Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (2 page)

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 Optimistic books with titles like “The Future of This” or “The Future of That” filled the store shelves, eventually superseded by pessimistic ones titled “The End of This” or “The End of That.”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.