : when everything happens now / Douglas Rushkoff.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-101-60824-1

1. Technology—Social aspects. 2. Technology—Philosophy. I. Title.

T14.5.R86 2013

303.48'3—dc23 2012039915

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For my daughter, Mamie, my present

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1

NARRATIVE COLLAPSE

CHAPTER 2

DIGIPHRENIA: BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

CHAPTER 3

OVERWINDING: THE SHORT FOREVER

CHAPTER 4

FRACTALNOIA: FINDING PATTERNS IN THE FEEDBACK

CHAPTER 5

APOCALYPTO

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

He is one of the most prescient hedge fund managers on Wall Street, but his trades always seem to happen after the fact. That’s because as soon as he executes an order, it is observed and preempted by traders at bigger firms with faster computers. The spread changes, and his buy order goes through just a few fractions of a penny higher than it should have. He is trading in the past, longing for the software and geeks he needs to get into his competitors’ present. And his clients can no longer conceive of investing in a company’s future, anyway; they want to win on the trade itself, as it actually happens.

She’s at a bar on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but she seems oblivious to the boys and the music. Instead of engaging with those around her, she’s scrolling through text messages on her phone, from friends at other parties across town. She needs to know if the event she’s at is the event to be at, or whether something better is happening at that very moment, somewhere else. Sure enough, a blip on the tiny screen catches her interest, and in seconds her posse is in a cab headed for the East Village. She arrives at a seemingly identical party and decides it’s “the place to be,” yet instead of enjoying it, she turns her phone around, activates the camera, and proceeds to take pictures of herself and her friends for the next hour—instantly uploading them for the world to see her in the moment.

He sees the signs all around him: the latest “natural” disaster on the evening news; the fluctuations in the prices at the gas pump; talk of a single world currency. Information overload might not have increased the rate at which disasters occur, but it has exponentially increased the rate at which they’re witnessed. As a result, prophecy no longer feels like a description of the future but, rather, a guide to the present. The ideas of quantum physicists and the Mayans have been twisted to indicate that time itself will soon be coming to an end, anyway. The messianic age is no longer something to prepare for; it is a current event. What would Jesus do?

This is the new “now.”

Our society has reoriented itself to the present moment. Everything is live, real time, and always-on. It’s not a mere speeding up, however much our lifestyles and technologies have accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s more of a diminishment of anything that isn’t happening right now—and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.

It’s why the world’s leading search engine is evolving into a live, customized, and predictive flow of data branded “Google Now”; why email is giving way to texting, and why blogs are being superseded by Twitter feeds. It’s why kids in school can no longer follow linear arguments; why narrative structure collapsed into reality TV; and why we can’t engage in meaningful dialogue about last month’s books and music, much less long-term global issues. It’s why an economy once based on long-term investment and interest-bearing currency can no longer provide capital to those who plan to put it to work for future rewards. It’s why so many long for a “singularity” or a 2012 apocalypse to end linear time altogether and throw us into a posthistoric eternal present—no matter the cost to human agency or civilization itself.

But it’s also how we find out what’s happening on the streets of Iran before CNN can assemble a camera crew. It’s what enables an unsatisfied but upwardly mobile executive to quit his job and move with his family to Vermont to make kayaks—which he thought he’d get to do only once he retired. It’s how millions of young people can choose to embody a new activism based in patient consensus instead of contentious debate. It’s what enables companies like H&M or Zara to fabricate clothes in real time, based on the instantaneous data coming from scanned tags at checkout counters five thousand miles away. It’s how a president can run for office and win by breaking from the seeming tyranny of the past and its false hope, and tell voters that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.”

Well, the waiting is over. Here we are.

If the end of the twentieth century can be characterized by futurism, the twenty-first can be defined by presentism.

The looking forward so prevalent in the late 1990s was bound to end once the new millennium began. Like some others of that era, I predicted a new focus on the moment, on real experience, and on what things are actually worth right now. Then 9/11 magnified this sensibility, forcing America as a nation to contend with its own impermanence. People had babies in droves,[1] and even filed for divorces,[2] in what was at least an unconscious awareness that none of us lives forever and an accompanying reluctance to postpone things indefinitely. Add real-time technologies, from the iPhone to Twitter; a disposable consumer economy where 1-Click ordering is more important than the actual product being purchased; a multitasking brain actually incapable of storage or sustained argument; and an economy based on spending now what one may or may not earn in a lifetime, and you can’t help but become temporally disoriented. It’s akin to the onslaught of changing rules and circumstances that 1970s futurist Alvin Toffler dubbed “future shock.”

Only, in our era it’s more of a present shock. And while this phenomenon is clearly “of the moment,” it’s not quite as in the moment as we may have expected.

For while many of us were correct about the way all this presentism would affect investments and finance, even technology and media, we were utterly wrong about how living in the “now” would end up impacting us as people. Our focus on the present may have liberated us from the twentieth century’s dangerously compelling ideological narratives. No one—well, hardly anyone—can still be convinced that brutal means are justified by mythological ends. And people are less likely to believe employers’ and corporations’ false promises of future rewards for years of loyalty now. But it has not actually brought us into greater awareness of what is going on around us. We are not approaching some Zen state of an infinite moment, completely at one with our surroundings, connected to others, and aware of ourselves on any fundamental level.

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

In some senses, this was the goal of those who developed the computers and networks on which we depend today. Mid-twentieth-century computing visionaries Vannevar Bush and J. C. R. Licklider dreamed of developing machines that could do our remembering for us. Computers would free us from the tyranny of the past—as well as the horrors of World War II—allowing us to forget everything and devote our minds to solving the problems of today. The information would still be there; it would simply be stored out of body, in a machine.

It’s a tribute to both their designs on the future and their devotion to the past that they succeeded in their quest to free up the present of the burden of memory. We have, in a sense, been allowed to dedicate much more of our cognitive resources to active RAM than to maintaining our cerebral-storage hard drives. But we are also in danger of squandering this cognitive surplus on the trivial pursuit of the immediately relevant over any continuance of the innovation that got us to this point.

Behavioral economists exploit the growing disparity between our understanding of the present and that of the future, helping us see future debts as less relevant than current costs and leading us to make financial decisions against our own better interests. As these ways of understanding debt and lending trickle up to those making decisions about banking and macrofinance—such as the Federal Reserve or the European Central Bank—our greater economies end up suffering from the same sorts of logical traps as those of individual mortgage holders and credit card users.

Neuroscientists, mostly at the service of corporations looking to develop more compliant employees and consumers, are homing in on the way people make choices. But no matter how many subjects they put in their MRI machines, the focus of this research is decision making in the moment, the impulsive choices made in the blink of an eye, rather than those made by the lobes responsible for rational thought or consideration. By implementing their wares solely on the impulsive—while diminishing or altogether disregarding the considered—they push us toward acting in what is thought of as an instinctual, reptilian fashion.

And this mode of behavior is then justified as somehow more connected to the organic, emotional, and immediately relevant moment in which human beings actually live. Of course, this depiction of consciousness may help sell the services of neurotechnicians to advertisers, but it does not accurately represent how the human brain relates to the moment in which the organism exists.

No matter how invasive the technologies at their disposal, marketers and pollsters never come to terms with the living process through which people choose products or candidates; they are looking at what people just bought or thought, and making calculations based on that after-the-fact data. The “now” they seek to understand tells them nothing about desire, reasons, or context. It is simply an effort to key off what we have just done in order to manipulate our decisions in the future. Their campaigns encourage the kinds of impulsive behavior that fool us into thinking we are living in the now while actually just making us better targets for their techniques.

That is because there is no now—not the one they’re talking about, anyway. It is necessarily and essentially trivial. The minute the “now” is apprehended, it has already passed. Like they used to say about getting one’s picture on a Time magazine cover: the moment something is realized, it is over. And like the diminishing beauty returns for a facially paralyzed Botox addict, the more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time, the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.

As a result, our culture becomes an entropic, static hum of everybody trying to capture the slipping moment. Narrativity and goals are surrendered to a skewed notion of the real and the immediate; the Tweet; the status update. What we are doing at any given moment becomes all-important—which is behavioristically doomed. For this desperate approach to time is at once flawed and narcissistic. Which “now” is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?

In the following chapters, we will explore present shock as it manifests in a variety of ways, on a myriad of levels. We will look at how it changes the way we make and experience culture, run our businesses, invest our money, conduct our politics, understand science, and make sense of our world. In doing so, we will consider panic reactions to present shock right alongside more successful approaches to living outside what we have always thought of as time.

The book is divided into five sections, corresponding to the five main ways that present shock manifests for us. We begin with the collapse of narrative. How do we tell stories and convey values without the time required to tell a linear story? How does pop culture continue to function without traditional storylines, and how does politics communicate without grand narratives? We move on to “Digiphrenia”—the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time. We’ll see that our relationship to time has always been defined by the technologies we use to measure it, and that digital time presents particular challenges we haven’t had to contend with before. In “Overwinding,” we look at the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller ones. It’s the effort to make the passing moment responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur. In particular, what does this do to business and finance, which are relying on increasingly derivative forms of investment? Next we look at what happens when we try to make sense of our world entirely in the present tense. Without a timeline through which to parse causes and effects, we instead attempt to draw connections from one thing to another in the frozen moment, even when such connections are forced or imaginary. It’s a desperate grasp for real-time pattern recognition I’ll call “Fractalnoia.” Finally, we face “Apocalypto”—the way a seemingly infinite present makes us long for endings, by almost any means necessary.

We will encounter drone pilots contending with the stress of dropping bombs on a distant war zone by remote control before driving home to the suburbs for supper an hour later. We will see the way the physical real estate of Manhattan is being optimized for the functioning of the ultrafast trading algorithms now running the stock market—as well as what this means for the human traders left in the wake. We will encounter doomsday “preppers” who stock up on silver coins and ready-to-eat meals while dismissing climate change as a conspiracy theory hatched by Al Gore and since exposed in an email scandal.[3] We will consider the “singularity”—as well as our scientific community’s response to present shock—especially for the ways it mirrors the religious extremism accompanying other great social shifts throughout history.

Most important, we will consider what we human beings can do to pace ourselves and our expectations when there’s no temporal backdrop against which to measure our progress, no narrative through which to make sense of our actions, no future toward which we may strive, and seemingly no time to figure any of this out.

I suggest we intervene on our own behalf—and that we do it right now, in the present moment. When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause.

We have time for this.

NARRATIVE COLLAPSE

I had been looking forward to the twenty-first century.

That’s what most of us were doing in the 1990s: looking forward. Everything seemed to be accelerating, from the speed of technology to the growth of markets. PowerPoint presentations everywhere used the same steep upward curve to describe the way business revenues, computer use, carbon dioxide emissions, and growth of every kind were accelerating exponentially.

Moore’s Law, a rule of thumb for technological progress coined in 1965 by Intel cofounder Gordon E. Moore, told us that our computer-processing speeds would double about every two years. Along with that, however, everything else seemed to be doubling as well—our stock indexes, medical bills, Internet speeds, cable-TV stations, and social networks. We were no longer adjusting to individual changes, we were told, but to the accelerating rate of change itself. We were in what futurist Alvin Toffler called “future shock.”

As a result, everything and everyone was leaning toward the future. We weren’t looking forward to anything in particular so much as we were simply looking forward. Trend casters and “cool hunters” became the highest-paid consultants around, promising exclusive peeks at what lie ahead. Optimistic books with titles like “The Future of This” or “The Future of That” filled the store shelves, eventually superseded by pessimistic ones titled “The End of This” or “The End of That.” The subjects themselves mattered less than the fact that they all either had a future or—almost more reassuringly—did not.

We were all futurists, energized by new technologies, new theories, new business models, and new approaches that promised not just more of the same, but something different: a shift of an uncertain nature, but certainly of unprecedented magnitude. With each passing year, we seemed to be closer to some sort of chaos attractor that was beckoning us toward itself. And the closer we got, the more time itself seemed to be speeding up. Remember, these were the last years of the last decade of the last century of the millennium. The roaring, net-amplified, long boom of the 1990s seemed defined by this leaning forward, this ache toward conclusion, this push toward 2000 and the ultimate calendar flip into the next millennium.

Though technically still in the twentieth century, the year 2000 was a good enough marker to stand in for millennial transformation. So we anticipated the change like messianic cultists preparing for the second coming. For most of us, it took the less religious form of anticipating a Y2K computer bug where systems that had always registered years with just two digits would prove incapable of rolling over to 00. Elevators would stop, planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would cease to cool their reactor cores, and the world as we know it would end.

Of course, if the changeover didn’t get us, the terrorists would. The events of 9/11 hadn’t even happened yet, but on the evening of December 31, 1999, Americans were already on alert for a violent disruption of the Times Square New Year’s Eve festivities. Seattle had canceled its celebration altogether, in anticipation of an attack. CNN’s coverage circled the globe from one time zone to another as each hit midnight and compared the fireworks spectacle over the Eiffel Tower to the one at the Statue of Liberty. But the more truly spectacular news reported at each stop along the way that night was that nothing spectacular happened at all. Not in Auckland, Hong Kong, Cairo, Vatican City, London, Buenos Aires, or Los Angeles. The planes stayed in the sky (all but three of KLM’s 125-plane fleet had been grounded just in case), and not a single terror incident was reported. It was the anticlimax of the millennium.

But something did shift that night as we went from years with 19’s to those with 20’s. All the looking forward slowed down. The leaning into the future became more of standing up into the present. People stopped thinking about where things were going and started to consider where things were.

In the financial world, for example, an investment’s future value began to matter less than its current value. Just ten weeks into the millennium, the major exchanges were peaking with the tech-heavy and future-focused NASDAQ reaching its all-time high, over 5,100 points. Then the markets started down—and have never quite recovered. Although this was blamed on the dot.com bubble, the market’s softening had nothing to do with digital technologies actually working (or not) and everything to do with a larger societal shift away from future expectations and instead toward current value. When people stop looking to the future, they start looking at the present. Investments begin to matter less for what they might someday be worth, because people are no longer thinking so much about “someday” as they are about today. A stock’s “story”—the rationale for why it is going to go up—begins to matter less than its actual value in real time. What are my stocks worth as of this moment? What do I really own? What is the value of my portfolio right now?

The stock market’s infinite expansion was just one of many stories dependent on our being such a future-focused culture. All the great “isms” of the twentieth century—from capitalism to communism to Protestantism to republicanism to utopianism to messianism—depended on big stories to keep them going. None of them were supposed to be so effective in the short term or the present. They all promised something better in the future for having suffered through something not so great today. (Or at least they offered something better today than whatever pain and suffering supposedly went on back in the day.) The ends justified the means. Today’s war was tomorrow’s liberation. Today’s suffering was tomorrow’s salvation. Today’s work was tomorrow’s reward.

These stories functioned for quite a while. In the United States, in particular, optimism and a focus on the future seemed to define our national character. Immigrants committed to a better tomorrow risked their lives to sail the ocean to settle a wilderness. The New World called for a new story to be written, and that story provided us with the forward momentum required to live for the future. The Protestant work ethic of striving now for a better tomorrow took hold in America more powerfully than elsewhere, in part because of the continent’s ample untapped resources and sense of boundless horizon. While Europe maintained the museums and cultures of the past, America thought of itself as forging the new frontier.

By the end of World War II, this became quite true. Only, America’s frontier was less about finding new territory to exploit than it was about inventing new technologies, new businesses, and new ideas to keep the economy expanding and the story unfolding. Just as Mormonism continued the ancient story of the Bible into the American present, technologies, from rocket ships to computer chips, would carry the story of America’s manifest destiny into the future. The American Dream, varied though it may have been, was almost universally depending on the same greater shape, the same kind of story to carry us along. We were sustained economically, politically, and even spiritually, by stories.

Together these stories helped us construct a narrative experience of our lives, our nation, our culture, and our faith. We adopted an entirely storylike way of experiencing and talking about the world. Through the lens of narrative, America isn’t just a place where we live but is a journey of a people through time. Apple isn’t a smart phone manufacturer, but two guys in a garage who had a dream about how creative people may someday gain command over technology. Democracy is not a methodology for governing, but the force that will liberate humanity. Pollution is not an ongoing responsibility of industry, but the impending catastrophic climax of human civilization.

Storytelling became an acknowledged cultural value in itself. In front of millions of rapt television viewers, mythologist Joseph Campbell taught PBS’s Bill Moyers how stories provide the fundamental architecture for human civilization. These broadcasts on The Power of Myth inspired filmmakers, admen, and management theorists alike to incorporate the tenets of good storytelling into their most basic frameworks. Even brain scientists came to agree that narrativity amounted to an essential component of cognitive organization. As Case Western Reserve University researcher Mark Turner concluded: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining.”[1] Or as science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin observed, “The story—from Rapunzel to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”[2]

Experiencing the world as a series of stories helps create a sense of context. It is comforting and orienting. It helps smooth out obstacles and impediments by recasting them as bumps along the way to some better place—or at least an end to the journey. As long as there’s enough momentum, enough forward pull, and enough dramatic tension, we can suspend our disbelief enough to stay in the story.

The end of the twentieth century certainly gave us enough momentum, pull, and tension. Maybe too much. Back in the quaint midcentury year of 1965, Mary Poppins was awarded five Oscars, the Grateful Dead played their first concert, and I Dream of Jeannie premiered on NBC. But it was also the year of the first spacewalk, the invention of hypertext, and the first successful use of the human respirator. These events and inventions, and others, were promising so much change, so fast, that Alvin Toffler was motivated to write his seminal essay “The Future as a Way of Life,” in which he coined the term “future shock”:

We can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people. . . . Even the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projects of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.[3]

Toffler believed things were changing so fast that we would soon lose the ability to adapt. New drugs would make us live longer; new medical techniques would allow us to alter our bodies and genetic makeup; new technologies could make work obsolete and communication instantaneous. Like immigrants to a new country experiencing culture shock, we would soon be in a state of future shock, waking up in a world changing so rapidly as to be unrecognizable. Our disorientation would have less to do with any particular change than the rate of change itself.

So Toffler recommended we all become futurists. He wanted kids to be taught more science fiction in school, as well as for them to take special courses in “how to predict.” The lack of basic predictive skills would for Toffler amount to “a form of functional illiteracy in the contemporary world.”[4]

To a great extent this is what happened. We didn’t get futurism classes in elementary school, but we did get an abject lesson in futurism from our popular and business cultures. We all became futurists in one way or another, peering around the corner for the next big thing, and the next one after that. But then we actually got there. Here. Now. We arrived in the future. That’s when the story really fell apart, and we began experiencing our first true symptoms of present shock.

NARRATIVE COLLAPSE

Toffler understood how our knowledge of history helps us put the present in perspective. We understand where we are, in part, because we have a story that explains how we got here. We do not have great skill in projecting that narrative ability into the future. As change accelerated, this inability would become a greater liability. The new inventions and phenomena that were popping up all around us just didn’t fit into the stories we were using to understand our circumstances. How does the current story of career and retirement adjust to life spans increasing from the sixties to the one hundreds? How do fertility drugs change the timeline of motherhood, how does email change our conception of the workweek, and how do robots change the story of the relationship of labor to management? Or, in our current frame of reference, how does social networking change the goals of a revolution?

If we could only get better at imagining scenarios, modeling future realities, and anticipating new trends, thought Toffler, we may be less traumatized by all the change. We would be equipped to imagine new narrative pathways that accommodated all the disruptions.

Still, while Star Trek may have correctly predicted the advent of cell phones and iPads, there are problems inherent to using science fiction stories to imagine the future. First, sometimes reality moves even faster and less predictably than fiction. While stories must follow certain plot conventions in order to make sense to their audiences, reality is under no such obligation. Stuff just happens, and rarely on schedule. Second, and more significant, stories are usually much less about predicting the future than influencing it. As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries.

The craft of futurism—however well intentioned—almost always comes with an agenda. For those who were already familiar with the Internet, the first issues of Wired magazine seemed glaringly obvious in their underlying purpose to marry the values of the net with those of the free market. The many futurists who emerged in the late 1990s simply couldn’t help but predict futures in which the most important specialists to have around would be—you guessed it—futurists. The stories they came up with were tailor-made for corporations looking for visions of tomorrow that included the perpetuation of corporate power. Futurism became less about predicting the future than pandering to those who sought to maintain an expired past.

Meanwhile, all this focus on the future did not do much for our ability to contend with the present. As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of that, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning. Companies spent more money and energy on scenario planning than on basic competency. They hired consultants (sometimes media theorists, like me) to give them “mile-high views” on their industries. The higher up they could go, they imagined, the farther ahead they could see. One technology company I spoke with was using research and speculation on currency futures to decide where to locate offshore factories. The CFO of another was busy hedging supply costs by betting on commodities futures—with little regard to emerging technologies in his own company that would render the need for such commodities obsolete. Some companies lost millions, or even went out of business, making bets of this sort on the future while their core competencies and innovative capabilities withered.

As people, businesses, institutions, and nations, we could maintain our story of the future only by wearing increasingly restrictive blinders to block out the present. Business became strategy, career became a route to retirement, and global collaboration became brinksmanship. This all worked as long as we could focus on those charts where everything pointed up. But then the millennium actually came. And then the stock market crashed. And then down came the World Trade Towers, and the story really and truly broke.

The discontinuity generated by the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated. While I was writing this very chapter, I met with a recent college graduate who was developing a nonprofit company and website to help create relationships between “millennials” of her generation and more aged mentors of my own. She explained that her generation was idealistic enough to want to help fix the world, but that they had been “traumatized by 9/11 and now we’re incapable of accessing the greater human projects.” Somehow, she felt, the tragedy had disconnected her generation from a sense of history and purpose, and that they “needed to connect with people from before that break in the story in order to get back on track.”

This was also the generation who used their first access to the polls to vote for Obama. She and her friends had supported his campaign and responded to his explicitly postnarrative refrain, borrowed from Alice Walker’s book title: “We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” What a call to presentism this was! Young people took Obama at his word, rising to the challenge to become change rather than wait for it. Of course, it turned out to be more of a campaign slogan than an invitation to civic participation—just more rhetoric for a quite-storybook, ends-justify-the-means push to power. It would be left to the Occupy movement to attempt a genuinely presentist approach to social and political change. But Obama’s speechwriters had at least identified the shift under way, the failure of stories to create a greater sense of continuity, and the growing sense that something much more immediate and relevant needed to take their place.

BIG STORIES

Traditional stories, with traditional, linear arcs, have been around for a long time because they work. They seem to imitate the shape of real life, from birth to death. Like a breath or lovemaking, these sorts of stories have a rise and a satisfying fall; a beginning, a middle, and an end. While it seems quite natural to us today, this familiar shape didn’t become the default structure of stories until pretty late in human history, after the invention of text and scrolls, in literate cultures such as ancient Greece.

The Bible’s stories—at least the Old Testament’s—don’t work quite the same way. They were based more in the oral tradition, where the main object of the storyteller was simply to keep people involved in the moment. Information and morals were conveyed, but usually by contrasting two characters or nations with one another—one blessed, the other damned. Epic poems and, later, theater, followed the more linear progression we might better associate with a scroll or bound book. There’s a beginning and there’s an end. Wherever we are in the story, we are aware that there are pages preceding and pages to come. Our place in the scroll or book indicates how close we are to finishing, and our emotional experience is entirely bound up in time.

Aristotle was the first, but certainly not the last, to identify the main parts of this kind of story, and he analyzed them as if he were a hacker reverse-engineering the function of a computer program. The story mechanics he discovered are very important for us to understand, as they are still in use by governments, corporations, religions, and educators today as they attempt to teach us and influence our behaviors. They are all the more important for the way they have ceased to work on members of a society who have gained the ability to resist their spell. This has put the storytellers into present shock.

The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens—an initiating event—that sends the character on a quest. Oedipus wants to find the truth of his origins; Luke wants to rescue Princess Leia; Dora wants to get the baby frog back into its tree. So then the character makes a series of choices that propel him or her into increasingly dangerous situations. Oedipus decides to find and kill the murderer of King Laius; Luke becomes a Jedi to fight the Empire; Dora enlists her monkey pal, Boots, to help her bring the baby frog through the scary forest to its home. At each step along the way, the character proceeds further into peril and takes the audience further up the path into tension and suspense.

Just when the audience has reached its peak of anxiety—the place where we can’t take any more without running out of the theater or throwing the book on the floor—we get our reversal. Oedipus learns that the murderer he seeks is himself; Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father; Dora learns she herself holds the answer to the ugly old troll’s riddle. And with that, finally, comes full recognition and release of tension. Oedipus blinds himself, Luke brings his dying father back to the light side of the force, and Dora gets the baby frog to its family’s tree. Most important, the audience gets catharsis and relief. The ride is over. The greater the tension we were made to tolerate, the higher up the slope we get, and the more we can enjoy the way down.

This way of organizing stories—Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey”[5]—is now our way of understanding the world. This may have happened because the linear structure is essentially true to life, or we may simply have gotten so accustomed to it that it now informs the way we look at events and problems that emerge. Whatever the case, this structure also worked perfectly for conveying values of almost any kind to the captivated audience. For if we have followed the protagonist into danger, followed him up the incline plane of tension into a state of great suspense and anxiety, we will be willing to accept whatever solution he is offered to get out. Arnold Schwarzenegger finds a new weapon capable of killing the bad aliens, the interrogator on Law & Order uses psychology to leverage the serial killer’s ego against himself, or the kids on Glee learn that their friendships matter more than winning a singing contest. The higher into tension we have gone, the more dependent we are on the storyteller for a way out. That’s why he can plug in whatever value, idea, or moral he chooses.

Or product. The technique reaches its height, of course, in any typical television commercial. In just thirty seconds (or twenty-eight seconds, when you account for the fades to and from video blackness), a character finds himself in a situation, makes choices that put him in danger, and then finds a solution in the form of a purchase. For just one actual example: A girl is anticipating her high school prom when she notices a pimple on her cheek (initiating event). She tries hot compresses, popping it, and home remedies, which only make it worse (rising tension). Just when it looks as though there’s no way to avoid being terribly embarrassed and humiliated at her prom, a friend sees the pimple and, instead of teasing her, tells her about the new fast-acting pimple cream (reversal). She puts on the cream (recognition) and goes to the prom, pimple free (catharsis).

If we have followed the character up the ramp of tension into danger, then we must swallow the pill, cream, gun, or moral the storyteller uses to solve the problem. For all this to work, however, the storyteller is depending on a captive audience. The word “entertainment” literally means “to hold within,” or to keep someone in a certain frame of mind. And at least until recently, entertainment did just this, and traditional media viewers could be depended on to sit through their programming and then accept their acne cream.

Even if television viewers sensed they were being drawn into an anxious state by a storytelling advertiser who simply wanted to push a product, what were the alternatives? Before the advent of interactive devices like the remote control, the television viewer would have had to get up off the couch, walk over to the television set, turn the dial, tune in the new station, and then adjust the rabbit ears. Or simply walk out of the room and possibly miss the first moments of the show when the commercial ended. Although television viewers weren’t as coerced into submission as a churchgoer forced to stay in the pew and listen to the story as the minister related it, they were still pretty much stuck swallowing whatever pill the programmer inserted into the turning point of the narrative.

Then came interactivity. Perhaps more than any postmodern idea or media educator, the remote control changed the way we related to television, its commercials, and the story structure on which both depended. Previously, leaving the couch and walking up to the television to change the channel might cost more effort than merely enduring the awful advertisement and associated anxiety. But with a remote in hand, the viewer can click a button and move away effortlessly. Add cable television and the ability to change channels without retuning the set (not to mention hundreds of channels to watch instead of just three), and the audience’s orientation to the program has utterly changed. The child armed with the remote control is no longer watching a television program, but watching television—moving away from anxiety states and into more pleasurable ones.

Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don’t click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don’t trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today’s television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moments on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show’s long commercial break to catch the end of the basketball game’s second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show before the aliens show up.

Deconstructed in this fashion, television loses its ability to tell stories over time. It’s as if the linear narrative structure had been so misused and abused by television’s incompetent or manipulative storytellers that it simply stopped working, particularly on younger people who were raised in the more interactive media environment and equipped with defensive technologies. And so the content of television, and the greater popular culture it leads, adapted to the new situation.

NOW-IST POP CULTURE IS BORN

Without the time or permission to tell a linear story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, television programmers had to work with what they had—the moment. To parents, educators, and concerned experts, the media that came out of this effort has looked like anything but progress. As Aristotle explained, “When the storytelling in a culture goes bad the result is decadence.”[6] At least on a surface level, the new storyless TV shows appeared to support Aristotle’s maxim.

Animated shows masquerading as kids’ programming, such as Beavis and Butt-head (1993) and The Simpsons (1989), were some of the first to speak directly to the channel surfer.[7] MTV’s animated hit Beavis and Butt-head consists of little more than two young teenagers sitting on a couch watching MTV rock videos. Though dangerously mindless in the view of most parents, the show artfully recapitulates the experience of kids watching MTV. As the two knuckleheads comment on the music videos, they keep audience members aware of their own relationship to MTV imagery. The show takes the form of a screen-within-a-screen, within which typical MTV videos play. But where a rock video may normally entice the viewer with provocative or sexual imagery, now the viewer is denied or even punished for being drawn in. When the sexy girl comes into frame, Butt-head blurts out, “Nice set”; Beavis giggles along; and the viewer is alienated from the imagery. The two animated kids are delivering a simple object lesson in media manipulation. When they don’t like something, one says, “This sucks, change it,” and the other hits the remote. Beavis and Butt-head might not have singlehandedly rendered the rock video obsolete, but their satire provided a layer of distance and safety between viewers and the programming they no longer trusted.

The cult hit Mystery Science Theater 3000 (first aired in 1988) turned this genre into something close to an art form. Set in the future, the show allows the audience to watch along as the sole captive inhabitant of a space station and his two robot companions are forced to view bad B movies and low-budget science fiction sagas. Our television screen shows us the movie, with the heads of the three audience members in silhouette, Looney Tunes–style, several rows ahead of us. The trio makes comments and wisecracks about the movie, much as we may do if we were watching with our own friends.

But we’re not. For the most part, viewers of this late-night show are isolated in their apartments, using the images on their screens as surrogate companions. In a self-similar fashion, the character trapped in the futuristic space station has fashioned his own robot friends out of spare projection parts—the ones that could have given him some control over when the movies are shown. He uses the technology at his disposal to provide himself with simulated human interaction but has given up a certain amount of freedom to do so. So, too, do the young viewers of the show simulate a social setting with their television sets, suffering through the long, awful sci-fi movies delivered on the network’s schedule for the joy of simulated companionship. MST3K, as its fans call it, is both entertainment and mirror. If we can no longer follow a character through his story over time, we can instead be that character in the moment. Most of the film’s dialogue is drowned out by the antics in the audience, and the plot is lost to the endless succession of jokes and mimicry. The linear progression of the film’s story is sacrificed to the more pressing need for a framework that mirrors the viewing experience.

The individual jokes and asides of the characters also make up a new media education for the show’s audience. Almost all of the humor is derived from references to other media. The robots make an Andrew Lloyd Webber grill to burn the composer’s self-derivative scores and argue about the relative merits of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems. When they observe Bela Lugosi taking off his lab coat in a campy old sci-fi feature, the robots sing, “It’s a beautiful day in the laboratory” to the tune of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood theme. The robots make sure to call attention to every cheesy special effect and structural flaw. As the noise of guns and guard dogs pursue escaping convicts, a robot shouts, “Sounds like the foley artists are chasing us. Move it!” Toward the end of another film, one robot comments, “Isn’t this a little late in act three for a plot twist?”

To appreciate the humor of the show, viewers need to understand the media as a self-reflexive universe of references, any of which can be used to elucidate any other. Each joke is a demonstration of the media’s self-similarity. This is not a humor of random association but a comedy of connectivity where images and ideas from very disparate sources are revealed as somehow relevant to one another. To belong to the MST3K culture is to understand at least some of the literally hundreds of references per show and, more important, how they relate to one another. When this is not the object of the game, the characters instead keep their audience aware of their moment-to-moment relationship to the media, either by commenting on the technical quality of the film or by calling attention to themselves as recapitulated bracketing devices.

The Simpsons, now in its twenty-fourth season of self-referential antics, brings the same TV-within-a-TV sensibility to an even wider, mainstream audience. The opening theme still plays over animation of the entire family rushing home to the living room couch in time for their favorite show. Mirroring our increasingly ironic sensibility, the program’s child protagonist, Bart Simpson, seems aware of his own role within the show and often comments on what his family must look like to the audience watching along.

Although The Simpsons episodes have stories, these never seem to be the point. There are no stakes: characters die, or do things that would kill them, yet reappear in later episodes. The fact that Homer (after the Greek hero) Simpson might have caused a nuclear spill does not create tension in the typical sense, and nobody watching particularly cares whether the town of Springfield is spared the resulting devastation. We are not in a state of suspense. Instead, the equivalents of recognition or reversal come from recognizing what other forms of media are being satirized in any given moment. When Homer picks up his daughter from child care, she is perched on a wall next to hundreds of other pacifier-sucking babies. The “a-ha” moment comes from recognizing it is a spoof of Hitchcock’s The Birds—and that institutional child care has taken on the quality of a horror movie. Unlike his ancient Greek counterpart, Homer has no heroic journey. He remains in a suspended, infinite present, while his audience has all the recognitions.

Still on the air after all these years, The Simpsons, along with the many satirical, self-referential shows that followed its path (the creators of Family Guy, South Park, and even The Office all credit The Simpsons as a seminal influence), offers the narrative-wary viewer some of the satisfaction that traditional stories used to provide—but through nonnarrative means. Family Guy (1999), canceled by FOX in 2002 but revived in 2005 when its popularity online kept growing, seems tailor-made for the YouTube audience. The show’s gags don’t even relate to the story or throughline (such as they are), but serve as detours that thwart or halt forward motion altogether. Rather than simply scripting pop culture references into the scenes, Family Guy uses these references more as wormholes through which to escape from the temporal reality of the show altogether—often for minutes at a time, which is an eternity on prime-time television. In one episode the mom asks her son to grab a carton of milk, “and be sure to take it from the back.” Apropos of nothing, a black-and-white sketch of a man’s hand pulls the child into an alternate universe of a-ha’s iconic 1984 “Take On Me” music video. The child runs through a paper labyrinth with the band’s front man for the better part of a minute before suddenly breaking through a wall and back into the Family Guy universe.

This reliance on what the show’s YouTube fans call “cutscenes” turns what would have been a cartoon sitcom into a sequence of infinite loops, each one just as at home on the decontextualized Internet as they are strung together into a half hour of TV. The only real advantage to watching them in their original form within the program is the opportunity to delight in the writers’ audacious disregard for narrative continuity (and for pop culture as a whole).

Finally, going so far out on this postnarrative journey that it comes full circle, NBC’s unlikely hit Community (2009) is ostensibly a plotted sitcom about a group of misfits at Greendale Community College—except for the fact that the characters continually refer to the fact that they are on a television sitcom. For example, as Greendale’s principal completes his standard PA announcements at the opening of one scene, the character Abed—a pop-culture-obsessed voyeur with Asperger’s syndrome who is often a proxy for the audience—remarks that the announcement “makes every ten minutes feel like the beginning of a new scene of a TV show.” He continues, “Of course, the illusion only lasts until someone says something they’d never say on TV, like how much their life is like TV. There, it’s gone.”

Community assumes such extensive pop cultural literacy that even its narrative tropes—odd couple turned best friends; triumph of the underdog; will they or won’t they do it?—are executed with dripping irony. These are overwrenched plots, recognized as parody by an audience well versed in television’s all too familiar narrative arcs. They even do one of those highlights episodes stringing together scenes from previous episodes (the kind that normal sitcoms do to fill up an episode with old free footage), except none of the scenes are actually from previous episodes. It’s a series of fake flashbacks to scenes that never appeared in those episodes—a satire of the clip-show trope. “Community,” writes Hampton Stevens in the Atlantic, “isn’t actually a sitcom—any more than The Onion is an actual news-gathering organization. Community, instead, is a weekly satire of the sitcom genre, a spoof of pop culture in general.”[8] While The Simpsons and Family Guy disrupt narrative in order to make pop culture references, Community’s stories are themselves pop culture references. Narrative becomes a self-conscious wink.

Through whichever form of postmodern pyrotechnics they practice, these programs attack the very institutions that have abused narrative to this point: advertisers, government, religions, pop culture sellouts, politicians, and even TV shows themselves. They don’t work their magic through a linear plot, but instead create contrasts through association, by nesting screens within screens, and by giving viewers the tools to make connections between various forms of media. It’s less like being walked along a pathway than it is like being taken up high and shown a map. The beginning, the middle, and the end have almost no meaning. The gist is experienced in each moment as new connections are made and false stories are exposed or reframed. In short, these sorts of shows teach pattern recognition, and they do it in real time.

Of course, this self-conscious parody was just one of many responses to a deconstructing mediascape. TV and movies, low culture and high culture, have all been contending with the collapse of narrative. Some resist and some actively contribute; some complain while others celebrate. We are just now finding a new equilibrium in a transition that has taken over twenty years—most visibly in the cinema. As if responding to the disruption of the remote control and other deconstructive tools and attitudes, many American films of the late 1990s seemed to be searching for ways to preserve the narrative structure on which their messages and box office receipts were depending.

Movies dedicated to preserving the stories we use to understand ourselves turned the cut-and-paste technologies against the digital era from which they emerged, as if to restore the seamless reality of yesterday. The mid-1990s blockbuster Forrest Gump, for just one example, attempted to counteract the emerging discontinuity of the Internet age by retelling the story of the twentieth century from the perspective of a simpleton. Filmmaker Robert Zemeckis was already most famous for the Back to the Future series in which his characters went back in time to rewrite history. Forrest Gump attempts this same revisionist magic through a series of flashbacks, in which the audience relives disjointed moments of the past century of televised history, all with Gump magically pasted into the frame. We see Gump protesting the Vietnam War, Gump with John Lennon, and even Gump meeting JFK and saying he needs to pee.

Gump’s lack of awareness allows him to fall, by sheer luck, into good fortune at every turn. He becomes a war hero and multimillionaire by blindly stumbling through life with nothing more than the good morals his mom taught him, while the people around him who seem more aware of their circumstances drop like flies from war wounds, AIDS, and other disasters. In this story’s traditionally narrative schema, Gump is saved and most everyone else is damned. The impending unpredictability of life beyond narrative is reinterpreted as a box of chocolates—“You never know what you’re gonna get.” But it’s a box of chocolates! You can pretty well count on getting a chocolate as long as you don’t reach outside of the box into the real world of sharp rocks and biting bugs. The opening sequence of the movie tells it all: in one continuous shot a feather floats on the wind, effortlessly wandering over the rooftops of a small, perfect town, and lands at Gump’s feet, either coincidentally or by divine will. Of course, it was neither luck nor God’s guiding the feather’s path, but the will of the movie’s director, who used cinematic trickery to create the continuous sequence. Just like Gump, we, the audience, are kept ignorant of the special effects, edits, and superimpositions, as technology is exploited to make the facade look seamless and real. And what does Gump do with the feather? He puts it in an old box with his other collected trinkets—contained, like everything else, within his oversimplified narrative.

If Forrest Gump could be considered a defender of the narrative worldview, its mid-1990s contemporary, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, may be thought of as its opposite. Where Gump offers us a linear, if rewritten, historical journey through the decades since World War II, Pulp Fiction compresses imagery from those same years into a stylistic pastiche. Every scene has elements from almost every decade—a 1940s-style suit, a 1950s car, a 1970s telephone, a 1990s retro nightclub—forcing the audience to give up its attachment to linear history and accept instead a vision of American culture as a compression of a multitude of eras, and those eras themselves being reducible to iconography as simple as a leather jacket or dance step. The narrative technique of the film also demands that its audience abandon the easy plot tracking offered by sequential storytelling. Scenes occur out of order and dead characters reappear. On one level we are confused; on another, we are made privy to new kinds of information and meaning. The reordering of sequential events allows us to relate formerly nonadjacent moments of the story to one another in ways we couldn’t if they had been ordered in linear fashion. If we watch someone commit a murder in one scene, our confusion about his motivations can be answered by going backward in time in the very next scene. The movie’s final protagonist, Bruce Willis, comically risks his life to retrieve the single heirloom left to him by his father: his watch. Pulp Fiction delights in its ability to play with time, and in doing so shows us the benefits of succumbing to the chaos of a postnarrative world. The object of the game is to avoid getting freaked out by the resulting gaps, juxtapositions, and discontinuity.

Slowly but surely, dramatic television and cinema seemed to give up the fight, and instead embrace the timelessness, even the purposelessness, of living in the present. The classic situation comedy had been narrative in its construction. The “situation” usually consisted of a history so important to the show that it was retold during the opening theme song. A poor mountaineer was shooting at some food, accidentally struck oil, got rich, and brought his whole hillbilly family to Beverly Hills. A three-hour boat tour meets with a storm at sea, shipwrecking a group of unlikely castaways. Compared to these setups, modern sitcoms appear as timelessly ahistorical as Waiting for Godot. Friends chronicles the exploits of some people who happen to frequent the same coffee bar. Seinfeld is a show about nothing. The backstory of Two and a Half Men has more to do with Charlie Sheen’s dismissal and Twitter exploits than the divorces of the show’s in-world characters. These shows are characterized by their frozenness in time, as well as by the utter lack of traditional narrative goals.

The new challenge for writers is to generate the sense of captivity, as well as the sensations and insights, of traditional narrative—but to do so without the luxury of a traditional storyline. So they come up with characters who simply wake up in a situation and have to figure out who they are or what the heck is going on around them. The characters are contending with the same present shock as their creators.

The movie Memento follows a man who loses his memory every few hours and must repiece together his existence (and a murder mystery) in essentially no time at all. He tattoos clues and insights to his body, turning himself into a mosaic of hints. If he is able to piece together the pattern, he will know who he is and what happened to him. Working with the same handicap as his screenwriter, the character is attempting to construct narrative sense without the luxury of narrative time. Somehow, the reality of his situation must come together for him in a single moment.

CSI, one of the most popular franchises on television, brings this presentist sensibility to the standard crime drama. Where Law & Order investigates, identifies, and prosecutes a murderer over a predictable sequence of discoveries, CSI uses freeze-frame and computer graphics to render and solve the murder as if it were a puzzle in space. It’s not a crime, but a crime scene. Potential scenarios—even false ones—are rendered in 3D video maps, as the detectives attempt to deconstruct a single sustained moment.

The TV hits Lost and Heroes take on this same quality. In Lost, characters find themselves on an island where the rules of linear time no longer apply. Successive seasons of the series bring progressively more convoluted permutations on time travel and fate. Solving the mystery of the island and their relationship to it is not the result of a journey through evidence but a “making sense” of the world in the moment. Heroes moves back and forth through time in a similar fashion, replacing linear storytelling with the immediacy of puzzle solving. While the various superheroes are indeed preparing to prevent an apocalyptic explosion from destroying New York City, the dramatic action is much more concerned with piecing together a coherent temporal map of the universe in which they are living. The shows are less about what will happen next, or how the story will end, than about figuring out what is actually going on right now—and enjoying the world of the fiction, itself.

True, there may have always been forms of storytelling less concerned with climax than they are with their own perpetuation. The picaresque adventures of Don Quixote gave way to the serialized adventures of Dickens’s novels and eventually found new life in American soap operas. But the beauty and reassurance of these sorts of entertainments was that there was always a tomorrow. Somehow, the characters would continue on and never gain so much insight as to become wise. They were often children, or perpetually deluded, or just plain simple. As time sped up and narrative fell apart, however, the soap opera form declined from a height of nineteen different shows in 1970 to just four today.

Taking their place are the soap-opera-like series of pay television, such as the acclaimed The Wire and The Sopranos. The Wire, which follows drug dealers, corrupt union bosses, and politicians through Baltimore, never doles out justice. A world in which no good deed goes unpunished, The Wire is as existential as TV gets—a static world that can’t be altered by any hero or any plot point. It just is. (The characters may as well be on the series Oz, which takes place in the limbo of prison.) Characters experience their reality in terms of their relationship to the “game”—a way of life that is experienced more like a person playing an arcade shooter than going on an epic quest. Likewise, The Sopranos was a soap opera about survival in the midst of internecine battles. The characters long to be characters in The Godfather movies, who lived by a strict code of ethics and whose careers had more predictable, traditional arcs. The celebrated, controversial last episode of the series was one of TV’s most explicit depictions of present shock: in a seemingly innocuous scene, the screen suddenly just goes black. Tony Soprano’s existence could end at any moment, without his even being aware that it has ended. No drama, no insight. So, too, for the member of a society without narrative context—at least until he develops alternatives to the linear story.

Still other television creators have taken their cue instead from the epic narratives of Japanese manga comics, developing stories with multiple threads that take years to unfold. Individual episodes of The X Files (1993), Babylon Five (1994), Battlestar Galactica (2004), Mad Men (2007), or Breaking Bad (2008) may not be capable of conveying a neatly arced storyline, but the slowly moving “meta narrative” creates sustained tension—with little expectation of final resolution.

New incarnations of this approach, such as HBO’s sprawling Game of Thrones (2011), use structures and tropes more common to player-derived fantasy role-playing games than television. The opening titles sequence of the show betrays this emphasis: the camera pans over an animated map of the entire world of the saga, showing the various divisions and clans within the empire. It is drawn in the style of a fantasy role-playing map used by participants as the game board for their battles and intrigues. And like a fantasy role-playing game, the show is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point.

This is no longer considered bad writing. In fact, presentist literature might even be considered a new genre in which writers are more concerned with the worlds they create than with the characters living within them. As Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, explained in an interview, it is no longer the writer’s job to “tell us how somebody felt about something, it is to tell us how the world works.”[9] Like other contemporary authors, such as Don DeLillo, Jonathan Lethem, and David Foster Wallace, Smith is less concerned with character arcs than with what she calls “problem solving.” Just like the worlds of television’s Lost or Heroes, the worlds of DeLillo’s White Noise and Lethem’s Chronic City are like giant operating systems whose codes and intentions are unknown to the people living inside them. Characters must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle by making connections and recognizing patterns.

REALITY BYTES

This same impulse lies at the heart of so-called reality TV—the unscripted, low-budget programs that have slowly replaced much of narrative television. Producers of these shows chose to embrace the collapse of linear narrative once they realized this meant that they were also relieved of the obligation to pay writers to tell a story or actors to perform it. Instead, the purveyors of reality TV simply roll camera in situations and locations that are most likely to generate drama or at least some conflict.

The first of these shows documented something close to reality. Cops, created by John Langley back in 1989 and still in production in dozens of countries, follows real police officers as they go on their patrols, chase drug addicts or drunk spouse abusers, and make arrests. The show’s opening song lyric, “What you gonna do when they come for you?” reveals the presentist premise: this is instructional video for how to act when you get arrested. The self-satisfied closing monologues of the police assuring us that justice has simply been served replace the character-driven insights and clever reversals of traditional crime drama. The arresting of lowlifes is not a special event but what might be considered a “steady state”—a constant hum or a condition of the presentist universe.

Another reality-TV archetype was born with MTV’s The Real World, first broadcast in 1992 and still on the air, which represents itself as a slice of its viewing demographic’s real lives. The show was inspired by the 1970s documentary series An American Family, which set out to document the daily reality of a typical family’s experience but hit the jackpot when the parents waged an unexpected and spectacular divorce while the son also realized he was gay, all in prime time. In hopes of yielding similarly sensational effects, The Real World selects a group of good-looking eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds and puts them in an apartment together with dozens of cameras running twenty-four hours a day. Any moment is as potentially significant as any other. It’s up to the editors to construct something like narrative, after the fact. Of course, the participants are actually competing for attention, and hoping to get noticed and selected for careers on MTV or in a related industry. So they generate drama as best they can by having sex, fighting, engaging in dangerous behavior, or thinking up something provocative to do that hasn’t been done by someone else in one of the other twenty-eight seasons of the show. The Real World also solves the television advertiser’s dilemma in a medium where traditional commercials no longer work: product placement.

After all, in the channel surfers’ DVR-enabled media environment, sponsors no longer have the luxury of captive viewers who will sit through commercials. Many of us are watching entire season’s worth of episodes in a single weekend through streaming services such as Hulu or Netflix. The traditional timeline of television schedules vanishes in an on-demand world, so the sponsor must embed advertising into the very fabric of the programming. Reality TV has proved a better backdrop for this, because the disruptions don’t compromise the reality of the situation. When we see a real product in a fictional show, we are drawn out of the fantasy and back into real-world considerations. The viewers of The Real World, ironically, have no such expectation of the consistency of reality. They know enough about marketing to accept that the clothes the participants wear might be sponsored by fashion companies in the same way that professional sports uniforms are sponsored by Nike. That’s the real world, after all. If Donald Trump’s “apprentices” are all working to brand a new hamburger, the audience understands that Burger King has paid for the exposure. In presentist TV, programmers lose the ability to distinguish between the program and the commercial—but they also lose the need to do so.

The bigger challenge is creating content compelling enough to watch, and to do so without any setup at all. Without the traditional narrative arc at their disposal, producers of reality TV must generate pathos directly, in the moment. This accounts for the downward spiral in television programming toward the kind of pain, humiliation, and personal tragedy that creates the most immediate sensation for the viewer. What images and ideas can stop the channel surfer in his tracks? The extent of the horror on screen is limited only by the audience’s capacity to tolerate the shame of its own complicity. We readily accept the humiliation of a contestant at an American Idol audition—such as William Hung, a Chinese American boy who revived the song “She Bangs”—even when he doesn’t know we are laughing at him. The more of this kind of media we enjoy, the more spectacularly cruel it must be to excite our attention, and the better we get at evading the moral implications of watching the spectacle.

It calls to mind the questions posed back in the 1960s by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, who had been fascinated by the impact of spectacle and authority on soldiers’ obedience in Nazi Germany. Milgram wanted to know if German war criminals could have been following orders, as they claimed, and not truly complicit in the death camp atrocities. At the very least, he was hoping to discover that Americans would not respond the same way under similar circumstances. He set up the now infamous experiment in which each subject was told by men in white lab coats to deliver increasingly intense electric shocks to a victim who screamed in pain, complained of a heart condition, and begged for the experiment to be halted. More than half of the subjects carried out the orders anyway, slowly increasing the electric shocks to what they believed were lethal voltages. On a structural level—and maybe also an emotional one—reality TV mirrors much of this same dynamic. No, we’re not literally shocking people, but we are enjoying the humiliation and degradation of the participants, from the safe distance of an electronic medium. The question is not how much deadly voltage can we apply, but how shamefully low can we go? Besides, the producers bear the real brunt of responsibility—just as the men in lab coats did in the research experiments.*

And while these sorts of studies were declared unethical by the American Psychological Association in 1973, reality TV does seem to have picked up the thread—less for research purposes than as a last-ditch attempt to generate spectacle without narrative. Because they can’t write scripts, reality-show producers must front-load the probability for drama into the very premises of their shows. In this sense, programs like Big Brother, Survivor, or Wife Swap are as purposefully constructed as psychology experiments: they are setups with clear hypotheses, designed to maximize the probability of drama, conflict, and embarrassment. Let’s get women to fawn over a millionaire, perform sex acts with him on television, and then reveal that he’s really a construction worker. Let’s confine a dozen celebrity addicts in a recovery facility together, make them go off drugs cold turkey, and see what happens! (Yes, these are real shows.)

There is certainly a freedom associated with the collapse of narrative, but it is very easily surrendered to the basest forms of spectacle and abuse. Why bother making a television show at all when kids are more likely to watch a one-minute Jackass clip on YouTube of a young man being subjected to the “fart mask”? (Don’t ask.) We find nearly every corner of popular culture balancing the welcome release from traditional storylines against the pressure to produce similarly heightened states without them. The emergence of interactivity and deconstruction of the late 1990s led to more than one reaction from programmers and audiences. It resulted in both the self-conscious, existentially concerned presentism of The Sopranos and Lost, as well as the crass, spectacular present shock of The Jerry Springer Show, Faces of Death videos, Mob Wives, Toddlers and Tiaras, and even the Paris Hilton sex tapes.

Concerned mythologists and anthropologists foresaw this moment of discontinuity and called upon storytellers to create a new story for this new society—or else. Joseph Campbell believed the first images of the Earth from space utterly shattered our individual cultural narratives and required humanity to develop a universal story about Gaia, the Earth Mother. That clearly hasn’t happened. Robert Bly sees manhood as the principal victim of the end of storytelling, as men no longer have a way to learn about the role of the father or the qualities of good leadership. By retelling lost myths, Bly hopes, men can reestablish their connection to these traditions.

But stories cannot truly come to the rescue of people who no longer have the time or trust required to respond to narrativity. What if stories themselves are incompatible with a presentist culture? How then do we maintain a sense of purpose and meaning? Moreover, how do we deal with the trauma of having lost these stories in the first place?

Some of the initial responses to living in a world without narrative are as refreshing as others are depressing. What appears at first like a positive, evolutionary leap in our ability to contend with newfound complexity quickly, even invisibly, often seems to degenerate into exploitation and cynicism. It’s not an either/or; in most cases, both are true.

Young people have proved the most adaptable in this regard, maybe because they are less likely to mourn what they never knew about to begin with. It’s not just their media consumption that’s changing, but their social and physical activities as well. For example, freestyle, independent sports such as skateboarding and snowboarding have surged right along with nonnarrative media. Camcorders, indie media, and YouTube no doubt had something to do with this, as kids had an easy way to record and share their best stunts for all the world to see. A ten-second video shown on a one-inch-high screen can’t really do justice to a Major League Baseball double play (you can’t even see the ball), but it’s the perfect format for a single daring skateboard flip. The individualism of personal media seemed perfectly wed to the individualism of extreme sports. But the shift in sports activity goes deeper than this.

Traditional team sports are not only dependent on mainstream, larger screen television for their success, but also on the top-down style of old-school media and narrative consistency of an enduring and inviolable value system. Gridiron football has distinct battle lines, clear adversaries, regional loyalties, and a winner-take-all ethos. It is a military simulation that follows the same arc as any traditional teaching story—and often with a similar social or commercial purpose. A band of brothers comes together under the guidance of a fatherly coach, who leads them in a locker room prayer before inspiring them with a pep talk worthy of Henry V on Saint Crispin’s Day. These tropes and values don’t resonate in a postnarrative world. Besides, when we learn that the actual pregame talk in the locker room involves coaches offering a cash bounty to players who can injure the opposing quarterback,[10] the integrity of that story is undermined—no matter how vigorously the league later fines the offenders.

Baseball, meanwhile, found its power in hometown loyalty and American spirit. This was America’s pastime, after all. But as the generic power of cash overtakes the sport, teams end up moving from city to city, from historic stadiums to ones named after corporations, while players—free agents—follow the money. Players today rarely come from the cities where they play, making traditional hometown-hero narratives impossible to sustain.

Familiar team rivalries give way to personal careerism, as players compete for record-breaking stats that will win them lucrative product endorsements. Players don’t take steroids on behalf of the team but to accumulate home run totals worthy of admittance to the Hall of Fame. The congressional hearings on steroids in baseball revealed the players’ own disillusionment with the sport. “Let’s face it,” José Canseco explained, “when people come to the ballpark, or watch us on TV, they want to be entertained.” Jason Giambi echoed the sentiment: “We’re in the entertainment business.” Disgraced home run legend Barry Bonds sadly admitted, “The last time I played baseball was in college.”[11]

In a piece on Boston’s 2004 World Series victory, ESPN sportswriter Bill Simmons best voiced the sense of interruption and narrative collapse: “I always thought that, for the rest of my life, I would look at that banner and think only good thoughts. Now, there’s a mental asterisk that won’t go away. I wish I could take a pill to shake it from my brain.”[12] There’s a real asterisk, too, in the record books besides the winning seasons of steroid-using teams—as if to extract those years from the timeline of history. Senator John McCain sadly concluded that Major League Baseball was “becoming a fraud in the eyes of the American people.”[13] And, of course, every scandal and betrayal is chronicled in painstaking clarity by an always-on cadre of amateur journalists who—unlike the television networks—have nothing to lose by dismantling the illusion of traditional team sports.

As a result, both the National Football League and Major League Baseball have been experiencing declines in attendance over the past four years.[14] The only league on the rise is the NBA, where individual performance, celebrity, and slam dunks take precedence over local affiliation or team spirit. Michael Jordan’s fade-away jumpers will be remembered longer than his tenuous connection to Chicago. But even there, strident individualism feels at odds with the central premise of team sports. When NBA superstar LeBron James famously used a televised special—The Decision—to announce he was leaving his home state of Ohio to play for Miami, the Cleveland Cavaliers fans never forgave him.

Freestyle sports, like skateboarding, snowboarding, rock climbing, and mountain biking, are more compatible with a world in which team loyalty and military victory have given way to self-expression and the thrill of the moment. Team sports take hours to watch and require a very particular sort of commitment to play. A kid must sign up at school, submit to a coach, and stay for the season. By contrast, extreme sports are improvisational in nature, and more about texture, pleasure, and style than about victory over an adversary. They emphasize process, form, and personal achievement, and resist efforts to standardize play. When the world’s first great snowboarders were asked to participate in the initial Olympics competition for snowboarding in 1998, they refused, because they were concerned it would redefine a freestyle sport as rules-based and combatively competitive.

Extreme sports also tend to celebrate the very discontinuities—the roughness—that well-crafted narrative arcs try to smooth over. Compared with traditional parallel skiers, who pursue a streamlined descent down the slope, snowboarders actively thrash their course. They seek out the rough, icy patches that regular skiers avoid, in order to test their mettle and improvise new maneuvers. They cherish the unpredictability of the slope the same way that skateboarders thrash the discontinuities of the urban landscape. Every crack in the sidewalk, every hydrant, and every pothole is an opportunity. Boarders’ magazines of the mid-1990s contained articles relating skateboarding to chaos math, and snowboarding to Buddhism.

The highly experiential now-ness of extreme sports was equally susceptible to the downward pull of present shock. Professional basketball has a hard enough time maintaining a team ethic in the face of showboating and hotdogging antics on the court and off. Only heavy fines are enough to keep players thinking about team priorities, like actually winning games. Without any such disincentives, extreme sports stars soon disregarded the anticommercial ethos of their predecessors and began accepting lucrative sponsorships from clothing companies and appearing on television shows dedicated to chronicling their exploits.

Meanwhile, the net celebrates kids whose antics are the most sensationalist and, as a result, often reckless and self-destructive. An entire genre of YouTube video known as Epic Fail features amateur footage of wipeouts and other, well, epic failures. “FAIL Blog,” part of The Daily What media empire, solicits fail videos from users and features both extreme sports stunts gone awry along with more random humiliations—like the guy who tried to shoplift an electric guitar by shoving it down his pants. Extreme sports clips are competing on the same sensationalist scale and result in popular classics such as “tire off the roof nut shot” and “insane bike crash into sign.” Daring quickly overtakes what used to be skill. In “planking” photos and videos, participants seek to stay frozen in a horizontal plank position as they balance on a flagpole, over a cliff, or on top of a sleeping tiger. For “choking” videos, young people strangle one another to the point of collapse and, sometimes, death.[15]

Maintaining a dedication to craft over crassness is not impossible, but pretty difficult when sports enthusiasts find themselves competing for the same eyeballs and accolades as plankers and chokers. The predicament they face casts an unlikely but informative light on the way adults, too, are coping with the demise of the stories we watch and use to participate in the world around us.

REAL-TIME FEED: THE CNN EFFECT

While the shift away from grand narrative in spectator sports may not radically impact the world, the shift away from narrative in spectator democracy just could. What began as a simple expansion of the way we were allowed to consume television news has resulted in profound changes to the ways in which both policy and politics are conducted, or, sadly in most cases, not conducted at all. A presentist mediascape may prevent the construction of false and misleading narratives by elites who mean us no good, but it also tends to leave everyone looking for direction and responding or overresponding to every bump in the road.

Until recently, of course, television news tended to reinforce traditional narrative values. Like the newsreels once shown in movie theaters, broadcast news compiled and contextualized footage from the field. By the early 1960s, the three main networks—CBS, NBC, and ABC—each had its own fifteen- to thirty-minute news program every weekday evening, anchored by a reassuring middle-aged man. These broadcasts enjoyed such authority that Walter Cronkite could end his broadcast, nonironically, by saying, “And that’s the way it is.” The daily news cycle gave everyone, from editors to politicians, the opportunity to spin and contextualize news into stories. This is what journalism schools taught: how to shape otherwise meaningless news into narratives.

Morning newspapers would have even more time to digest, format, and editorialize on the news of the preceding day, so that the public wouldn’t simply be confronted with the globe’s many catastrophes. We would be told what was being done about them or how they ended up, and those in charge were located and given a chance to reassure us. News editors also chose when to hold back a story altogether, for fear that its unresolved nature might worry us too greatly. Foreign dictators were not granted US airtime, for example, and scandals about politicians were held indefinitely or forever. Just as the New York Times promised us news that was “fit to print,” television news shows sought to promote the interests, welfare, and contentment of America by creating a coherent narrative through which we could understand and, hopefully, dismiss the news before going to bed. Thank you and good night.

None of this was necessarily intended to be devious. The widespread belief among both the political and the media industries was that the public was not sophisticated enough to grasp the real issues of the day. Walter Lippman, America’s first true public relations specialist, had convincingly argued in his 1922 book Public Opinion, “The real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.”[16] Incapable of grasping news directly, the public was to be informed about issues only after a benevolent elite had crafted all this information and its implications into simple and palatable stories. In this view, the people are incapable of participating as informed members of a democracy, and their votes should not be left up to their discretion. Instead, public relations specialists would be hired to get people to vote in their own best interests. So, for example, after winning the presidency on a peace platform, Woodrow Wilson subsequently decided to go to war. He hired Lippman and his protégé, Edward Bernays, to manufacture public consent for American participation in World War I.

Later, coverage of the Vietnam War threatened this arrangement, as daily footage of American soldiers enduring and even perpetrating war atrocities proved too much for the evening news to contextualize. There was still a story being told, but the story was out of the government’s—or its propagandists’—control. If anything, the story that the television news was telling ended up more accurate than the one President Johnson’s staff was feeding him. The cognitive dissonance between the stories we were trying to tell ourselves about who we were as a nation and a people began conflicting with the stories that we were watching on TV. In a world still organized by stories, news about Vietnam atrocities and Watergate crimes can only mean there are bad people who need to be punished.

This cognitive dissonance amounted to a mass adolescence for America: the stories we were being told about who we were and what we stood for had turned out to be largely untrue. And like any adolescent, we felt ready to go out and see the world for ourselves. What a perfect moment for Ted Turner to arrive with an unfiltered twenty-four-hour news channel. Like every other escape from media captivity, the launch and spread of CNN in the 1980s appeared to offer us liberation from the imposed narratives of our keepers. Instead of getting the news of the day neatly packaged by corporate networks into stories with tidy endings, we would now get live feeds of whatever was happening of importance, anywhere in the world. Although CNN would lack the network news’s budgets, editorial experience, and recognizable anchormen, it would attempt to parlay its unique position to its advantage. CNN was not under traditional corporate control, so it could present news without worrying about who or what was impacted; its always-on format meant the newsroom was not under the obligation to craft events into satisfying packages for a single evening broadcast; its position on the cable dial lowered expectations for high-budget production values; and, finally, its freedom from traditional narrative made it less suspect in the post-Watergate era. Like Ted Turner himself, CNN would be renegade, free of corporate or government control, and utterly uncensored.

This is why the network came under such widespread attack in its earlier days from traditional news media, academics, and politicians. Contrary to journalistic standards of the day, CNN let Saddam Hussein speak directly to the American people. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, CNN was the only network to broadcast the first bombardments of Baghdad from a hotel window, having made arrangements for transmission access with the Iraqi government that were later criticized. CNN also carried immediate and around-the-clock coverage of the Battle of Mogadishu, the protests at Tiananmen Square, and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. This saturation with live, uncensored, and unconsidered images from around the world impacted public opinion profoundly and actually forced government leaders to make decisions more quickly. Officials at the Pentagon eventually dubbed this phenomenon “the CNN effect,” as then secretary of state James Baker explained, “The one thing it does, is to drive policymakers to have a policy position. I would have to articulate it very quickly. You are in real-time mode. You don’t have time to reflect.”[17] Baker isn’t simply talking about needing to work and think faster; he’s expressing the need to behave in real time, without reflection. Policy, as such, is no longer measured against a larger plan or narrative; it is simply a response to changing circumstances on the ground, or on the tube. Of course, the Internet, Facebook status updates, and Twitter feeds amplify this effect, bringing pings and alerts from around the world to people’s desktops and smart phones without even the need for a CNN truck or a satellite feed. Just as CNN once forced network news broadcasters to carry images they might have otherwise held back, now YouTube forces the cable networks to show amateur clips, even if they do so with disclaimers.

The focus on immediate response engendered by always-on news becomes the new approach to governance. Pollsters such as Republican operative Frank Luntz[18] take real-time, moment-to-moment measurements of television viewers’ responses as they watch news debates. Holding small devices with dials called “people meters,” sample audience members register their immediate impressions of candidates, coverage, and calamity. Policy makers then use this information to craft their responses to crises as they unfold. No one has time to think, and insisting on a few hours or even an entire day to make a decision is regarded as a sign of indecision and weakness. The mythic emergency phone call to the president at 2 a.m. must not only be answered, but also responded to immediately, as if by instinct.

As a result, what used to be called statecraft devolves into a constant struggle with crisis management. Leaders cannot get on top of issues, much less ahead of them, as they instead seek merely to respond to the emerging chaos in a way that makes them look authoritative. While grand narratives may have prompted ethnocentric and jingoistic attitudes from ideological policy makers (neoconservatism being just one of the more recent varieties of world writing), the lack of any narrative at all subjects them to the constant onslaught of random disasters. The effort to decisively end a story is futile. George W. Bush posed his control over narrativity just three days after 9/11 when he stood at Washington National Cathedral and told America, “This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others; it will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing.”[19] He later landed on an aircraft carrier and stood in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, as if to punctuate the conclusion of this story, but reality would not submit. In a presentist world, it is impossible to get in front of the story, much less craft it from above.

Likewise, without long-term goals expressed for us as readily accessible stories, people lose the ability to respond to anything but terror. If we have no destination toward which we are progressing, then the only thing that motivates our movement is to get away from something threatening. We move from problem to problem, avoiding calamity as best we can, our worldview increasingly characterized by a sense of panic. Our news networks and Internet feeds compound the sense of crisis by amplifying only the most sensational and negative events, which garner the highest ratings and click-throughs, generating still more of the same. Yes, the news has always been dominated by darkness and disaster; newspapers with a dead body on the cover page sell better than those announcing a successful flower show. But now the feedback on viewer ratings is instantaneous, and its relationship to ad revenues is paramount, as once-independent news channels like CNN become mere subsidiaries of NYSE conglomerates such as Time Warner. The indirect value that a quality news program may have to the reputation of an entire television franchise ceases to have meaning—or at least enough meaning to compensate for poor ratings in the short term. Blatant shock is the only surefire strategy for gaining viewers in the now. In addition, the 24/7 news cycle creates the sense of a constant stream of crises that are inescapable, no matter where we go. I remember a time in my youth when taking a vacation meant losing touch with whatever was going on. We would return home to mail, phone messages, and the major news stories. Now, as kids on line at Disneyworld busy texting their friends back home seem to attest, there’s almost no way or cause to leave all that behind.

The world is now connected by the news feeds of twenty-four-hour networks, and so together we watch the slow-motion, real-time disasters of Hurricane Katrina, Deepwater Horizon, and the Fukushima nuclear plant—as well as what feels like the utter ineffectualness of our leaders to do anything about any of it. CNN put up a live feed of the BP well spewing out its oil into the gulf and kept it in a corner of the broadcast continuously for months. The constancy of such imagery, like the seemingly chronic footage of Katrina victims at the New Orleans Superdome holding up signs begging for help, is both unnerving and desensitizing at the same time. With each minute that goes by with no relief in sight our impatience is stoked further and our perception of our authorities’ impotence is magnified.

Talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News make good business out of giving voice to presentist rage. Opinionated, even indignant, newsreaders keep our collective cortisol (stress hormone) levels high enough to maintain a constant fight-or-flight urgency. Viewers too bored or impatient for news reporting and analysis tune in to evening debate shows and watch pundits attack one another. The pugilism creates the illusion of drama, except the conflict has no beginning or end—no true origin in real-world issues or legitimate effort at consensus. It’s simply the adaptation of well-trodden and quite obsolete Right-Left debate to the panic of a society in present shock. What used to be the Left argues for progress: MSNBC’s brand motto encourages us to “lean forward” into the future. What used to be the Right now argues primarily for the revival of early-twentieth-century values, or social conservatism. Whether looking back or looking ahead, both sides promise relief from the shock of the present.

OCCUPY REALITY

The problem with leaving the present altogether, however, is that it disconnects us from reality. For all the reality shows, twenty-four-hour news channels, issues-related programming, and supposed information overload online, there’s precious little for people to actually rely on or use effectively. Are real estate prices going up or down? Who is winning in Afghanistan? Do Mexicans take American jobs? It all depends on who is talking, as the descent of what used to be professional journalism into professional opining generates the sense that there is no objective truth. Every day, thanks to their immersion in this mediated distortion field, fewer Americans agree that the environment needs to be protected or that biological species evolve. From 1985 to 2005, the number of Americans unsure about evolution increased from 7 percent to 21 percent,[20] while those questioning global warming increased from 31 percent in 1997 to 48 percent in 2010.[21] These impressions are formed on the basis of religious programming posing as news reporting and cable-channel debates about email scandals, while back in the real world, aquifers are disappearing and first-line antibiotics are becoming ineffective against rapidly mutating bacteria. In the relativistic haze of participatory media, it’s all just a matter of opinion. You are entitled to yours and I am entitled to mine. This is a democracy, after all. As even the jaded, former public relations giant Richard Edelman now admits, “In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.”[22]

The Internet welcomes everyone into the conversation. An op-ed in the New York Times may as well be a column on the Huffington Post, which may as well be a personal blog or Twitter stream. Everyone’s opinion may as well matter as much as everyone else’s, resulting in a population who believes its uninformed opinions are as valid as those of experts who have actually studied a particular problem. (I can even sense readers bridling at the word “experts” in the preceding sentence, as if I have fallen into the trap of valuing an elite over the more reliable and incorruptible gut sense of real people.) College students often ask me why anyone should pay for professional journalism when there are plenty of people out there, like themselves, willing to write blogs for free? One answer is that government and corporations are investing millions of dollars into their professional communications campaigns. We deserve at least a few professionals working full-time to evaluate all this messaging and doing so with some level of expertise in ascertaining the truth.

Young people are not alone in their skepticism about the value of professional journalism. A 2010 Gallup Poll showed Americans at an under 25 percent confidence in newspapers and television news—a record low.[23] Pew Research shows faith in traditional news media spiking downward as Internet use spikes upward, and that a full 42 percent believe that news organizations hurt democracy. This is twice the percentage who believed that in the mid-1980s, before the proliferation of the net.[24]

As cultural philosopher Jürgen Habermas offered during his acceptance speech of a humanitarian award in 2006, “The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus.”[25] To be sure, the rise of citizen journalism brings us information that the mainstream media lacks either the budget for or fortitude to cover. Initial reports of damage during Hurricane Katrina came from bloggers and amateur videographers. However, these reports also inflated body counts and spread rumors about rape and violence in the Superdome that were later revealed not to have occurred.[26] Footage and reporting from the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution—where news agencies were limited or banned—were almost entirely dependent on amateur journalists. But newsgathering during a bloody rebellion against a violently censorious regime is an outlier example and hardly the basis for judging the efficacy of amateur journalism in clarifying issues or explaining policy.

If anything, such heroism under fire, combined with the general public’s access to blogging technology and professional-looking website templates, gives us all the false sense that we are capable of researching and writing professional-quality journalism about anything. In fact, most of us are simply making comments about the columns written by other bloggers, who are commenting on still others. Just because we all have access to blogging software doesn’t mean we should all be blogging, or that everyone’s output is as relevant as everyone else’s. Today’s most vocal critic of this trend, The Cult of the Amateur author Andrew Keen, explains, “According to a June 2006 study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 34 percent of the 12 million bloggers in America consider their online ‘work’ to be a form of journalism. That adds up to millions of unskilled, untrained, unpaid, unknown ‘journalists’—a thousandfold growth between 1996 and 2006—spewing their (mis)information out in the cyberworld.” More sanguine voices, such as City University of New York journalism professor and BuzzFeed blogger Jeff Jarvis, argue that the market—amplified by search results and recommendation engines—will eventually allow the better journalism to rise to the top of the pile. But even market mechanisms may have a hard time functioning as we consumers of all this media lose our ability to distinguish between facts, informed opinions, and wild assertions.

Our impatient disgust with politics as usual combined with our newfound faith in our own gut sensibilities drives us to take matters into our own hands—in journalism and beyond. In a political world where ideological goals are replaced by terror and rage, it’s no wonder the first true political movement to emerge out of present shock would be the Tea Party. This is the politics of PTSD, inspired by a no-nonsense brand of libertarianism espoused by Texas congressman Ron Paul. Taking its name from the Boston Tea Party of 1773, when American colonists dumped British tea into the harbor in a tax revolt, today’s Tea Party movement shares the antiauthoritarian impulse of its namesake and then expresses it as a distrust of government in all forms. While the Tea Party may have originated as an antitax movement, it has been characterized over time more by a disdain for consensus and an almost deliberate effort to remain ignorant of facts that may contradict its oversimplified goals.

Tea Partiers, such as Michele Bachmann, either misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented the concept of a debt ceiling as a vote to authorize additional spending (when it is actually a vote to pay what has already been spent). The solution to the seemingly perpetual debt crisis? Shut down government. Healthcare system too complicated? End it. (Except, of course, for Medicare, which doesn’t count.) Russia and China are evil, Arabs are scary, Mexicans are taking Americans’ jobs, and climate change is a hoax. As Columbia University historian Mark Lilla has chronicled, the combination of amplified self-confidence and fear of elites is a dangerous one. In his view, the Tea Partiers “have two classic American traits that have grown much more pronounced in recent decades: blanket distrust of institutions and an astonishing—and unwarranted—confidence in the self. They are apocalyptic pessimists about public life and childlike optimists swaddled in self-esteem when it comes to their own powers.”[27]

If the Tea Party is to be disparaged for anything, it is not for being too conservative, too right wing, or too libertarian, but simply too immature, quick-triggered, and impatient for final answers. Traumatized by the collapse of the narratives that used to organize reality and armed with what appears to be access to direct democracy, its members ache for harsh, quick fixes to age-old problems—something they can really feel—as if fomenting a painful apocalypse would be better than enduring the numbing present.

More intellectually grounded conservatives and GOP regulars fear the Tea Party more than they fear Democrats, for they understand that this knee-jerk race to results undermines the very foundation and justification for representative democracy. As former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum laments:

A political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn. But Cain’s gaffe on Libya or Perry’s brain freeze on the Department of Energy are not only indicators of bad leadership. They are indicators of a crisis of followership. The tea party never demanded knowledge or concern for governance, and so of course it never got them.[28]

Representative democracy has a hard enough time justifying itself in a digitally connected world where representation no longer means sending someone on a three-day carriage ride to the capital. Having cynically embraced the Tea Party as a means to an end, Republicans now face erosion of party integrity from within. Meanwhile, as if aware of the role that the twenty-four-hour news cycle played in having generated this phenomenon, CNN partners with the Tea Party to arrange televised presidential debates. For the one thing the Tea Party appears to want more than the destruction of government is to elect Tea Party members to positions within it.

The impatient rush to judgment of the Tea Party movement is only as unnerving as the perpetually patient deliberation of its counterpart present shock movement, Occupy Wall Street. Opposite reactions to collapse of political narrative, the Tea Party yearns for finality while the Occupy movement attempts to sustain indeterminacy.

Inspired by the social-media-influenced revolutions of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street began as a one-day campaign to call attention to the inequities inherent in a bank-run, quarterly-focused, debt-driven economy. It morphed into something of a permanent revolution, however, dedicated to producing new models of political and economic activity by its very example. Tea Partiers mean to wipe out the chaotic confusion of a world without definitive stories; the Occupiers mean to embed themselves within it so that new forms may emerge. It’s not an easy sell. The Tea Party’s high-profile candidates and caustic rhetoric are as perfectly matched for the quick-cut and argument-driven programming of the cable news networks as the Occupiers are incompatible. Though both movements are reactions to the collapse of compelling and believable narratives, the Tea Party has succumbed to and even embraced the crisis mentality, while Occupy Wall Street attempts to transcend it.

This is at least part of why mainstream television news reporters appeared so determined to cast Occupy Wall Street as the random, silly blather of an ungrateful and lazy generation of weirdos. As if defending against the coming obsolescence of their own truncated news formats, television journalists reported that the movement’s inability to articulate its agenda in ten seconds or less meant there was no agenda at all. In a segment titled “Seriously?!” CNN business anchor Erin Burnett ridiculed the goings-on at Zuccotti Park. “What are they protesting?” she asked. “Nobody seems to know.” Like The Tonight Show host Jay Leno testing random mall patrons on American history, Burnett’s main objective was to prove that the protesters didn’t know that the US government had been reimbursed for the bank bailouts. More predictably, perhaps, a Fox News reporter appeared flummoxed when the Occupier he interviewed refused to explain how he wanted the protests to end. Attempting to transcend the standard political narrative, the protester explained, “As far as seeing it end, I wouldn’t like to see it end. I would like to see the conversation continue.”[29]

In this sense, regardless of whether its economic agenda is grounded in reality, Occupy Wall Street does constitute the first truly postnarrative political movement. Unlike the civil rights protests, labor marches, or even the Obama campaign, it does not take its cue from a charismatic leader, it does not express itself in bumper-sticker-length goals, nor does it understand itself as having a particular endpoint. The Occupiers’ lack of a specific goal makes it hard for them to maintain focus and cohesion. The movement may be attempting to embrace too wide an array of complaints, demands, and goals: the collapsing environment, labor standards, housing policy, government corruption, World Bank lending practices, unemployment, increasing wealth disparity, and so on. But these many issues are connected: different people have been affected by different aspects of the same system—and they believe they are all experiencing symptoms of the same core problem. But for journalists or politicians to pretend they have no idea what the movement wants is disingenuous and really just another form of present shock. What upsets banking’s defenders and traditional Democrats alike is the refusal of this movement to state its terms or set its goals in the traditional language of campaigns.

That’s because, unlike a political campaign designed to get some person in office and then close up shop (as in the election of Obama and subsequent youth disillusionment), this is not a movement with a traditional narrative arc. It is not about winning some debate point and then going home. Rather, as the product of the decentralized networked-era culture, it is less about victory than sustainability. It is not about one-pointedness, but inclusion. It is not about scoring a victory, but groping toward consensus. It is not like a book; it is like the Internet.

Occupy Wall Street is not a movement that wins and ends; it is meant more as a way of life that spreads through contagion and creates as many questions as it answers. The urban survival camps they set up around the world were a bit more like showpieces, congresses, and beta tests of new ideas or revivals of old ones. Unlike a traditional protest, which identifies the enemy and fights for a particular solution, Occupy Wall Street just sits there talking with itself, debating its own worth, recognizing its internal inconsistencies, and then continuing on as if this were some sort of new normal. It is both inspiring and aggravating.

Occupy’s General Assembly methodology, for example, is a highly flexible approach to group discussion and consensus building borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Unlike parliamentary rules that promote debate, difference, and decision, the General Assembly forges consensus by stacking ideas and objections as they arise, and then making sure they are all eventually heard. The whole thing is orchestrated through simple hand gestures. Elements in the stack are prioritized, and everyone gets a chance to speak. Even after votes, exceptions and objections are incorporated as amendments.

On the one hand, the process seems like an evolutionary leap forward in consensus building. Dispensing with preconceived narratives about generating policy demands or settling the score between Right versus Left, this process eschews debate (or what Enlightenment philosophers called “dialectic”) for consensus. It is a blatant rejection of the binary, winner-takes-all, political operating system that has been characterizing political discourse since at least the French National Assembly of the 1700s. But it is also a painstakingly slow, almost interminably boring process, in which the problem of how to deal with noise from bongo drummers ends up getting equal time with how to address student debt. It works well for those who are committed to sitting in a park doing little else with their days and nights, but is excruciating for those committed to producing results. Engaged with this way, the present lasts a whole long time.

The ambiance and approach of the Occupiers is more like a university—one of life’s great pauses—than a political movement. Both online and offline spaces consist largely of teach-ins about the issues they are concerned with. Young people teach one another or invite guests to lecture them about subjects such as how the economy works, the disconnection of investment banking from the economy of goods and services, possible responses to mass foreclosure, the history of centralized interest-bearing currency, and even best practices for civil disobedience.

The approach is unwieldy and unpredictable but oddly consistent with the values of a postnarrative landscape. The Occupy ethos concerns replacing the zero-sum, closed-ended game of financial competition with a more sustainable, open-ended game of abundance and mutual aid. In the traditional political narrative, this sounds like communism, but to the Occupiers, it is a realization of the peer-to-peer sensibility of the social net. It is not a game that someone wins, but rather a form of play that—like a massive multiplayer online game—is successful the more people get to play, and the longer the game is kept going.

INFINITE GAMES

Computer games may, in fact, be popular culture’s first satisfactory answer to the collapse of narrative. Believe what we may about their role in destroying everything from attention spans and eyesight to social interactions and interest in reading, video games do come to the rescue of a society for whom books, TV, and movies no longer function as well as they used to. This is not simply because they are brighter and louder; the sounds and imagery on kids’ TV these days have higher resolution and are even more densely packed. Video games have surpassed all other forms of entertainment in market share and cultural importance because they engage with players in an open-ended fashion, they communicate through experience instead of telling, and they invite players into the creative process. While video games do occur over linear time, they are not arced like stories between a past and the future. When they are off, they are gone. When they are on, they are in the now.

Although religious historian James Carse came up with the concept of “infinite games” well before computer games had overtaken television, music, and movies as our dominant entertainment industry, his two categories of play help explain why electronic gaming would gain such favor in an era of present shock. Finite games are those with fixed endings—winners and losers. Most every game from tennis to football works this way. Victory is the scarcity: there can be only one winner, so players compete for the win. Infinite games, on the other hand, are more about the play itself. They do not have a knowable beginning or ending, and players attempt to keep the game going simply for the sake of the play. There are no boundaries, and rules can change as the game continues. Carse’s point is to promote the open-ended, abundant thinking of infinite games. Instead of competing against one another and aching for the finality of conclusion, we should be playing with one another in order to maximize the fun for all. Instead of yearning for victory and the death of finite games, we should be actively enjoying the present and trying to sustain the playability of the moment. It’s an approach that favors improvisation over fixed rules, internal sensibilities over imposed morals, and playfulness over seriousness.

While there is no such thing as a perfectly infinite game (except maybe for life itself), there are many increasingly popular forms of play that point the way to Carse’s ideal. For anyone but professional performers, improvisational storytelling usually ends with early childhood and is replaced with books, television, and organized play. But beginning in the mid-1970s (right around the time that TV remotes became standard features), a new form of game emerged called the fantasy role-playing game, or RPG. Inspired by the rules written for people who play war games with medieval miniature figures, Dungeons & Dragons, the first published RPG, was a simple rule set that allowed players to imagine and enact adventures on a tabletop.* Unlike conventional games with sides and rules and winners, Dungeons & Dragons was really just a starting place for interactive storytelling. Less like a performance than one of artist Allan Kaprow’s “Happenings,” D&D provided an excuse and a context for people to gather and imagine adventures together. Each player began by creating a character sheet that defined his identity and attributes. Some attributes were purely creative (a dwarf with blond hair who wears a red hat), while others determined a character’s abilities in the game, such as strength level, magical skills, or intelligence. A Dungeon Master led the proceedings and refereed interactions. Beyond that, characters went on adventures and engaged in conflicts as fanciful as they could imagine.

The popularity of RPGs was matched only by the consternation they generated among parents and educators. Along with heavy metal music, Dungeons & Dragons was blamed for a collapse of ethics among young teens, drug abuse, and even murder. The underlying fear of RPGs, however, probably had a lot more to do with how open-ended they were. Kids went into the basement or game room for hours, became deeply involved in fantasy adventures that were sustained over months or even years, and the boundary between the game and real life seemed to erode as players wore costume pieces from the game to school, or utilized game strategies in daily activities. RPGs did not respect our notions of time boundaries. When was the game over? Who wrote the rules? How does a person win? If a game doesn’t teach winning, is it simply creating losers?

RPG players were aficionados of presentism, not merely tolerating but delighting in stories without endings. While the adventures they invented together had little arcs and minivictories for one character or another, they were valued most for their ability to sustain themselves—and everyone’s interest—over long periods of time. Dungeon Masters measured their reputations in terms of how long they could keep a game group together. They had one terrific advantage in this regard over regular storytellers: their audience actively participated in the creation of the story. Instead of leading a passive audience through a vicarious adventure and then inserting a particular value into the climax, the Dungeon Master simply facilitates the imaginative play of a group of peers. He sets up the world in which the play takes place. In this sense, it was the purest precursor to the interactive media that was to follow.

RPG players were a natural fit and ready audience for video games, which tend to require a similarly open and participatory approach to story. While not all video games wrestle directly with issues of narrativity, they all must contend with audience members who have the freedom to make their own, differing choices over the course of the game. Choices may be as limited as which asteroids to shoot at or as expansive as how to ally a number of raiding groups to fight in a war. Wherever in the spectrum of free will and interactivity they fall, however, video games—like RPGs—reverse the rules of Aristotelian narrative. A traditional narrative leads inevitably to its ending. That’s the whole point: the character makes the best choices possible but meets a fate that seems almost destined, at least in retrospect. The audience must conclude this is the only way things could have gone given the situation and the characters. If the hero makes a wrong choice, it’s considered a hole in the plot.

Video games are just the opposite. While the game writer may have an ending or final level he wants everyone to get to at some point, moving through this world is supposed to feel like free will. Each scene opens up a series of choices. Instead of watching a character make the only right choice in each scene, the player is the main character, confronted with a myriad of choices. While a traditional story narrows toward the destined ending, the game branches open to new possibilities. When we read a book or watch a movie, the best choice for each character already exists; it just hasn’t been revealed. When we play a game, that choice is happening in real time.

The many different types of video games exercise presentism differently. “Shooters,” where the player runs around and shoots monsters or other enemies, may seem the most present-tense but actually offer the least amount of player authorship. While the player can kill things on each level in any number of ways, this only brings him to the next predetermined level. “God” games, like SimCity and Civilization, let players build and supervise worlds. The player may be charged with planning a city, managing a civilization from its inception, or even evolving life from the beginning (as in Spore). The biases of these worlds are determined by the choices the player makes. Violent choices yield a violent world; focusing on business may create a world more dominated by economics; and so on.

But the most compelling and still largest sector of gaming is social games. In massively multiplayer online role-playing games, or MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft and Guild Wars, players join groups and set out on missions together. While the world in which they play is created by game companies, and the various monsters and natural phenomena they encounter have been preprogrammed, the interactions between the characters are all up to the players. Players choose whether to go on quests, to make friends, or to form groups that go on to attack others. The games are social in that participants really are playing with other people—even if separated by computers, Internet connections, and thousands of miles of physical distance.

Even the social games played on the Facebook platform would qualify as a crude form of this style of participatory storytelling. FarmVille and Mafia Wars have been huge successes (enough to justify a billion-dollar stock offering by the company that released them). Like a god game, FarmVille lets players create and tend a farm, sell crops, then buy special decorations with the game money. The payoff, such as it is, is that because the game is happening on a social network, friends can see one another’s farms. Similarly, Mafia Wars let players fight with and against one another over territory and status. The main way to gain status, and support the game company, is to recruit more players to be in one’s mafia gang. Though they offer a whole lot less creative latitude than true MMORPGs, these games still give people who might never have played a video game the chance to experience entertainment that unfolds in the present tense.

These experiences needn’t be entirely devoid of meaning and values, either. Just because an experience lacks narrativity doesn’t mean it can’t communicate and do so powerfully. Serious games, named for their intended effects, are computer games that attempt to convey serious things. Instead of inserting messages into games the way an author might insert a message into a book, games try to communicate through experience. So instead of watching a character get hoisted on his own petard for being too arrogant, the player is to experience this reversal and recognition himself.

There are games about health, violence, ethics, pollution, and pretty much any serious subject you can imagine. Games for Change, for example, is an organization and website that collects and curates games that engage players with contemporary social issues. One of the most famous such games so far, Darfur is Dying, re-creates the experience of the 2.5 million Sudanese refugees. The player is the refugee, whose gender and other preconditions end up having a lot to do with what happens (rape, murder, or escape). In some sense the game is unwinnable, but the interactions and experience may convey more about the refugee plight and the futility of the situation than a hundred hours of news footage. The game, like many others, provides opportunities for players to donate, Tweet, or otherwise use the Internet to participate in the cause.

Games offer a healthier, or at least more active, response to the collapse of narrativity confounding much of the rest of popular culture. They also offer us an inkling of how we may avert present shock altogether and instead adopt approaches that successfully reorient us to the all-at-onceness of life today. Instead of panicking at the death of the story, players become the story and delight in acting it out in real time. The people designing the game can still communicate values if they choose to; they simply need to do it by offering choices instead of making them in advance.

This approach is applicable almost anywhere narrative is failing. In the world of politics, this would mean taking the tack of the Occupiers prototyping new modes of activism—eschewing ends-justify-the-means movements and developing a normative behavior, instead. In retail, the equivalent would mean deemphasizing brand mythologies and focusing instead on what is called brand experience—the actual pathway the customer takes through the real or virtual shopping environment. It’s not about the story you tell your customer; it is about the experience you give him—the choices, immersion, and sense of autonomy. (It also means accepting transparency as a new given, and social media as the new mass communications medium, as we’ll see in chapter 4.) In medicine, it means enlisting patients in their own healing process rather than asking them to do nothing while blindly accepting the magical authority of the doctor and a pharmaceutical industry. Understanding these cultural, political, and market dynamics through the lens of gaming helps us transition from the world of passively accepted narrative to one that invites our ongoing participation.

Games point the way toward new ways of accomplishing what used to be done with stories. They may not be a cure-all, but they can successfully counteract some of the trauma we suffer when our stories come apart. Our disillusionment is offset by a new sense of participation and self-direction.

In fact, gaming’s promise as an antidote to post-traumatic stress on a cultural scale finds support in its increasing use as an actual treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder on an individual level. At a University of Southern California lab called the Institute for Creative Technologies, a psychologist named Albert “Skip” Rizzo has been using virtual-reality simulations to treat Iraq War veterans suffering from severe PTSD. He started with the immersive video war game Full Spectrum Warrior, and then adapted it for use in therapy sessions. The patient wears 3D virtual-reality goggles and describes the scene of his trauma as the therapist builds that world around him. The patient holds a game controller and walks or drives or shoots as he did in the war zone. The therapist uses the game to re-create the entire scene, allowing the patient to relive all of the horror of the lost and tragic moment in the safety and from the distance of a computer simulation.

I had the chance to use the gear myself while working on a documentary about how digital technologies change the way we live. Rizzo operated the simulation as I described a car accident that had occurred many years ago, in which I lost my best friend. I was originally planning on criticizing the technology for getting in the way of the human contact between therapists and their patients—but I was wrong. I had told the story of my car accident to many people, even a few psychotherapists, but never felt anything about the incident had been resolved. Just telling the story somehow was not enough. But in the simulator, I was able to tell Dr. Rizzo that the sky was a bit darker—it wasn’t quite dawn. He darkened the sky. Pinker, I said. He made it pinker. And there were some thinned-out shrubs on the side of the road. He added them. And my friend had a paler complexion. Done. Rizzo used another device to generate the smell of the desert and the juniper bushes I described. It was as if I were there again.

More important, Rizzo was there with me the whole time. He wasn’t just making the simulation for me; he was in the simulation with me. The human connection was actually more profound than when I had told the story to friends and even a therapist before, because I knew for sure that he could see what I meant—because he was literally seeing and hearing and smelling what I was. By bringing a traumatically archived narrative into the present, the game simulation allowed me to reexperience it in real time instead of the artificiality of my story about it. It became real, and I have to admit, I was changed and even largely healed through the experience, which was meant only to demo the technology and not treat my own PTSD. But I never underestimated the potential of computer games again.

Computer gaming is valuable to us not just through its particular applications, but as the inkling of an approach to contending with present shock—in this case, the inability of stories to function as they used to. Without the beginnings and endings, nor the origins and goals offered by linear narratives, we must function instead in the moment. We must mourn the guiding stories we have lost, while also contending with new measures of control, freedom, and self-determination. Gaming is a great lens through which to see this process of maturation.

Narrativity is just the first of many things obsolesced by presentism, and the sense of trauma at losing linearity just the first of five main forms of present shock. But like the rest, it provokes both some initial, panicked reactions as well as a few more constructive alternatives. The disappearance of story first incites a knee-jerk sensationalism. We attempt to re-create the exhilaration and fall of traditional narrative with the increasingly lewd, provocative, or humiliating imagery of the reality-TV spectacle. Our always-on news media follows suit and, spurred further by the needs of the multinational corporations that own them, reproduce what had been the narrative authority of the newscaster with the graphic authority of the lens. How we’re supposed to feel about it, on the other hand, is debated in real time as the images still play behind them.

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

Of course, it’s not as easy as all that. The digital environment presents many challenges of its own, and members of the connected generation are among the first casualties of its many distractions and discontinuities. Computers and the net may be running in real time, but its torrent of pings seems to be coming at us from all sides simultaneously. Which flashing screen we choose to answer often means less about whom or what we want to engage with than who or what we want to be, ourselves, in that moment. We’re in the game, all right, but playing on many different levels at once. Or at least we’re trying to.

And this struggle to be in more than one place at the same time leads to the next main type of present shock.

DIGIPHRENIA

BREAKING UP IS HARD TO DO

Things are too busy. “An Over-Proximity of All Things.” I’ve been fundraising. Negotiating. Flying. Every week, two plane trips, two destinations. It is all at once. No time, no time.

—SMS to me from cyborg anthropologist Amber Case

You know you’re in trouble when even Google thinks you have exceeded the human capacity to exist in more than one place at a time.

It was morning, Europe-time, and I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in a remote suburb of Berlin, jet-lagged and disoriented, unable to check in to my room until later that afternoon. Temporal limbo. But the Internet never sleeps and the lobby had WiFi, so I figured I’d get some work done. I had neglected my email for the fourteen hours it took to get from outside New York to outside Berlin, and there were already second and third pings in the inbox from people wondering why they hadn’t yet received a reply to their initial missives. (Teaches me right for answering emails so quickly and creating unrealistic expectations.)

Not that I hadn’t made a valiant effort to connect while in transit. The plane had some sort of WiFi while we were over land, but someone kept trying to make Skype calls, which crashed all the passengers’ connections. After the flight attendant restarted the system for the third time, I gave up, took a pill, and fell asleep to the movie. I tried again from my iPhone at the airport but couldn’t log on. Now that I was at the hotel with plug-in power, I knew I’d have an easier time catching up with all that was waiting for me.

The emails with the most little red exclamation points next to them came from an executive in New York desperate to find a speaker for an event about Internet ethics. I knew I had a talk in Missouri on the day following his event but thought that maybe I could do the New York talk in the morning and still make my flight to Missouri that afternoon. I just had to log in to my Google Calendar to make sure. Google said I was using an unfamiliar IP address, so it wanted to ask a few questions to make sure I was really me. My childhood pet, my city of birth . . . that’s when my thirty minutes of connectivity ran out. I went to the front desk for another little slip of paper with a password on it and got back online and back to the place where I needed to prove my identity to Google. Except now Google was really upset with me. It said I appeared to be attempting to access the site from too many locations at once. As a precaution, Google would lock my account until it could verify I was really me. Google wanted to send an automatic text message to my cell phone so I could authenticate my identity—but my cell phone did not work in Germany.

So in the haze of that rainy German morning, I foolishly decided to keep planning my digital-era schedule without access to my digital-era calendar. I replied that I would accept the morning talk as long as I could manage to leave before noon to make my flight. And as you may have guessed by now, by the time I got back to New York where I could verify my human identity to my Google media extensions, the calendar had a different version of my future than I did. My talk in Missouri was the same morning as the New York talk—not the morning after. Oops. Present-shock nightmare: I was supposed to be in two places at once. No matter how digitally adept I get, there’s still only one me.

Unlike humans who might treasure their uniqueness, digital media’s most defining quality is its ability to be copied exactly. Digital files, even digital processes, can be multiplied and exist in several instances at once. This is something new. The real-world, analog copies of things we have known up to now are all efforts to remain as true as possible to some original source. Even the movies we watch are struck from an internegative of the movie, which is in turn struck from the original negative. Like successive photocopies, each one contains a bit more noise—but it’s better than playing the original negative repeatedly and wearing out the source. In contrast, digital copies are indistinguishable from the original. They don’t take a toll on the thing being copied, either. In a sense, they are not copies at all. Once created, they are the original.

In the analog world, the original must be preserved, and copying slowly destroys it. Every time the original negative is run through the printing machine, it is further degraded. Flash pictures are prohibited at museums, because each exposure to light slightly dims the brilliance of an original painting. Unlike such photos, digital copies are not impressions made off a master; they are originals themselves—more like clones than children, capable of carrying on new activities as if utterly reborn in every instant.

People are still analog.

Leveraged appropriately, the immense distributive power of digital production and networks gives us the ability to spread our ideas and expressions, as well as our power and influence. We can produce effects in more than one place at a time, each of us now having the global reach formerly reserved for kings, presidents, and movie stars. Our role in our culture and society may have changed from that of passive readers or watchers to that of active game players, but this self-direction comes at a cost. We previously had the luxury of being led through experiences, our one-pointed attention moving along a tightly controlled narrative pathway. In the choose-your-own-adventure landscape of gaming—as well as the culture, workplace, and political realm structured in this new way—we must keep our eyes moving and at the same time stay aware of all sorts of activity on the periphery.

Wherever our real bodies may be, our virtual personae are being bombarded with information and missives. Our inboxes are loading, our Twitter feeds are rolling, our Facebook updates are changing, our calendars are filling, and our consumer profiles and credit reports are adjusting all along the way. As in a game, things we do not act upon don’t wait for us to notice them. Everything is running in parallel, and sometimes from very far away. Timing is everything, and everyone is impatient.

Even though we may be able to be in only one place at a time, our digital selves are distributed across every device, platform, and network onto which we have cloned our virtual identities. The people and programs inhabiting each of these places relate to our digital addresses and profiles as if they were the original. The question is always “Why hasn’t he answered my email?” and never “When will he log on to the Internet and check the particular directory to which my text was copied?”

Our digital devices and the outlooks they inspired allowed us to break free of the often repressive timelines of our storytellers, turning us from creatures led about by future expectations into more fully present-oriented human beings. The actual experience of this now-ness, however, is a bit more distracted, peripheral, even schizophrenic than that of being fully present. For many, the collapse of narrative led initially to a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder—a disillusionment, and the vague unease of having no direction from above, no plan or story. But like a dose of adrenaline or a double shot of espresso, our digital technologies compensate for this goalless drifting with an onslaught of simultaneous demands. We may not know where we’re going anymore, but we’re going to get there a whole lot faster. Yes, we may be in the midst of some great existential crisis, but we’re simply too busy to notice.

We have already heard a great deal from concerned doctors and humanists about the ill effects of living digitally.[1] Their findings are on record and deserving of our consideration. While all their warnings may be true to some extent, so, too, were the warnings about automobiles and steam engines, or even the threat that written language and law posed to tribes once unified by spoken stories, and that printed Bibles posed to the authority of the Pope and his priests. The things we use do change us. In order to understand and contend with present shock, we should probably be less immediately concerned with the cause-and-effect consequences of digital activity than with the greater implications and requirements of living in the digital environment. It’s not about how digital technology changes us, but how we change ourselves and one another now that we live so digitally.

We live in a world informed in large part by digital devices and outlooks, and one of the primary impacts of thinking this way is to assume the rigors of digital time as our own. Our digital universe is always-on, constantly pinging us with latest news, stock quotes, consumer trends, email responses, social gaming updates, Tweets, and more, all pushing their way to our smart phones. There are so many incoming alerts competing for attention that many phones now allow users to swipe downward to reveal a scrollable screen containing nothing but the latest alerts pushed through. Everyone and everything intrudes with the urgency of a switchboard-era telephone operator breaking into a phone call with an emergency message from a relative, or a 1960s news anchor interrupting a television program with a special report about an assassination. Anything we do may be preempted by something else. And, usually, we simply add the interruption onto the list of other things we’re attempting to do at the same time.

All these interruptions, more than simply depleting our cognitive abilities, create the sense that we need to keep up with their impossible pace lest we lose touch with the present. These are live feeds, after all, pinging us almost instantaneously from every corner of the globe. There are video cameras trained on Wall Street and the Western Wall, a tent village in Cairo and a box of schnauzer puppies in a Florida pet shop.

If we could only catch up with the wave of information, we feel, we would at last be in the now. This is a false goal. For not only have our devices outpaced us, they don’t even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense. They are reports from the periphery, of things that happened moments ago. It seems as if to digest and comprehend them in their totality would amount to having reality on tap, as if from a fantastic media control room capable of monitoring everything, everywhere, all at the same time. It’s as if all the Facebook updates, Twitter streams, email messages, and live-streamed video could combine to create a total picture of our true personal status, or that of our business, at any given moment. And there are plenty of companies out there churning all this data in real time in order to present us with metrics and graphs claiming to represent the essence of this reality for us. And even when they work, they are mere snapshots of a moment ago. Our Facebook profile and the social graph that can be derived from it, however intricate, is still just a moment locked in time, a static picture.

This quest for digital omniscience, though understandable, is self-defeating. Most of the information we get at lightning speed is so temporal as to be stale by the time it reaches us. We scramble over the buttons of the car radio in an effort to get to the right station at the right minute-after-the-hour for the traffic report. Yet the report itself warns us to avoid jams that have long since been cleared, while telling us nothing about the one in which we’re currently stuck—one they’ll find out about only if we ourselves call it in to their special number. The irony is that while we’re busily trying to keep up with all this information, the information is trying and failing to keep up with us.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary measures we take to stay abreast of each minuscule change to the data stream end up magnifying the relative importance of these blips to the real scheme of things. Investors trade, politicians respond, and friends judge based on the micromovements of virtual needles. By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living. The tension between the faux present of digital bombardment and the true now of a coherently living human generates the second kind of present shock, what we’re calling digiphrenia—digi for “digital,” and phrenia for “dissordered condition of mental activity.”

This doesn’t mean we should ignore this digitally mediated reality altogether. For just as we found healthier responses to the fall of narrative than panic and rage, there are ways to engage with digital information that don’t necessarily dissect our consciousness into discrete bits right along with it. Instead of succumbing to the schizophrenic cacophony of divided attention and temporal disconnection, we can program our machines to conform to the pace of our operations, be they our personal rhythms or the cycles of our organizations and business sectors. Computers don’t suffer present shock, people do. For we are the only ones living in time.

TIME IS A TECHNOLOGY

We tend to think of the assault on our temporal sensibilities as a recent phenomenon, something that happened since the advent of computers and cell phones—or at least since the punch clock and shift workers. But as technology and culture theorists have reminded us at each step of the way,[2] all this started much, much earlier, and digiphrenia is just the latest stage in a very long and lamented progression. At each of these stages, what it meant to be a human being changed along with however it was—or through whatever it was—we related to time.

Of course, humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. The passage of time was not recorded or measured, but rather experienced in its various cycles. Older, wiser people and tribes became aware not just of the cycles of day and night, but of the moon and even the seasons. Since farming hadn’t yet been invented, however, seasons were not to be anticipated or exploited. Beyond gathering a few nuts as it got colder, there was little we could do to shift or store time; the changes around us were simply enjoyed or endured.

Many religions and mythologies look back longingly on this prehistoric timelessness as a golden age, or Eden. Humanity is seen as a fetus in the womb, at one with Mother Nature.[3] False notions of a prehistoric noble savage aside, there is at least some truth to the idea that people lacked the capacity to distinguish themselves from nature, animals, and one another. While living so completely at the mercy of nature was fraught with pain and peril, this existence was also characterized by a holism many media and cultural theorists consider to be lost to us today in a world of dualism, preferences, and hierarchies. As media theorist and Catholic priest Walter Ong put it, “Oral communication unites people in groups. Writing and reading are solitary activities that throw the psyche back on itself. . . . For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center.”[4] People living in this oral, timeless civilization saw God, or the gods, in everything around them. While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.

Everything changed, finally, in the Axial Age with the invention of text. The word-pictures of hieroglyphic writing were replaced with the more discrete symbols of an alphabet. The progenitor of a more digital style of storage, letters were precise and abstract.Combined together, they gave people a way to represent the mouth noises of oral culture in a lasting artifact. Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay. The simple twenty-two-letter alphabet popularized and democratized writing, giving people a way to record promises, debts, thoughts, and events. The things written down one day could be read and retrieved the next.

Once a line could truly be drawn in something other than sand, the notion of history as a progression became possible. With the invention of text came the ability to draft contracts, which were some of the first documents ever written, and described agreements that endured over time. With contracts came accountability, and some ability to control what lay ahead. The notion of a future was born. Religion, in the oral tradition, came from the mouth of a leader or pharaoh, himself a stand-in for God. Text transformed this passive relationship to God or nature with a contract, or, more precisely, a covenant between people and God. What God demands was no longer a matter of a tyrant’s whim or the randomness of nature, but a set of written commandments. Do this and you will get that.

This resonated well with people who were learning agriculture and developing a “reap what you sow” approach to their world. Seeds planted and tended now yield a crop in the future. Scriptural laws obeyed now earn God’s good graces in the future. The world was no longer just an endless churn of cycles, but a place with a past and a future. Time didn’t merely come around; it flowed more like a river, forming a history of all that went before. In the new historical sense of time, one year came after the other. Human beings had a story that could be told—and it was, in the Torah and other written creation myths. Pagan holidays that once celebrated only the cycle of the seasons now celebrated moments in history. The spring equinox and fertility rites became the celebration of the Israelite exodus from Egypt; the solstice became the Hanukkah reclamation of the Temple and, later, the birth of Jesus. Periods in the cycle of nature became moments in the flow of history.[5]

The new metaphor for time was the calendar. A people was defined and its activities organized by its calendar, its holidays, and its memorials. Calendars tell a culture what matters both secularly and religiously. The time for sacred days was held apart, while time for productivity could be scheduled and even enforced. The calendar carried the double-duty of representing the cyclical nature of the lunar months and solar year while also keeping track of historical time with the passing of each numbered year. There was now a before and an after—a civilization that could measure its progress, compare its bounties from one year to the next, and, most important, try to do better. The great leaning forward had begun. We progressed from what social theorist Jeremy Rifkin called “the Earth’s universe” to “God’s universe,”[6] conceiving ourselves as participants in a greater plan and subject to a higher law and an external gauge of our success over time.

Some of the most devout members of this religious universe were responsible for breaking time down even further. For their new Islamic faith, Muslims were required to pray at regular intervals. Their methodical call to prayer sequence used the height of the sun and measurement of shadows to break the day into six sections. In Europe, it was Benedictine monks who organized not just the calendar year but every day into precisely defined segments for prayer, work, meals, and hygiene. Handheld bells coordinated all this activity, making sure the monks performed their tasks and said their prayers at the same time. Surrendering to this early form of schedule constituted a spiritual surrender for the medieval monks, for whom personal time and autonomy were anathema to their new collective identity. Although their schedule might look simple compared with that of an average junior high student today, the monks were exercising radically strict temporal discipline for the time.

As they became more concerned (some may argue obsessed) with synchronizing all their daily routines, the monks eventually developed the first mechanical timepieces. The Benedictine clocks were celebrated for their escapement technology—basically, the ability to control the descent of a weight (or expansion of a spring) by breaking its fall slowly and sequentially with a little ticking gear. The real leap, however, had less to do with escapement than with ticking and tocking itself. What the monks had discovered was that the way to measure time was to break it down into little beats. Just as ancient Buddhist water clocks could mark four hours by storing the combined volume of hundreds of relatively regularly falling drops, the Benedictine clocks broke down the slow, continuous descent of weights into the regular beats of a pendulum. Tick-tock, before-after, yes-no, 1/0. Time was necessarily digital in character,[7] always oscillating, always dividing. As an extension of the new culture of science (a word that originally meant to separate one thing from another, to split, divide, dissect), the clock turned time into something that divides, and, like any technology, created more preferences, judgments, and choices.

Even though the Chinese had accurate water clocks for centuries before the Benedictines, clocks and timing did not come to spread and dominate Asian culture the same way they did in Europe. Westerners believed this was because the Chinese didn’t know quite what to do with all this precision. But it may have had less to do with a lack than with a bounty. The Chinese already had a strong sense of culture and purpose, as well as a different relationship to work and progress over time. The introduction of timepieces capable of breaking down time didn’t have quite the same impact on a people who looked at time—for better and for worse—as belonging to someone else, anyway.

Arriving on church bell towers at the dawn of the Industrial Age, the clock was decidedly more interesting to those looking for ways to increase the efficiency of the new working classes. Ironically, perhaps, an invention designed to affirm the primacy and ubiquity of the sacred ended up becoming a tool for the expansion of the secular economy. Trade had been expanding for a century or two already, and keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule.

The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market were all punctuated by the ringing of bells. In line with other highly centralizing Renaissance inventions such as currency and the corporation, bells were controlled by central authorities. This gave rise to distrust, as workers were never sure if their employers were measuring time fairly. The emergence of the clock tower gave everyone access to the same time, allowing for verification while also amplifying time’s authority.

Thanks to the clock tower, the rhythms of daily life were now dictated by a machine. Over time, people conformed to ever more precisely scheduled routines. Where the priority of the calendar-driven civilization was God, the priorities of the clockwork universe would be speed and efficiency. Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Time was money. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word “speed” (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary, or did “punctual”—which used to refer to a stickler for details—come to mean a person who arrived on time.[8]

The metaphor for the human being became the clock, with the heartbeat emulating the ticks of the escapement, counting off the seconds passing. Management of people meant management of time (the word “management” itself deriving from putting a horse through its paces, or manege). People were to perform with the precision and regularity of the machines they drove—and, in some senses, were becoming. By the 1800s, workers punched clocks to register their hours. A mechanical engineer named Frederick Taylor applied his skill with machines to human beings, inventing a new field called scientific management. He and his assistants would spread out through a company armed with stopwatches and clipboards to measure and maximize the efficiency of every aspect of the work cycle. The time it took to open a file drawer was recorded down to the hundredth of a second, in order to determine the standard time required to complete any job. Once that was known, the efficiency of any particular worker could be measured against it. The efficiency movement was born, for which glowing accounts of increased productivity over time were published and promoted, while evidence of worker dissent was actively suppressed.[9]

Now that human beings were being tuned up like machines, the needs of humans and machines became almost indistinguishable. The entirety of the clockwork universe may as well have been a machine, with new innovations emerging primarily to assist technology or the businesses on which those technologies depended. Thanks in part to the legal arguments of a railroad industry lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, for example, the rights of local municipalities were subordinated to those of corporations that needed thoroughfare for their trains and cargo. Time and timing began to mean more than place. Transcontinental commerce required synchronized activity over great distances, leading to “standard time” and the drawing of time zones across the map. (Greenwich Mean Time’s placement in the United Kingdom represented the British Empire’s lingering domination of the globe.) Likewise, the telegraph emerged primarily as a communication system through which train crashes could be minimized. Directing the motion of trains with red lights and green lights was eventually applied to cars and ultimately to people navigating the crosswalks—all timed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and speed. In the clockwork universe, all human activity—from shift work to lunch breaks to TV viewing to blind dates—involved getting bodies to the right place at the right time, in accordance with the motions of the clock. We were as clocks ourselves, with arms that moved and hearts that counted and alarms that warned us and bells that went off in our heads. Just wind me up in the morning.

If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don’t compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped. In nature, our activities were regulated by the turning of the Earth. While the central clock tower may have coordinated human activity from above, in a digital network this control is distributed—or at least it seems that way. We each have our own computer or device onto which we install our choice of software (if we’re lucky), and then use or respond to it individually. The extent to which our devices are conforming to external direction and synchronization for the most part remains a mystery to us, and the effect feels less like top-down coordination than personalized, decentralized programs.

The analog clock imitated the circularity of the day, but digital timekeeping has no arms, no circles, no moving parts. It is a number, stationary in time. It just is. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any binary, discrete decision, it is either here or there. In contrast to our experience of the passing of time, digital time is always in the now, or in no time. It is still. Poised.

I remember when I was just ten years old, how I used to stare at my first digital clock. It had no LED, but rather worked a bit like a train terminal’s board, with a new number flipping down into place every minute. I would wait and count, trying and failing to anticipate the click of the next number flipping down—each time being surprised by its suddenness in a micromoment of present shock. My dad’s old alarm clock required him to wind it up each night, and then to twirl a second winder for the alarm. Over the course of the day, the potential energy he wound into the device slowly expressed itself in the kinetic energy of the motion of the arms and bell hammer. My digital clock just sat there, interrupting itself each minute only to sit there again. Its entire account of the minute 7:43 was the same. Maybe that’s why, to this day, digital watches have not replaced their analog counterparts—though wristwatches are primarily ornamental for most wearers, who now read the time on a smart phone.

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

Where a schedule simply lists an appointment we are supposed to attend or a task we are to complete, a program carries out the actual process with us or for us. The clock dictated only time; the computer (and smart phone, and biometric device on the wrist) tells us what we should be doing when. We once read books at our own pace; computer animations, YouTube movies, and video games play out at a speed predetermined by the programmer. The GPS on the dashboard knows our entire route to the dentist’s office and offers us the turns we need to take on a need-to-know basis. The computer graphic on the exercise machine tells us how fast to pedal and turns the simulation uphill when it knows we need it. We surrender this authority over our pacing because we know that, for the most part, the programs will be better at helping us meet our stated goals than we are. The events carried out by computers are less like schedules than they are like simulations; less like sheet music, more like a piano roll. In a scheduled world, you are told you have half an hour to peruse an exhibit at the museum; in a programmed world, you are strapped into the ride at Disneyland and conveyed through the experience at a predetermined pace. However richly conceived, the ride’s complexity is limited because its features are built-in, appearing and unfolding in sync with the motions of your cart. The skeleton dangles, the pirate waves, and the holographic ship emerges from the cloud of smoke. In the programmed life, the lights go on and off at a specified time, the coffee pot activates, the daylight-balanced bulb in the programmable clock radio fades up. Active participation is optional, for these events will go on without us and at their own pace.

As we grow increasingly dependent on code for what to do and when to do it, we become all the more likely to accept a model of human life itself as predetermined by the codons in our genomes. All we can do is watch the program of our DNA unfold or, at best, change our fates by altering the sequence of genes dictating what’s supposed to happen. Free will and autonomy are eventually revealed to us to be a simulation of some sort, while the reality we think we’re participating in is really just the predetermined dance of pure information. The timekeeper is no longer the controller of the clock but the programmer of the computer.

And instead of taking our cues from the central clock tower or the manager with the stopwatch, we carry our personal digital devices with us. Our daily schedule, dividing work time from time off, is discarded. Rather, we are always-on. Our boss isn’t the guy in the corner office, but a PDA in our pocket. Our taskmaster is depersonalized and internalized—and even more rigorous than the union busters of yesterday. There is no safe time. If we are truly to take time away from the program, we feel we must disconnect altogether and live “off the grid,” as if we were members of a different, predigital era.

Time in the digital era is no longer linear but disembodied and associative. The past is not something behind us on the timeline but dispersed through the sea of information. Like a digital unconscious, the raw data sits forgotten unless accessed by a program in the future. Everything is recorded, yet almost none of it feels truly accessible. A change in file format renders decades of stored files unusable, while a silly, forgotten Facebook comment we wrote when drunk can resurface at a job interview.

In the digital universe, our personal history and its sense of narrative is succeeded by our social networking profile—a snapshot of the current moment. The information itself—our social graph of friends and likes—is a product being sold to market researchers in order to better predict and guide our futures. Using past data to steer the future, however, ends up negating the present. The futile quest for omniscience we looked at earlier in this chapter encourages us, particularly businesses, to seek ever more fresh and up-to-the-minute samples, as if this will render the present coherent to us. But we are really just chasing after what has already happened and ignoring whatever is going on now. Similarly, as individuals, our efforts to keep up with the latest Tweet or update do not connect us to the present moment but ensure that we are remaining focused on what just happened somewhere else. We guide ourselves and our businesses as if steering a car by watching a slide show in the rearview mirror. This is the disjointed, misapplied effort of digiphrenia.

Yet instead of literally coming to our senses, we change our value system to support the premises under which we are operating, abstracting our experience one step further from terra firma. The physical production of the factory worker gives way to the mental production of the computer user. Instead of measuring progress in acres of territory or the height of skyscrapers, we do it in terabytes of data, whose value is dependent on increasingly smaller units of time-stamped freshness.

Time itself becomes just another form of information—another commodity—to be processed. Instead of measuring change from one state of affairs to another, we measure the rate of change, and the rate at which that rate is changing, and so on. Instead of proceeding from the past to the future, time now proceeds along derivatives, from location to speed to acceleration and beyond. We may like to think that the only constant is change, except for the fact that it isn’t really true—change is changing, too. As Mark McDonald, of IT research and advisory company Gartner, put it, “The nature of change is changing because the flow and control of information has become turbulent, no longer flowing top down, but flowing in every direction at all times. This means that the ability to manage and lead change is no longer based on messaging, communication and traditional sponsorship. Rather it is based on processes of informing, enrolling and adapting that are significantly more disruptive and difficult to manage for executives and leaders.”[10]

Or as Dave Gray, of the social media consultancy Dachis Group, explains it, “Change is not a once-in-a-while thing so much as something that is going to be happening all the time. Change is accelerating, to the point where it will soon be nearly continuous. Periods of sustained competitive advantage are getting shorter, and there are a host of studies that confirm that. It’s not just something that is happening in technology, either. It’s happening in every industry.”[11]

These analysts are describing the new turbulence of a present-shock universe where change is no longer an event that happens, but a steady state of existence. Instead of managing change, we simply hope to be iterated into the next version of reality that the system generates. The only enduring truth in such a scheme is evolution, which is why the leading spokespeople for this world-after-calendars-and-clocks tend to be evolutionary scientists: we are not moving through linear time; we are enacting the discrete, punctuated steps of a program. What used to pass for the mysteriousness of consciousness is shrugged off as an emergent phenomenon rising from the complexity of information. As far as we know, they may be right.

It’s not all bad, of course. There are ways to inhabit and direct the programs in our lives instead of simply responding to their commands. There are ways to be in charge. Unlike the workers of the Industrial Age who stood little chance of becoming one of the managing elite, we are not excluded from computing power except through lack of education or the will to learn. As we’ll see, becoming one of the programmers instead of the programmed is probably a better position from which to contend with digitality.

CHRONOBIOLOGY

Thanks to our digital tools, we are living in a new temporal order, one no longer defined by the movement of the heavens, the division and succession of the years, or the acceleration of progress. We are free of the confines of nature, capable of creating simulated worlds in which we can defy gravity, program life, or even resurrect ourselves. And as anyone who has gotten lost in World of Warcraft only to look up at the clock and realize four hours have gone by can tell you, we are also free of time—and as cognitive studies show, more so than when reading a book or watching a movie, and with temporal distortions lingering still hours later.[12]

At least our virtual selves enjoy this freedom. We flesh-and-blood humans living back in the real world have still aged four hours, missed lunch, denied ourselves bathroom breaks, and allowed our eyes to dry up and turn red. Like an astronaut traveling at light speed for just a few seconds who returns to an Earth on which ninety years have passed, our digital selves exist in a time unhinged from that of our bodies. Eventually the two realities conflict, leading to present shock. If tribal humans lived in the “total” time of the rotating Earth, digital humans attempt to live in the “no” time of the computer. We simply can’t succeed at it if we bring our bodies along for the ride. Yet when we try to leave them behind, both nature and time come back to reassert their authority over us.

Digital technology is not solely to blame. Indeed, the microchip may be less the cause of this effort to defeat time than its result. Since the prehistoric age, humankind has been using technology to overcome the dictates of nature’s rhythms. Fire allowed us to travel to colder climates and defeat the tyranny of the seasons. It also gave us the ability to sit up past sundown and cook food or tell stories. In the early 1800s, the proliferation of gaslight utterly changed the landscape and culture of London, making the night streets safer and illuminating the urban environment at all hours. New cultures emerged, with new relations to time of day and other activities. Nighttime cafés and bars led to new musics and entertainments. New flexibility of work scheduling allowed for around-the-clock shifts and factories whose stacks emitted smoke day and night. The invention of jet planes gave us even more authority over time, allowing us to traverse multiple time zones in a single day.

But no matter how well technology overcame the limits of natural time, our bodies had difficulty keeping up. Stress and fatigue among night workers and those whose shifts are changed frequently is only now being recognized as more than a ploy by labor unions, and if it weren’t for the rather obvious symptoms of jet lag, we may still not have acknowledged the existence of biological clocks underlying our bodies’ rhythms. For jet lag is more than just a woozy feeling, and it took many years until scientists realized it had a real influence over our effectiveness. Back in the 1950s, for example, when jet passenger service was still quite novel, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles flew to Egypt to negotiate the Aswan Dam treaty. His minders assumed he would sleep on the plane, and they scheduled his first meeting for shortly after he arrived. He was incapable of thinking straight, his compromised perceptual and negotiating skills were overtaxed, and he failed utterly. The USSR won the contract instead, and many still blame this one episode of jet lag for provoking the Cold War.

A decade later, in 1965, the FAA finally began to study the effects of air travel on what were now admitted to be human biological rhythms. For some unknown reason, subjects traveling east to west experienced much greater decline in “psychological performance” than those traveling in other directions.[13] The next year, the New York Times Sports section acknowledged the little-understood effects of jet lag on Major League Baseball players: “The Jet Lag can make a recently debarked team too logy for at least the first game of any given series.”[14] Coaches became aware of the various behavior patterns associated with travel in each direction, but no one could tell them the mechanisms at play or how to counteract them.

By the 1980s, NASA got on the case. Its Ames Fatigue/Jet Lag Program was established to “collect systematic, scientific information on fatigue, sleep, circadian rhythms, and performance in flight operations.”[15] Leaving people in rooms with no external time cues, researchers found that the average person’s biological clock would actually lengthen to a twenty-five-hour cycle. This, they concluded, is why traveling east, which shortens the day, is so much more disorienting than traveling west, which lengthens it. Most important, however, the studies showed that there were clocks inside us, somehow governed by the body, its metabolism, and its chemical processes. Or perhaps we were syncing to something unseen, like the moon, or shifting magnetic fields. Or both. Circadian rhythms, as they came to be called, were real.

The phenomenon had been discovered and measured in plants centuries earlier. In the 1700s, Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus designed a garden that told time by planting adjacent sections of flowers that opened and closed their blossoms an hour apart, around the clock. But if human activities were really governed by the same mysterious cycles as tulips and cicada, we would have to consider whether our ability to transcend nature through technology was limited by forces beyond our control.

The relatively new field of chronobiology hopes to unravel some of these mysteries, but each new discovery seems to lead to even bigger questions. Some biological cues are clearly governed by simple changes in sunlight. The eye’s photoreceptors sense the darkening sky, sending a signal to release melatonin, which makes us sleepy. Watching TV or staring at a bright computer screen in the evening delays or prevents this reaction, leading to sleeplessness. But if sunlight were the only cue through which the body regulated, then why and how does a person who can set his own hours find the twenty-five-hour day?

It is because we also have internal clocks, governed by less understood metabolic, hormonal, and glandular processes. We listen to those inner rhythms while simultaneously responding to external cues, from daylight and moon phases to the cycle of the seasons. Still other evidence suggests a complex set of relationships between all these clocks. Body temperature rises during the daylight hours, but some people’s rise faster than others, making them morning people, while those whose temperature rises more slowly over the course of the day reach their most effective state of consciousness in the early evening. Meanwhile, when our body temperature rises, we perceive of time as passing more slowly. This is because our internal clocks are counting faster, while time is actually passing at the same rate as always.

Although the thing we call time might be a mere concept—some variation on energy in Einstein’s equations—all this chronobiological evidence suggests there is a kind of synchronization going on between different parts of our world. In other words, even if we are ultimately unhinged from any absolute clock at the center of the universe, we are not unhinged from one another. In a biosystem or a culture, timing is everything.

For instance, the daily orbit of the moon generates two high tides every twenty-four hours. Twice each month, at the full and new moons, the tide is higher than normal, creating the fifteen-day-cycle spring tides that dictate the life and mating cycles of marine life. The human menstrual cycle is approximately twenty-eight days, the same cycle as the moon, for reasons and through mechanisms no one has yet figured out. In other chronobiology research, we learn that people treated with chemotherapy at one hour of the day respond significantly better than those treated at another hour.

The point is that time is not neutral. Hours and minutes are not generic, but specific. We are better at doing some things in the morning and others in the evening. More incredible, those times of day change based on where we are in the twenty-eight-day moon cycle. In one week, we are more productive in the early morning, while in the next week we are more effective in the early afternoon.[16]

Technology gives us the ability to ride roughshod over all these nooks and crannies of time. We can fly through ten time zones in as many hours. We can take melatonin or Ambien to fall asleep when we’ve arrived at our destination, and later take one of our attention deficit disorder–afflicted son’s Ritalin pills to wake up the next morning. Then maybe get a prescription for Prozac or Lexapro to counteract the depression and anxiety associated with this lifestyle, and one for a good tranquilizer to calm the mind at night with all those mood enhancers in our bloodstream, and maybe one for Viagra to counteract the sexual side effects.

We can screw up our biological clocks a lot easier than that, too. Shift work, where employees alternate between days and nights on the job, leads to a significantly higher rate of violence, mood disorders, depression, and suicide. If a shift worker is scheduled even just one night on duty, urinary electrolytes take five days to adjust and eight days for the heart rate to return to normal. The World Health Organization has suggested that shift work is a “possible” carcinogen.[17] Women who work night shifts, for example, may have up to a 60 percent greater risk of contracting breast cancer. Even that midnight snack cues your body to believe it’s daytime, reducing the effectiveness of your sleep.

Technology gives us more choice over how and when we do things. What we often forget is that our bodies are not quite as programmable as our schedules. Where our technologies may be evolving as fast as we can imagine new ones, our bodies evolved over millennia, and in concert with forces and phenomena we barely understand. It’s not simply that we need to give the body rhythms; we can’t simply declare noon to be midnight and expect the body to conform to the new scheme. If only it were as simple as a single clock for which we could change the settings—but it’s not. The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of different clocks, all listening to and relating to and syncing with everyone and everything else’s. Human beings just can’t evolve that quickly. Our bodies are changing on a much different timescale.

PACING AND LEADING

Luckily, our technologies and programs are as fungible as our bodies are resistant. Yes, we are in a chronobiological crisis of depression, suicides, cancers, poor productivity, and social malaise as a result of abusing and defeating the rhythms keeping us alive and in sync with nature and one another. But what we are learning gives us the ability to turn this crisis into an opportunity. Instead of attempting to retrain the body to match the artificial rhythms of our digital technologies and their artifacts, we can instead use our digital technologies to reschedule our lives in a manner consistent with our physiology.

Technology may have given us the choice to defeat our natural rhythms, but we then built a society and economic order around these choices, making them seemingly irreversible. The only answer seemed to be to speed up, and the microchip might well be the poster child for this race to catch up with ourselves. If only we could offload the time-intensive tasks to silicon, we would regain the time—what technology analyst Clay Shirky calls “cognitive surplus”[18]—that we need to do our thinking again.

But our microchips don’t seem to be serving us in that way. Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, our machines keep us humans working at their pace, or the pace of the companies on the other end of our network connections. Thanks to the Internet, we travel more on business, not less, we work at all hours on demand, and we spend our free time answering email or tending to our social networks. Staring into screens, we are less attuned to the light of day and the physiological rhythms of our housemates and coworkers. We are more likely to accept the false digital premise that all time is equivalent and interchangeable.

The always-on philosophy works well for many businesses. During overnight hours when traditional broadcast television networks used to go off the air, cable channels like Home Shopping Network and QVC are still buzzing. Where traditional department stores may wait until the fourth quarter of the year for one of the store’s buyers to walk the floor and find out how certain product lines are doing, executives at QVC get sales reports as they happen. “It’s instant gratification,” explained one merchandiser using QVC to push product. “You learn and react constantly.”[19]

Their salespeople sure do. Mostly former (or, one could argue, still-working) actors, these shopping-channel salespeople make pitches for zirconium diamonds and designer handbags while receiving constant, real-time feedback on their success. Computer screens indicate the number of items sold, how many remain in inventory, and whether the pace of sales is increasing or decreasing—allowing the announcer to shift strategies and intensity instantaneously. They also receive feedback through an earpiece, about everything from the quality of their pitch, merchandiser satisfaction with the on-air delivery style, and whether phone lines are jammed. If a sweater is selling best in red, the host sees this on the screen, then picks up the green one and talks about its beautiful shade, or how “only fifty are left in stock. Make that forty-five—better hurry!” The salespeople almost universally feel that these technological links allow them to forge an emotional connection with their audiences, even though most of the feedback they get is in numbers. Rick Domeier, a ten-year veteran salesman, explains, “If you go too hard, they’ll let you know.” Their skill at reading and digesting multiple sources of information on the fly has led many to compare them with air traffic controllers. As far as the hosts are concerned, they are living outside time: “This is kind of like Vegas—you don’t know if it’s two o’clock in the afternoon or two o’clock in the morning,” adds Domeier. “When I’m on, it’s prime time.”[20]

Many of us aspire to this ability to be “on” at any time and to treat the various portions of the day as mere artifacts of a more primitive culture—the way we look at seemingly archaic blue laws that used to require stores to remain closed at least one day a week. We want all access, all the time, to everything—and to be capable of matching this intensity and availability ourselves. Isn’t this what it would mean to be truly digital citizens of the virtual city that never sleeps? A cell phone can be charged at any hour of the day, just as a person can take a power nap. Ultraefficiency advocate Timothy Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Body teaches readers how to “hack sleep.” Rather than sleeping six to nine hours in one stretch, those practicing polyphasic sleep are supposed to get by with twenty-minute naps every four hours. It’s an approach to the human-body-as-lithium-ion-battery that Ferriss says has proved successful for several high-tech CEOs.[21] It’s also indicative of a set of aspirations that may be more appropriate for machines, or markets, than for people.

Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies. We compete to process more emails or attract more social networking connections than our colleagues, as if more to do on the computer meant something good. We misapply the clockwork era’s goals of efficiency and productivity over time to a digital culture’s asynchronous landscape. Instead of working inside the machine, as we did before, we must become the machine.

We fetishize concepts such as the cyborg or human technological enhancement, looking to bring our personal evolution up to the pace of Apple system updates. We answer our email in the morning before we brush our teeth,[22] we trust the computers at Echemistry.com to calculate our best mates, and we line up for new iPhones even though our old ones still work. We obsessed over the first day a social networking website called Facebook sold its stock on the NASDAQ exchange, which had less to do with any interest in the value of the stock than an acknowledgment of social networking as central to our lives: the online network as the default mode of human connectivity and one’s profile as the new form of self-representation as well as the mirror in which to primp. Our algorithmically generated Klout scores stand in for what used to be social status. The NikeFuel bands strapped around our wrists track our motions and change colors as we approach our fitness goal for the day, then upload our results with other cyber-enhanced exercisers in our network, for mutual motivation.

Some of this activity happens so self-consciously that it amounts to what digital-arts theorists call the New Aesthetic[23] of everything from drone photography and ubiquitous surveillance to 8-bit game nostalgia and pixilated herringbone fabric. It is a blending of the language of digital technology with that of the physical world, perhaps best exemplified by the most advanced form of dubstep dancing, called glitch. Taking up where robot dancers and pop-and-lockers left off, glitch dancers imitate the glitchy stutter of low-resolution video streaming over the Internet. Their movements imitate those of a dancer as rendered by a malfunctioning video device, complete with dropouts and stutters.

Internet workers are expected to accept the cyborg ethos as a given circumstance. Google and Facebook welcome their engineers to work around the clock; the companies provide food, showers, and even laundry service for their programmers—who are assumed to have no life beyond the company. The bathroom stall doors at Google have daily programming tips for employees to read while sitting on the toilet. These campuses are lovely, to be sure, and the food and facilities are of a higher standard than most of us get at home. And everyone appears to be having a good time. But these places may as well be space stations, meticulously stocked and arranged, and utterly cut off from the passage of time.

The culture of the Internet is informed by this sensibility, which then trickles back into its content and programs. Programmers who are always-on naturally assume their users would want to live this way as well. Likewise, Internet writers whose lives must conform to the dictates of online publishing and economics end up espousing values consistent with the always-on hyperactivity of the Web. The most trafficked sites have new posts going up every few minutes, and their writers feel the pressure. Blog publisher Nick Denton has grown famous—and wealthy—exploiting this phenomenon in the way he runs his own properties, Gawker, Gizmodo, and Jezebel, among others. The formula is to hire young writers, subject them to almost impossible time constraints, and then let them go if they develop a reputation and merit higher pay. Writers for Denton’s publications are required to post twelve pieces per day—which often keeps them working around the clock (or, as I have witnessed myself, posting via smart phones from “real” life activities). The blog’s content exudes this sense of desperate immediacy and always-on urgency. No celebrities are safe or should be safe, wherever and whenever they are. A reputation-busting story about almost anyone can break while he or she is asleep, and spread all over the net before morning. As if to respond to the culture these blogs created, Denton implemented a computer program at Gawker that assigned stories based on trending Internet terms, creating a closed feedback loop between the net’s writers and readers.

It’s a lifestyle that is at once endured and enjoyed. As New York magazine writer and Gawker confidante Vanessa Grigoriadis put it,

Bloggers get to experience the fantastic feeling of looking at everything in the world and then having everyone look at them through their blog, of being both subject and object, voyeur and voyeurant. To get more of that feeling, some bloggers—if we were a blog, we’d tell you who—are in the bathroom snorting cocaine, or Adderall, the ADHD drug popular among college kids on finals week, the constant use of which is one of the only ways a blogger can write that much (“We’re a drug ring, not a bunch of bloggers,” one Gawker Media employee tells me cheerily). Pinched nerves, carpal tunnel, swollen feet—it’s all part of the dastardly job, which at the top level can involve editing one post every fifteen minutes for nine hours a day, scanning 500 Websites via RSS for news every half-hour, and on “off-hours” keeping up with the new to prepare for tomorrow.[24]

By letting technology lead the pace, we do not increase genuine choice at all. Rather, we disconnect ourselves from whatever it is we may actually be doing. Bloggers disconnect themselves from the beats they may be covering by working through the screen and keyboard, covering the online versions of their subjects. Designers base their fashions and handbags on the computer readouts of incoming calls from housewives at 1 a.m. Lovers expect immediate and appropriate responses to their text messages, however tired or overworked (or drunk) the partner might be. Programmers expect themselves to generate the same quality code at 2 a.m. as they did at 2 p.m. earlier—and are willing to medicate themselves in order to do so.

In each of these cases, the bloggers, designers, lovers, and programmers all sacrifice their connection to natural and emergent rhythms and patterns in order to match those dictated by their technologies and the artificial situations they create. They miss out on the actual news cycle and its ebb and flow of activity. They work less efficiently by refusing to distinguish between naturally peak productive and peak restorative hours. Designers miss out on quite powerfully determinative cultural trends and cycles by focusing on the mediated responses of insomniac television viewers. And their articles, programs, and creative output all suffer for it.

It’s an easy mistake to make. The opportunity offered to us by digital technology is to reclaim our time and to program our devices to conform to our personal and collective rhythms. Computers do not really care about time. They are machines operating on internal clocks that are not chronological, but events-based: This happens, then that happens. They don’t care how much—or how little—time passes between each step of the sequence. This relationship to time offers unique opportunities.

For example, early Internet culture took advantage of the staccato, stepped no-time of digital technology. The first bulletin board services worked as asynchronously as the computer programs themselves: users logged on, downloaded entire conversations, and then responded at their convenience. A participant might take a few hours, or even a few days, to craft a response to a conversation in progress, and then upload it to the bulletin board. We conversed and wrote at our own pace and in our own time. For some this meant reading at night and then composing a response in the morning. For others, it meant a sudden burst of reading and writing. For still others like me, it took on a quality of chess by mail, with responses going back and forth over a period of days.

The beauty of these conversations is that we were all brilliant—more brilliant than we were in real life, anyway, when only the very best conversationalists were capable of coming up with replies that took the rest of us days to construct. The result was that on the Internet we were smarter than we could be in daily life. We had used digital technology not simply to slow down a group’s conversation, but to allow everyone to participate at his or her own pace and in the most effective part of his or her daily or weekly cycle.

By putting email and Twitter in our smart phones and attaching them to our bodies so that something vibrates every time we are mentioned, summoned, or pinged, we turn a potentially empowering asynchronous technology into a falsely synchronous one. We acquire phantom vibration syndrome and begin to experience symptoms formerly limited to air traffic controllers and 911 emergency operators. Even when we take advantage of speed or, pardon, “cognitive enhancement drugs,” we eventually burn out. The same is true for businesses that rework their operations around the time frames of quarterly reports, and mutual funds that “dress up” for end-of-year evaluations by selling unpopular assets and purchasing popular ones. They miss or work against more naturally occurring rhythms and lose the ability to ride the waves underlying essentially all human endeavors. The phones are smarter but we are dumber.

Countless examples of self-pacing systems abound in both nature and culture. The mentrual cycles of women who live in the same dormitory tend to become synchronized. Through a perhaps similar mechanism, children’s playground activity has been observed to be paced by just one or two youngsters who move about seemingly randomly from one group to another, establishing fairly precise rhythms of activity. Social scientists believe this collaborative pacing allows for high levels of group coherence as well as greater awareness of those individuals falling out of sync due to illness or some other stress deserving of collective attention. These processes may be little more than artifacts of more primitive human societies, but they may also be essential coordinators of activity and behavior that we should think twice about overriding.

Rather than being paced by our technologies, we can just as easily program our technologies to follow our own paces—or those of our enterprise’s remaining natural cycles. Or better than simply following along, technologies can sync to us and generate greater coherence for all of us in the process. After all, people have been achieving the benefit of sync since the invention of agriculture. Farmers learned that certain crops grow better in particular climates and seasons, so they plant the right seeds at the right times. Not only is the crop better and more bountiful when planting is organized in this fashion, but the fruits, vegetables, and grains available end up better matched to the human physiology’s needs during that season. Potatoes, yams, carrots, beets, and other root vegetables are in high supply during the winter months, providing sustained energy and generating warmth. The moist, hydrating fruits available during the summer are cooling to the overheated body. Beyond these superficial relationships are very specific glandular and hormonal connections between seasonal shifts and available plant enzymes. Whatever is in season has been in season over the course of hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution, coaxing and cueing everything from our thyroids to our spleens to store, cleanse, and metabolize at appropriate intervals. We can willfully re-create the dietary regimen that the year-round availability of hydroponic vegetables in the aisles of the Whole Foods Market otherwise effectively camouflages from us.

Much of our culture is already designed around the more subtle influences of the seasons on our moods, hormone levels, and neurotransmitter activity. Religions program their holidays to exploit or, in some cases, counteract seasonal states of mind. Ancient fertility rituals came in April, when both farming and sexual activity reached their heights, redirecting it to local gods and authorities. Solstice rituals brought light, greenery, or oily foods into people’s homes during the darkest days of the year, when as-yet-unidentified seasonal affective disorder was most likely to strike. Today it’s no secret that movie studios release blockbuster action films to meet the higher energy levels of summer audiences, more intellectual fare for the winter months, and romantic comedies for spring. They don’t do it out of any sense of loyalty to our natural chronobiological rhythms, but because it’s good business.

People can program their own activities to conform to these cycles as well—once we know what they are. Athletes and their trainers have always been aware that surges of energy, high performance levels, and unexplained slumps seemed to follow regular cycles over seasons, months, weeks, and even times of day. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that a surging culture of amateur joggers looking mostly for better ways to improve their cardiac health made the first significant breakthroughs tying timing to performance.

Already accustomed to making minute tweaks to their highly routinized workout regimens, runners took a particularly keen interest in the emerging science of chronobiology for any hints on how to improve their efficiency and cardiac results. Many doctors and trainers looked for correlations between time of day, exertion, and recovery in the quest for an ideal sequence. Among them, cardiac surgeon Irving Dardik, founding chair of the U.S. Olympic Sports Medicine Committee (and the first to use umbilical veins for bypass surgery), discovered that he could help runners and patients alike modulate their cardiac rhythms by having them exercise and rest at very particular intervals during the day.[25] He based his work on fairly precise but seemingly esoteric relationships between his subject’s cardiac and respiratory rhythms and what he called the “superwave” of lunar, solar, and other cycles. The work got great results for many patients contending with chronic (as in chronos, get it?) illness, but Dardik’s enthusiasm for the broader applications of his theories—including cold fusion research and the treatment of multiple sclerosis—led to widespread derision and the revocation of his license to practice medicine.

The genie was out of the bottle, though, and the notion that there were biorhythms at play in health and performance became a working principle for sports trainers and alternative healthcare practitioners. What had previously been treated as folklore about the influence of the seasons and the lunar phases on human activity was now being confirmed by new information about the brain and its changing states. New insights into brain chemistry began to validate the premise that our moods and abilities change cyclically over time, along with the wash of neurotransmitters in which our gray matter happens to be bathing at any particular moment. Psychopharmacologist and researcher Dr. David Goodman left the mainstream neuroscience community and functioned in academic exile for over thirty years to study—on subjects including himself—how the brain boosts different neurochemicals at different times of the month in order to adapt to environmental shifts over the lunar cycle. He discovered that there are four main brain states that each dominate over a single week in the twenty-eight-day lunar cycle.[26]

Meanwhile, Dr. Joel Robertson, author of the popular depression manual Natural Prozac, began to study the specific influence of each of the dominant neurotransmitters as they relate to depression.[27] He found that certain people naturally seek to avoid depression by boosting serotonin levels, resulting in calm, peaceful mind states. Others are attracted to arousal and excitement, and tend toward behaviors and diets that boost “up” chemicals such as norepinephrine and dopamine. (The former would opt to abuse speed and cocaine; the latter may gravitate toward alcohol and Valium.) As significant as the exercise and behavior regimens he developed were his conclusions about the way different neurotransmitters favor particular mental states and activities.

Putting all this together into a comprehensive approach to the brain over time is Dr. Mark Filippi, founder of Somaspace.org and a sought-after consultant to Wall Street stockbrokers and professional sports teams looking to improve their performance, as well as more crunchy New Age types looking to make sense of the patterns in their lives. I interviewed him at his modest Larchmont office filled with books by everyone from general semanticist Alfred Korzybski to scientist David Bohm. “Why does a baseball player go into a slump?” he asks me. “Because he’s out of sync with the waves in his world.”[28] That’s a sports statistic I hadn’t heard about before.

Filippi argues that instead of masking our incoherence on a biochemical level through psychotropic drugs like Prozac and Valium, we need to organize our social routines with more acute awareness of the chronobiology informing them. He helps his clients coordinate their activities and exercises with natural cycles occurring all around and within them, in an effort to increase their efficiency, reduce their stress, and generate well-being. He is doughy but fast-talking—an avid sports fan with a small TV on in his office 24/7, as if it were a window to the sociocultural weather. Watching a sports game with Filippi is like listening to an entirely alternative radio commentary. “Look at his jaw,” Filippi comments of a point guard in a basketball game on the TV. “His ankle is going to give out.” Sure enough, two plays later the point guard is on the ground clutching his shin. “It’s all connected,” he says, as if the structural dynamic between jaw and ankle through “tensegrity”[29] were patently obvious.

“When we speak of tensegrity,” Filippi explains, “we mean the capacity a system has to redistribute tension and retain the same physical shape. Our manifested reality, from the infrastructure of our cells to the street grids of the towns and cities we live in, possess a tensegrity.” Most basically, tensegrity is what holds it all together. Our most internalized patterns, such as breathing, moving, and relating, embody it. Without tensegrity, we no longer exist; we’re just a bunch of cells. But it’s also a moving target, changing its forces and rhythms along with our external activities and internal states.

Building on his predecessors’ work, Filippi has been analyzing the biochemical impact of seasonal and lunar phases in order to make sense of human rhythms and determine optimal times for both therapy and particular activities. Just as there are four solar seasons with rather obvious implications (winter is better for body repair; summer is better for exertion), there are also four corresponding moon phases, sections of the day, quarters of the hour, and even stages of breath, Filippi argues. By coordinating our internal four-part, or “four phase,” rhythms with those of our greater environment, we can think, work, and interact with greater coherence. Integrating the research of Dardik, Goodman, and Robinson along with his own observations, Filippi concluded that in each moon phase the brain is dominated by a different neurotransmitter. According to Filippi, the prevalence of one chemical over the others during each week of the lunar cycle optimizes certain days for certain activities.

At the beginning of the new moon, for example, one’s acetylcholine rises along with the capacity to perform. Acetylcholine is traditionally associated with attention. “The mood it evokes in us is an Energizer Bunny–like pep. That vibe can be used to initiate social interactions, do chores and routines efficiently, and strive for balance in our activities.”

Nearer to the full moon, an uptick in serotonin increases self-awareness, generating both high focus and high energy. Serotonin, the chemical that gets boosted by drugs like Prozac, is thought to communicate the abundance or dearth of food resources to our brain. “When under its influence we can feel euphoric, spontaneous, and yet composed and sedate. Whereas acetylcholine worked to anchor us to our physical world, serotonin buoys us to the mental realm, allowing us to experience the physical world from an embodied, more lucid vantage point. We actually benefit from solitude at this time, as when an artist finds his muse.”

Over the next week, we can enjoy the benefits of increased dopamine. This chemical—responsible for the rush one gets on heroin or after performing a death-defying stunt—is responsible for reward-driven learning. “It allows us to expand our behaviors outside of our routines, decrease our intensity, and essentially blend with the energy of the moment. If acetylcholine is the ultimate memory neurotransmitter, dopamine is the ultimate experiential one. Functionally, it serves us best when we’re doing social activities we enjoy.” In other words, it’s party week.

Finally, in the last moon phase, we are dominated by norepinephrine, an arousal chemical that regulates processes like the fight-or-flight response, anxiety, and other instinctual behaviors. “We tend to be better off doing more structural tasks that don’t involve a lot of reflection. Its binary nature lets us make decisions, act on them, and then recalibrate like a GPS with a hunting rifle. The key with norepinephrine is that if it’s governed well, we experience a fluid coordination of thought and action so much so that we almost fail to feel. Everything becomes second nature.” So instead of letting the natural rise of fight-or-flight impulses turn us into anxious paranoids, we can exploit the state of nonemotional, almost reptilian arousal it encourages.

Further, within each day are four segments that correspond to each of these moon phases. In the new moon phase, people will be most effective during the early morning hours, while in the second phase leading up to the full moon, people do best in the afternoon.

Admittedly, this is all a tough pill for many of us to swallow, but after my interviews with Filippi, I began working in this fashion on this book. I would use the first week of the moon to organize chapters, do interviews, and talk with friends and colleagues about the ideas I was working on. In the second, more intense week, I would lock myself in my office, set to task, and get the most writing done. In the third week, I would edit what I had written, read new material, jump ahead to whatever section I felt like working on, and try out new ideas. And in the final week, I would revisit structure, comb through difficult passages, and recode the nightmare that is my website. My own experience is that my productivity went up by maybe 40 percent, and my peace of mind about the whole process of writing was utterly transformed for the better. Though certainly anecdotal as far as anyone else is concerned, the exercise convinced me to stay aware of these cycles from now on.

Digital technology can be brought back into the equation as well, promoting altogether new levels of sync. Think of it the way biofeedback works: a person is hooked up to a bunch of equipment that monitors his heart, breath, blood pressure, galvanic skin response, and so on. That information is then fed back to him as an image on a monitor; a moving line; a pulsing light, music, or sound; or an animation. The person who wants to slow his heart rate or lower his blood pressure might do so by attempting to change a red light to a blue one. The sensors are listening and the computer is processing, but the data they feed back is the articulation of inner, cyclic activity, not its repression. Seeing this previously hidden information gives us new access to natural rhythms and the ability to either adjust them or adjust ourselves and our lives to their warning signals.

More advanced deployments of these technologies attempt to synchronize those internal rhythms with those of the outside world. Most of us today live in cities and spend most of our time indoors, where the cues that used to alert us to the changing days, moon phases, and seasons are largely hidden from us. Our minds may know it’s nighttime, but our eyes and thyroids don’t. Neither do most of us know what phase the moon is in, whether the tides are high, or if the honey is ready—even though some of our immune systems may have registered that ragweed is in the air and triggered an allergic response. So, some of our senses are still connected to the cycles to which we have coordinated our organ systems for the past several hundred thousand years, while others are blinded by our artificial environments or our efforts to synchronize to the wrong signals. (What does it mean to your body when a ten-ton bus zooms past? That you’re in the middle of an elephant stampede?)

In an effort to resynchronize our internal rhythms with those of nature, chronobiologists have developed computer programs that both monitor the various pulses of our organs while comparing and contrasting them with daily, lunar, and seasonal cycles. Not everyone marches to exactly the same beat, which is why these approaches are highly personalized. New, controversial, but effective exercise programs from companies with names like iHeart and LifeWaves exploit these emerging findings,[30] assigning workouts during different, specific hours of the day over the course of each month.

Believe what we may about such strategies, there is now substantial evidence that time is not generic, however interchangeable our digital devices may make it seem. Yes, the DVR means we can record our programs instead of watching them as they are broadcast, but this does not mean the experience of watching our favorite HBO drama is the same on a Wednesday afternoon as it would have been on the Sunday evening before when everyone else was watching it. We needn’t be slaves to the network’s schedule, but neither must we submit to the notion that we are equally disposed to all activities in all time slots.

By the same token, businesses need not submit to the schedules and sequences that are external to the social and cultural rhythms defining their product cycles. Duncan Yo-Yos, for just one example, enjoy a cyclical popularity as up and down as the motion of the toy itself. The products become wildly popular every ten years or so, and then retreat into near total stagnation. The company has learned to ride this ebb and flow, emerging with TV campaigns, celebrity spokespeople, and national tournaments every time a new generation of yo-yo aficionados comes of age.

Likewise, Birkenstock shoes rise and fall in popularity along with a host of other back-to-nature products and behaviors. Instead of resisting these trend waves and ending up with unsold stock and disappointing estimates, the company has learned to recognize the signs of an impending swing in either direction. With each new wave of popularity, Birkenstock launches new lines and opens new dealerships, then pulls back when consumer appetites level off. With this strategy, the company has expanded from making just a handful of shoes to its current offering of close to five hundred different styles.

A friend of mine who worked on smart phone applications at Apple told me that Steve Jobs always thought of product development in terms of three-year cycles. Jobs simply was not interested in what was happening in the present; he only cared about the way people would be working with technology three years in the future. This is what empowered Jobs to ship the first iMacs with no slot for floppy drives, and iPhones without the ability to play the then-ubiquitous Flash movie files. He was developing products in the present that were situated to catch (and, some may argue, create) changing consumer trends instead of simply meeting his marketing department’s snapshots of current consumer demand.

This is not as easy for companies with shareholders who refuse to look at anything but quarterly reports and expect year-over-year earnings to do nothing but increase. But that is not the way either people or organizations function—especially not when they are using social networking technologies that in many ways promote the coherence of their living cultures. For while digital technology can serve to disconnect us from the cycles that have traditionally orchestrated our activities, they can also serve to bring us back into sync.

The choice of how to use them remains ours.

THE SPACE BETWEEN THE TICKS

I grew up back when family vacations meant long road trips. My brother and I would fight for control of the AAA TripTik, a plastic-bound pad of little one-page maps with a hand-drawn green-felt-tip pen line over the highway we were supposed to follow. Holding the map meant getting to look at the tiny numbers indicating the mileage between each exit, and then trying to add up how far it was to the next destination or rest stop, while out the window the trees and road signs flew by.

“I’m getting carsick,” the map holder would inevitably call out, handing over navigational authority to his sibling.

“Look out the window,” our dad would say. “At things far away. And stop looking at that map!”

What our father, an accountant, understood from experience if not brain science was that it’s hard to focus on something up close while moving at sixty-five miles per hour down a highway. This is due to what neurologists call sensory conflict. In order to locate our own positions in space, we use multiple sources of information: sight, touch, the angles of our joints, the orientation of the inner ear, and more. When we are focused on a fine motor task or tiny detail, the scale on which this occurs just doesn’t jibe with the speed at which things are flying past in our peripheral vision, or the bumps and acceleration we feel in our stomachs as the car lurches forward. Are we sitting on a couch, falling out of a tree, or running through a field? The body doesn’t know from automobiles. Our inner ear says we are moving, while our eyes, staring at a fixed object like a book, tell the brain we are stationary.

We are similarly disoriented by digital time, for it tends to mix and match different scales simultaneously. A date twenty years in the future has the same size box in the Google calendar as the one tomorrow or next week. A search result may contain both the most recent Tweet about a subject as well as an authoritative text representing fifty years of scholarship—both in the same list, in the same size, and virtually indistinguishable. Just like the world whizzing by out the car window, the digital world on the other side of our computer screens tends to move out of sync with the one in which our bodies reside.

In both cases, the driver is the only one truly safe from nausea. For while the passengers—or in the digital realm, users—cannot anticipate the coming bumps or steer into curves, drivers can. For those of us contending with digiphrenia, becoming a driver means taking charge of choice making, especially when that means refusing to make any choice at all.

Digital technology is all about choices. Closer to a computer game than a continuous narrative, the digital path is no longer inevitable, but a branching hierarchy of decision points. The digital timeline moves not from moment to moment, but from choice to choice, hanging absolutely still on each command line—like the number on a digital clock—until the next choice is made and a new reality flips into place.

This freedom to choose and make choices is the underlying promise of the digital era, or of any new technology. Electric lighting gives us the freedom to choose when to sleep; asphalt gives us the choice where to drive our cars; Prozac gives us the freedom to choose an otherwise depressing lifestyle. But making choices is also inherently polarizing and dualist. It means we prefer one thing over another and want to change things to suit our sense of how things ought to be.

Our leading consumer-technology brand, Apple, makes this all too clear: using these devices is akin to taking a bite of the forbidden fruit, exchanging the ignorant holism of Eden for the self-aware choice making of adulthood. The “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil,” as the myth calls it, introduced humanity to the binary universe of active choice that computers now amplify for us today. As a downside, the new freedom of choice created self-consciousness and shame. Adam and Eve became self-aware and ashamed of their nudity. They were banished from the holism of Eden and went out into the world of yes and no, this and that, Cain and Abel, and good and evil.

The same is true for us today. Our digital technologies empower us to make so many choices about so many things. But the staccato nature of digital choice also thwarts our efforts to stay fully connected to our greater throughlines and to one another. Every choice potentially brings us out of immersive participation and into another decision matrix. I am with my daughter, but the phone is vibrating with a new instant message. Even if I choose to ignore the message and be with her, I have been yanked from the intimate moment by the very need to make a choice. Of course, I can also choose to turn off the phone—which involves pulling it out of my pocket and changing a setting—or just leave it and hope it doesn’t happen again.

For many of us trying to reconcile our real and virtual scales of existence, there is almost a feeling of operating at different speeds or in multiple time zones. This sensation comes from having to make precise, up-close, moment-to-moment choices while simultaneously attempting to experience the greater flow we associate with creativity and productivity. Like when you’re writing with great flow and energy, but your Microsoft Word program puts a little green line under one word. Do you stop and check, or do you keep going? Or both? Just like the kid in the backseat of the car, we get a kind of vertigo.

The ancient Greeks would probably tell us our troubles stem from our inability to distinguish between the two main kinds of time, chronos and kairos. It’s as if they understood that time is simply too multifaceted to be described with a single word. Chronos is the kind of time that’s registered by the clock: chronology. It’s not time itself but a particular way of understanding time by the clock. That’s what we literally mean when we say “three o’clock.” This is time of the clock, meaning belonging to the clock, or chronos.

Kairos is a more slippery concept. Most simply, it means the right or opportune moment. Where chronos measures time quantitatively, kairos is more qualitative. It is usually understood as a window of opportunity created by circumstances, God, or fate. It is the ideal time to strike, to propose marriage, or to take any particular course of action. Carpe diem. Kairos is perfect timing relative to what’s going on, where chronos is the numerical description of what happens to be on the clock right then. Chronos can be represented by a number; kairos must be experienced and interpreted by a human.

While clocks may have suggested that we live in a world bound by chronos, digitality asks us to embody chronos itself. Where the arms of the clock passed through the undefined, unmeasured spaces between numbers, digital technology registers only chronos. It does not exist between its pulses. This is why we call it an asynchronous technology: it does not pass. It is the ticks of the clock but none of the space between. Each new tick is a new line of a code, a new decision point, another division—all oblivious to what happens out there in the world—except when it gets a new discrete input from one of us.

Digital time ignores nearly every feature of kairos, but in doing so may offer us the opportunity to recognize kairos by its very absence. Clocks initially disconnected us from organic time by creating a metaphor to replace it. Digital time is one step further removed, replacing what it was we meant by “time” altogether. It’s a progression akin to what postmodern philosopher Jean Baudrillard called the “precession of the simulacra.” There is the real world, then there are the metaphors and maps we use to represent that world, and then there is yet another level of activity that can occur on those maps—utterly disconnected from the original. This happens because we have grown to treat the maps and symbols we have created as if they were the underlying reality. Likewise, we started with this amorphous experience of rhythms that we called time. We created the analog clock to represent the aspects of time we could represent with a technology. Then, with digital readouts, we created a way of representing what was happening on that clock face. It is twice removed from the original.

Now that chronos has been fully freed from the cycles and flows through which we humans experience time, we can more easily differentiate between the kinds of clocks and time we are using. We can stop forcing our minds and bodies to keep up with digital chronos while also ceasing to misapply our digital technologies to human processes. We come to fully recognize the difference between chronos and kairos, or between time and timing.

Or think of it this way: Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. Image may be thought of as chronos, where sound is more like kairos. Not surprisingly, the digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.

Our analog technologies anchored us temporally in ways our digital ones don’t. In a book or a scroll, the past is on our left, and the future is on our right. We know where we are in linear time by our position in the paper. While the book with its discrete pages is a bit more sequential than the scroll, both are entirely more oriented in time than the computer screen. Whichever program’s window we may have open at the moment is the digital version of now, without context or placement in the timeline. The future on a blog is not to one side, but above—in the as-yet-unposted potential. The past isn’t to the other side, but down, in and among older posts. Or over there, at the next hypertext link. What is next does not unfold over time, but is selected as part of a sequence.

In this context, digiphrenia comes from confusing chronos with kairos. It happens when we accept the digital premise that every moment must potentially consist of a decision point or a new branch. We live perched atop the static points of chronos, suffering from the vertigo of no temporal context. It’s akin to the discomfort many LP listeners had to early CD music and low-resolution digital music files, whose sample rates seemed almost perceptible as a staccato sawtooth wave buzzing under the music. It just didn’t feel like continuous sound and didn’t have the same impact on the body.

Digital audio is markedly superior in many respects. There is no “noise”—only signal. There are no “pops” on the record’s surface, no background hiss. But without those references, our experience becomes frictionless—almost like the vertigo we experience when zooming in or out of a Google map too rapidly. There’s no sense of scale—no background to the foreground. None of the cues that create a sense of organic connection to the medium. There is no messy handwriting to be deciphered, only ACII text. Every copy is the original. And it is perfect—at least when it’s there. When it is not, as in the case of the spaces between the samples in a digital audio recording, there is nothing. For many kinds of activities, this doesn’t matter at all. The fixed type of the printing press already removed pretty much every sign of analog personality from text. For human purposes, there is no real difference between the text in a digital book and a physical one; the only difference is the form factor of the book versus that of the tablet. That’s because a symbol system like text is already abstracted and just as well represented digitally.

When there is a direct communication with the senses, on the other hand, the difference becomes a lot clearer. Like a fluorescent lightbulb, which will perceptibly flicker at 60 hertz along with the alternating current of the house, digital technologies are almost perceptibly on/off. They create an environment, regardless of the content they are expressing. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by “the medium is the message.” A lightbulb creates an environment, even though it has no content. Even without a slide or movie through which to project an image onto the wall, the light itself creates an environment where things can happen that otherwise wouldn’t. It is an environment of light.

With digital technology, the environment created is one of choice. We hop from choice to choice with no present at all. Our availability to experience flow or to seize the propitious moment is minimized as our choices per second are multiplied by a dance partner who doesn’t see or feel us. Our rhythms are dictated by the pulses of required inputs and incoming data. It is not a stream but a series of points along a line. Yes, we have the ability to make more choices, but in the process we become primarily choosers. The obligation to choose—to “submit” as the button compels us—is no choice at all. Especially when it prevents us from achieving our own sense of flow and rhythm.

The first experience most of us had of this sort of forced choice was call waiting—the interruptive beep letting us know we had the option of putting our current conversation on hold and responding to whoever was now calling us. By utilizing the feature and checking on the incoming call, we are introducing a new choice into our flow. In the process, we are also saying, “Hold on while I check to make sure there’s not someone calling whom I want to speak with more than I want to speak with you.” Sure, we can justify that it might be an emergency, but it’s really just a new decision point.

Now with caller ID in addition to our call waiting, we can visually check on the source of the incoming call without our current caller even knowing. We pull the phone away from our ear, imperceptibly disconnecting from the call for long enough to scan the incoming number. Then we return to the conversation in process, only half listening while we inwardly debate whether to interrupt the conversation with the now certain fact that whatever the person on the other end is saying is less important to us than the alternative, the incoming caller. (It was easier when everyone heard the beep, and the insult seemed less willful.)

The real crime here is not simply the indignity suffered by our rejected talk partner, but the way we so easily allow the sanctity of our moment to be undermined. It assumes that kairos has no value—that if there is a moment of opportunity to be seized, that moment will break into our flow from the outside, like a pop-up ad on the Web. We lose the ability to imagine opportunities emerging and excitement arising from pursuing whatever we are currently doing, as we compulsively anticipate the next decision point.

Clay Shirky correctly distinguishes this problem from the overused term “information overload,” preferring instead to call it “filter failure.” In a scarce mediaspace dominated by books, printing a text meant taking a financial risk. The amount of information out there was limited by the amount of money publishers and advertisers were willing to spend. Now that information can be generated and distributed essentially for free, the onus is upon the receiver to filter out or even stop the incoming traffic. Even though each one seems to offer more choices and opportunities, its very presence demands a response, ultimately reducing our autonomy.

Once we make the leap toward valuing the experience of the now and the possibilities of kairos, we can begin to apply some simple filters and mechanisms to defend it. We can set up any cell phone to ring or interrupt calls only for family members; we can configure our computers to alert us to only the incoming emails of particular people; and we can turn off all the extraneous alerts from everything we subscribe to. Unless we want our entire day guided by the remote possibility that a plane may crash into our office building, we need to trust that we can safely proceed on the assumption that it won’t.

While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem. We can defend our access to our personal kairos by letting the digital care for the chronos. Email lives outside time and can sit in the inbox until we are ready to read it. This should not be guilt provoking. The sender of the email is the one who relegated this missive to the timeless universe. Once sent, it is no longer part of our living, breathing cycling world of kairos but of the sequential realm of chronos. Email will form a stack, just like the stacks of processes in a computer program, and wait until we open it.

When I visit companies looking to improve their digital practices, I often suggest office workers attempt not to answer or check on email for an entire hour—or even two hours in a row. They usually reel in shock. Why is this so hard for so many of us? It’s not because we need the email for our productivity, but because we are addicted to the possibility that there’s a great tidbit in there somewhere. Like compulsive gamblers at a slot machine rewarded with a few quarters every dozen tries, we are trained to keep opening emails in the hope of a little shot of serotonin—a pleasant ping from the world of chronos. We must retrain ourselves instead to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.

A friend of mine makes her living selling homemade candles through the craft site etsy.com. As her business got more successful, more orders would come through. By habit, she stopped whatever she was doing and checked her email every time a new message dinged through. If it was an order, she opened it, printed it out, and filled it before returning to her work melting wax, mixing scents, and dipping her wicks. Her routine became broken up and entirely un-fun, until it occurred to her to let the emails stack up all day, and then process them all at once. She used an automatic reply to all incoming orders, giving customers the instant feedback they have come to expect, but kept her flesh-and-blood candle maker self insulated from the staccato flow of orders. At 3 p.m. each day, her reward was to go to the computer and see how many orders had come in since morning. She had enough time to pack them all at once while listening to music, and then take them to the post office before closing. She achieved greater efficiency while also granting herself greater flow.

The digital can be stacked; the human gets to live in real time. This experience is what makes us creative, intelligent, and capable of learning. As science and innovation writer Steven Johnson has shown, great ideas don’t really come out of sudden eureka moments, but after long, steady slogs through problems.[31] They are slow, iterative processes. Great ideas, as Johnson explained it to a TED audience, “fade into view over long periods of time.” For instance, Charles Darwin described his discovery of evolution as a eureka moment that occurred while he was reading Malthus on a particular night in October of 1838. But Darwin’s notebooks reveal that he had the entire theory of evolution long before this moment; he simply hadn’t fully articulated it yet.

As Johnson argues it, “If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the ‘slow hunch.’ We’ve heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people’s minds. They have a feeling that there’s an interesting problem, but they don’t quite have the tools yet to discover them.” Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time—available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation.

Extracting digital processes from our organic flow not only creates the space for opportune timing to occur, it also helps prevent us from making inopportune gaffes. Like the famous television sketch where Lucy frantically boxes chocolates on the assembly line, we attempt to answer messages and perform tasks at the rate they come at us. And like Lucy, we end up jamming the wrong things in the wrong places. Gmail gives us a few minutes to recall messages we may have sent in error, but this doesn’t stop us from replying hastily to messages that deserve our time, and creating more noise than signal.

Comments sections are filled with responses from people who type faster than they think and who post something simply because they know they will probably never have time to find the discussion again. The possibility that someone might actually link to or re-Tweet a comment leads people to make still more, turning posting into just as much a compulsion as opening email messages. As our respected leaders post their most inane random thoughts to our Twitter streams, we begin to wonder why they have nothing better to do with their time, or with ours. When an actor with the pop culture simplicity of Ashton Kutcher begins to realize that his unthinking posts can reflect negatively on his public image,[32] it should give the rest of us pause. But we would need to inhabit kairos for at least a moment or two in order to do that.

The result is a mess in which we race to make our world conform to the forced yes-or-no choices of the digiphrenic.

I once received an email from a college student in Tennessee who had been recruited by a political group to protest against leftist professors. Since I was scheduled to speak at the university in a month, she had studied my website for over ten minutes, trying to figure out if I was a leftist. After perusing several of my articles, she was still unable to determine exactly which side of the political spectrum I was on. Could I just make this easier for her and tell her whether or not I was a leftist, so that she knew whether to protest my upcoming speech? I pointed her to some of my writing on economics and explained that the Left/Right categorization may be a bit overdetermined in my case. She thanked me but asked me to please just give her a yes-or-no answer.

“Yes and no,” I replied, breaking the binary conventions of digital choice making. I didn’t hear back.

DO DRONE PILOTS DREAM OF ELECTRIC KILLS?

I was working on a story about Predator drones, the unmanned aircraft that the US Air Force flies over war zones in the Middle East and Central Asia collecting reconnaissance, taking out targets, and occasionally launching a few Hellfire missiles. The operators—pilots, as they’re called—sit behind computer terminals outfitted with joysticks, monitors, interactive maps, and other cockpit gear, remotely controlling drones on the other side of the world.

I was most interested in the ethical challenges posed by remote control warfare. Air Force commanders told me that within just a few years a majority if not all American fighter planes would be flown remotely by pilots who were thousands of miles away from the war zone. The simulation of flight, the resolution of the cameras, the instantaneousness of feedback, and the accuracy of the controls have rendered the pilot working through virtual reality just as effective as if he or she were in the cockpit. So why risk human troops along with the hardware? There’s no good reason, other than the nagging sense that on some level it’s not fair. What does it mean to fight a war where only one side’s troops are in jeopardy, and the other side may as well be playing a video game? Will our troops and our public become even more disconnected from the human consequences and collateral damage of our actions?

To my great surprise, I found out that the levels of clinical distress in drone crews were as high, and sometimes even higher, than those of crews flying in real planes.[33] These were not desensitized video-game players wantonly dropping ordinance on digital-screen pixels that may as well have been bugs. They were soul-searching, confused, guilt-ridden young men, painfully aware of the lives they were taking. Thirty-four percent experienced burnout, and over 25 percent exhibited clinical levels of distress. These responses occur