 Douglas Rushkoff is a man after my own heart. In his new book, Present Shock, he explains what the Internet and modern society at large is doing to our brains and our humanity. And it's not all good. Part of the reason I left the Internet is that I found it to be overwhelming. Everything happens all at once and I couldn't keep up. In the book, Rushkoff explains some of my syndromes, like how I tended to synchronize myself to the digital instead of paying attention to my own biorhythms. He captures the stress I felt with endless information at my fingertips and what seemed like futile efforts to monitor my Twitter stream or wade through my email. I got a chance to sit down with Rushkoff and confess some of my fears to him. Luckily it's not all doom and gloom, just mostly doom and gloom. I guess Present Shock is really, is the human response to living in an always on, immediate, real-time, digital reality. And it kind of looks at two things that have happened and they've happened simultaneously in a way that supports one another. One thing is our transition from kind of an industrial age world to this digital world. And what does that mean as we move from analog clocks and cycles and things to the digital clock which is always in the now, which is a, you know, a minute is no longer some portion of the day. It's a segment of itself. You know, what does that do? And then at the same time we've gone from a very future-based kind of movement-oriented world into this 21st century, this post-millennial end of time. It's funny, you know, the Mayan calendar, it didn't mean the end of times, but it kind of meant the end of time. How do we deal with problems that are steady state, present tense problems rather than sending a man up to the moon and sticking a flag in there? You know, it's like how do you deal with like global warming? It's like you don't win. There's no victory. There's no thing. It's not Martin Luther King having a dream of a world without global warming. It's just like we got to kind of perpetually deal with this. What is that like? I feel this terror of what you describe as present shock. For me, I actually wrote on the margins a lot, stress. Like I was stressed out while reading this and I'd kind of get overwhelmed as you're listening things because this is stuff that really scares me just trying to keep up, keep my head above water. Is present shock something I do to myself? I've decided to immerse myself in this level of technology and therefore I'm experiencing present shock, or is present shock just our status as a species and we're all dealing with it? It's either our status as a species or maybe more likely our status as a civilization. The way the book moves is through the sort of five main syndromes that I identified. The first one is narrative collapse. What happens when time seems to stop? When we get from the 20th century to the 21st, from all the forward leaning numbers of the 19s to the standstill numbers of the 20s. What happens is your movements die, your stories die, this sense of forward momentum dies and you don't have goals and long-term thinking to motivate you forward. What do you do? You end up then in a much more of a kind of a video game like world where you're making decisions and doing things in that sort of almost digital mindset of I'm programming my world rather than responding to the stories that have been left for me, which leads you to digiphernia. When you're in a programmed environment, what happens? Well, you end up with more than one instance of yourself and I'm going to now instead of being programmed by my technology, I'm going to program my technology to conform with me. That's then what leads to this sense of responsibility, which is what I'm calling overwinding. You're calculating this whole giant thing. I renamed the long now the short forever. It's sort of the paralysis of that long-term thinking. Basically all these ways that we try to almost make up for lost time or maximize this efficiency into this single moment and mistake one time scale for another because they're not interchangeable. This is less of a necessarily a symptom of present shock, but something that we try to do because of present shock? Yeah. Well, overwinding would be almost like OCD. It's this obsessive compulsive urge to compress time and to be more efficient and to conform on a certain level. From there, I went to fractal noya, which is the idea that if you're living in an eternal present, how do you make meaning? We used to make meaning through stories, through narrative, but now if we're in the moment, then we try to make sense by taking a picture of where things are and drawing connections between them. You can end up drawing way too many connections and then going crazy. You get noya, basically. That's where the paranoia comes in because everything's not connected to everything else. If you have no time in which to make sense of things, then the only way you can make sense of something is to connect this to that to this to that. This leads us to apocalyptic. Apocalyptic. The circle, people want there to be a beginning and an end. I think what it is is these guys, particularly older guys who are enthralled with digital technology and made great careers off digital technology, they are very intolerant of steady state. It's very hard to be this you mean it's just going to be. I've best begun to understand narrative collapse since I've left the internet. I've started to realize the value of a novel length idea. For me, digiphernia is the most dangerous of Rushkoff's syndromes. I've always had a problem with priorities. For instance, email would take me ages to get through and I responded to half the ones I should. Overwinding is why I quit text messaging in addition to the internet. I just hate how text messages arrive and need to be dealt with out of step with my own reality. What Rushkoff calls fractal noya, I call ignorance. It always bothered me how I knew so little compared to what the internet knew. By leaving the internet, I could read books and insulate myself and wrestle with one idea at a time. Finally, Rushkoff's term apocalyptic was reflected in my decision to give up the internet in the first place. I was just one step away from buying an underground bunker. I find the names of each of these chapters almost they sound like names of like sci-fi, contagion style diseases that wipe out mankind. Well, in a way, I meant them more like almost psychological syndromes, digiphernia and fractal noya. It's sort of like presentist era or present shock era versions of the mental ailments we've come to know and love. I guess I'm thinking Phil K. Dick where a mental ailment could wipe out you. Well, they can. I mean, on a certain level, yeah, they can wipe out humanity. At least from a subjective. Yeah, but humanity, when I talk about wiping out humanity, I don't mean that the human bodies go away necessarily. I mean that humanity goes away. Our humanness. Right, our humanness. In the industrial age, we very much aped the machines. We tried to be like the machines that were guiding human experience through that millennium. The more we try temporally to keep up with an asynchronous temporal landscape, which is the digital temporal landscape. You talk about computers are multitasking and we fundamentally aren't. Right, and computers go in sequence and we don't. We go in a continuous flow. We do live continuously. I don't really buy that human beings are sampled. So I'm still scared of present shock, but if you can't tell by now, Rushkov isn't entirely pessimistic. In fact, I plan on using some of his terms and solutions when I return to the internet. Actually what Rushkov prescribes is sort of what I've been doing this year, like taking time to meet people in person and dealing with data one item at a time. You said you had to pause things, or you said just as we can pause, we can unpause. If you decide to pause long enough to read my book, for example, you can unpause when you're done and the world will still be there. You don't have to take a whole year off. I mean I learned to dip into the digital atemporal reality and then go, now I'm back in this one. But when you maintain your own clocks, even in the face of all this, it's really interesting. Then you start looking at things, how do I make digital time conform to my time? Again, this all sounds terrifying and horrible to me. It's only stressful to the extent that you refuse to take charge of your own time. How do you do that? You're doing it in an extreme way, by saying, okay, no net, I'm gone. I'm doing it in an apocalyptic way where I'm so afraid of it, I'm just going to avoid it. I haven't solved anything yet. One simple thing to do is to distinguish between what I'm kind of calling flow media and stacked media. Something like Twitter is a flow media that's just going. Twitter is something you dip into to get the sort of cultural weather and then dip out of. You don't try to keep up with Twitter. You don't try to read all the tweets that happened between the last time you looked and now. It's a thing that's moving. On the other hand, if you're going to get a book or an email or something, don't just dip into those as whether those are stacked media. So that's something you actually sit and you give a period, I'm going to read this email that came from this person. If you rush through that email, you feel stressed after it. Most of us try to deal with our inbox and it's like this awfully stressful experience because we're treating it like flow. It's like, no, it's not flow. I have my phone. My phone, sure, it could buzz me every time an email comes and then I can quickly check it. Or it's like, no, email is in there. If someone else relegated a piece of information to the atemporal universe, why should I convert it back to the temporal universe and have it zap me as soon as it arrives? No, this is atemporal. This is something that waits. It's not even a text. It's not a phone call. You refer to this idea. This is something I talk to people a lot. I call it like a cognitive load you can put on somebody. I could text somebody, can you make dinner plans tonight? That took me five seconds to write. That took the person an hour to... You opened a loop. It's like the way the brain works is it's just like it's co-processors and stuff. You open a loop in the brain. If you don't deal with that open loop right away, it creates stress for you because it's sitting there open. They basically set up, even if you don't agree to do them, oh, will you send me this book? Will you write this quick piece? Will you send a bio? Will you make sure this? You've just inserted 10 or 20 open loops into your brain that you're not going to be able to get to later. Part of it is realizing that the distance and anonymity that sort of Asperger's like non-emotionality afforded by digital technology frees people to lay shit at your doorstep that you don't really have to accept. The thing that technology gives us is choice, is more choice. The more you're going to use technologies, the more you're going to be making choices. You get the freedom to choose what you want, but you lose, in many cases, the freedom not to choose. You know, the freedom to just be. If you're on a computer, the choices are going to come more and more and more rapidly, particularly if you're living in a programmed environment where they're trying to get you to choose more because they make more money the more you choose. I guess that kind of gets back to this idea of, you know, humans and the uniqueness of humans. And it does feel like there's an inhumanity to what we've created and we're humans, but at the same time, we're the humans who created this machine thing, so where does this leave us? We are the humans and we did create our technologies, but the difference between the industrial age and the digital age is industrial age technologies pretty much sat there. And although there were unintended consequences like carbon emissions and slavery and things like that, digital technologies are different, or digital era technologies like computers, nano, robotics and genomics, because they carry on after. It's not like a shovel that you make and sits there. It's a seed that you make and then it tries to stay alive. It replicates. It adjusts itself and self-modifies and finds others. So we're launching things that have something very much like lives of their own. What we're looking at in some sense is a competition between human agency and intelligent agents. It's sort of the old divide was between, you know, Marvin Minsky and artificial intelligence versus like Timothy Leary and intelligence augmentation. These were seen as sort of the two sides of how computer technology was going to be used. And I myself am on the side of intelligence augmentation, rather than if we're not fucking with ourselves too dramatically. I'm more interested in humans getting smarter than just making information more complex by itself, because if we don't go along for the ride, I don't think anyone will be there to see what happened. It's a good apocalyptic note to end on. Thank you so much. Thank you. I have a bit more than one month left before I return to the internet. To be honest, I'm pretty scared. I don't know if I'll be able to deal with it any better than before. It could be present shock all over again, except now I'll just be out of practice. What gives me hope is that smart people like Rushkoff are beginning to diagnose some of these problems. And I think they're even starting to grasp some solutions.