Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (21 page)

The ready availability of anything to anyone removes it from whatever its original context may have been. In the mid-twentieth century, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin wondered about the effects of mechanical reproduction on the work of art. What would it mean that people could see reproductions of paintings in books or listen to music on records without ever beholding the work for real, in their original settings? Would the aura of the originals be lost?

As anyone who grew up in the twentieth century knows, however, to discover and learn about a counterculture or art movement still involved a journey. Only certain used-record stores and bookshops may carry the genre in question, and even knowing what to look for required mentorship from those who went before. And getting that help meant proving oneself worthy of time and tutelage. Beat poetry, psychedelic literature, Japanese pop music, and John Cage recordings weren’t available via a single Google search. Accumulating knowledge and content took time, and that time was a good and necessary part of the experience. It didn’t simply make these nooks and crannies of culture more elitist; it helped keep them more like tide pools than oceans. Their stillness and relative obscurity helped these genres grow into unique cultures.

When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense. In the short forever, there is no time to prepare and anticipate. No wonder people hang on to the musical styles and fashions of their youth. Finding them took a kind of time—a particular windup—that is unavailable to cultural explorers today.

It is also unavailable to the cultural creators. No sooner is a new culture born than it is discovered by trend-setting
Vice
magazine; covered by the
New York Times
Style section; broadcast on MTV; and given a book, record, or movie deal. There is no time for an artist or scene to develop unless those involved take extreme measures to isolate themselves and avoid being noticed. As a result, there is no time to develop the layers and experiences required for a genre to evolve.

As a substitute for this process, temporal compression takes the form of mashup. Originally just a way of describing how a deejay may overlay the vocal track of one recording onto the instrumental track of another, mashup now refers to any composition or process that mashes up previously distinct works into something new. Mashup is to culture as genetic engineering is to biological evolution. Instead of waiting to see how genres merge and interact as cultures over time, the artist cuts and pastes the cultural strains together.

A lot of it is tremendous fun—such as a YouTube video that mashes up Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” with Boston’s “More Than a Feeling,”
¹⁴
demonstrating how the two songs are nearly identical. But a lot of mashup is also serious, thought-out art.
The Grey Album
, released by Danger Mouse in 2004, mashes up an a cappella version of rapper Jay-Z’s
Black Album
with instrumentals from the Beatles’
White Album.
It not only led to lawsuits over its use of copyrighted Beatles’ content, but also won the critical attention of the
New Yorker
and Album of the Year from
Entertainment Weekly
. Mashup mix-artist Gregg Gillis’s project Girl Talk has released records that are both commercial and critical hits. The
New York Times
waxes almost reverential: “Girl Talk has created a new kind of hook that encompasses 50 years of the revolving trends of pop music. Sometimes cynicism is a hook, sometimes the hook is humor, angst, irony, aggression, sex or sincerity. Girl Talk’s music asserts all these things at once.”
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The Museum of Modern Art in New York regularly features exhibitions and performances by mashup artists, such as DJ Spooky remixing D. W. Griffith’s footage with modern imagery into a new piece called
Rebirth of a Nation
. While mashups may compress time, they do allow for a new sort of commentary, intention, and irony to emerge.

In the twentieth century, cubism responded to the deconstructed processes of the Industrial Age by expressing everything as deconstructed shapes. Artists broke from the tradition of showing something from a particular perspective and instead used multiple points of view in the very same painting. The artist pulled apart objects into planes that would normally be visible only from multiple vantage points. This allowed them to show more than one facet of a person or scene at the same time. While cubism looked at one moment from different perspectives, mashup looks at one perspective from multiple moments. Perhaps best understood as cubism’s twenty-first-century corollary, mashup accomplishes the reverse: instead of sharing one moment from multiple perspectives, it brings multiple moments into a single whole. Twenties jazz, sixties rock, nineties electronica—all occurring simultaneously. Where cubism compresses space, mashup compresses time. Cubism allowed us to be in more than one place at the same time; mashup allows us to be in more than one time at the same place.

Although it may not be as classically structured or emotionally resolved as the artistic works of previous eras, mashup does express the temporal compression almost all of us feel on a daily basis. Fifteen minutes spent on Facebook, for example, mashes together our friendships from elementary school with new requests for future relationships. Everything we have lived, and everyone we have met, is compressed into a virtual now. While grade school relationships used to be left back in childhood, they reemerge for us now—intentionally forgotten memories forcibly shoved back into current awareness. We live all of our ages at once. Nothing can be safely left behind.

For digital memory never forgets. After conducting a simple Google search, US immigration agents at the Canadian border denied entry to Andrew Feldmar, a seventy-year-old college professor, because they found an obscure reference to the fact that he had taken LSD in the 1960s. While that case was sensational enough to make the headlines, this same inability to shed the past from the present affects us all. According to research by Microsoft, 75 percent of human resources departments do online research about their candidates, utilizing search engines, social networking sites, personal blogs, and even photo-sharing sites. Seventy percent of these prospective employers say they have rejected candidates on the basis of their pictures and comments.
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And our own online hygiene may not be enough to spare us the consequences. Did someone else snap a photo of you while you were drunk at her party? Did she upload the picture to Facebook (or did her camera do it automatically, as so many smart phones now do)? Facial-recognition software online can tag the photo with your name if someone doesn’t do that manually. And even if you find out and get it deleted, it is always there in someone’s history or hard drive. Moreover, Facebook pages can be temporarily hibernated, but they cannot be removed.

This ends up favoring the past over the present. Most societies give individuals the opportunity to reinvent themselves over time. We are either forgiven for past mistakes, or they are eventually forgotten. Jewish Talmudic law requires people forgive all trespasses at regular intervals, and even forbids someone from reminding another of an embarrassing moment from his past or childhood. The ancients understood that community could not function if knowing someone for a long time was a social liability instead of a strength. In more recent history, written records would often be expunged after a period of time, a person could move to a new neighborhood and start over, or a bankruptcy cleared after seven years.

Today the new permanence of our most casual interactions—and their inextricability from more formal legal, financial, and professional data about us—turns every transient thought or act into an indelible public recording. Our résumés are no longer distinct from our dating histories. It’s not just the line between public and private activity that has vanished, but the distance between now and then. The past is wound up into the present and no longer at an appropriate or even predictable scale. The importance of any given moment is dependent solely on who has found it and what they use it for. Many of the top political science and constitutional law graduates steer clear of politics or even judgeships for fear of the scrutiny that they and their families will be subjected to. Nothing, no matter how temporally remote, is off-limits. A forgotten incident can resurface into the present like an explosion, threatening one’s reputation, job, or marriage.

Our recorded past then competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. In his book
Delete
, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story of a woman who met up with an old boyfriend and made a date, thinking she might rekindle the relationship—particularly now that so much time had passed since their breakup. But she went ahead and reviewed her old email exchanges with him, archived deep in her trash folder. It brought the painful memories back into the present, and she canceled the date. However she or her former beau may have changed or grown since then—whatever connection had been forged between them when they actually reunited in the real world—was rendered irrelevant in comparison with the past magnified through technology.

Even our Facebook identities can now be unwound as timelines depicting our previous states on the site—the friends we later unfriended, the silly movies and books in which we were once interested, and the embarrassing things we said and did that we wish would recede into the distance. But in the short forever, nothing recedes. Everything relative is now also relevant.

What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future. Our Facebook profiles and Google accounts become parts of big data sets, where they can be mined for patterns and modeled against those of millions of other users. The computers at companies like the market research firm Acxiom and big data analytics specialists Opera Solutions churn data not simply to learn what we have done, but what we
will
do. Opera is not merely doing analytics, but what they call predictive analytics. As they put it: “We have created Vektor™—a secure and flexible Big Data analytics platform that extracts powerful signals and insights from massive amounts of data flow, and then streams analytically enriched guidance and recommendations directly to the front lines of business operations.”
¹⁷

It doesn’t require smarts, just computing brawn. Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us to pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will be shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They care only about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do. Privacy has nothing to do with a particular fact they may know about you, but things they know about you that you may not even know yourself.

Now that most of us have migrated to the Internet, the number of data points available to big data companies is almost infinite. Every mouse click and navigational pathway, the lengths of our incoming and outgoing emails, the amount of time we spend with more than one window open, and so on, may not give any logical clues about our inner workings, but how they stack up against the same data points of others means everything. Comparing and contrasting all this data, modelers can identify the future sexual orientation of prepubescents, the probability of our requiring fertility treatments, the likelihood of our changing political party affiliations, or even if we’re about to come down with the flu. And with startling accuracy, they are correct.

So it’s not only our past, but our futures that are compressed into the present, as well. We end up in a short forever—a psychic mashup—filled with contradiction and paralyzed by both the weight of an indelible history and the anticipation of a preordained fate.

ACT NOW

Black Friday gets worse every year. The infamous day-after-Thanksgiving sale-a-thon, when stores launch the Christmas shopping season by offering their deepest discounts of the year, seems to get more extreme, more urgent, and more violent each time it comes around. The stakes are high, and not just for the consumers who trample one another—sometimes to death—in order to get through Walmart’s doors the second they open. Equally invested are many market analysts and economists, who now treat Black Friday’s results as reliable indicators of the nation’s financial health.

Fully aware that the Black Friday sales figures will lead the headlines and have a significant impact on the following Monday’s stock indexes, investors look to what’s happening the day
before
Black Friday for a hint of how to be positioned for the actual Black Friday, which is really just a way to be positioned for whatever happens on Christmas. Knowing they are being judged in advance and eager to get a jump on their competitors, retailers edge toward increasingly earlier opening times. While the earliest Black Friday sales used to begin Friday morning at 9 a.m., by the early 2000s they had moved up to 6 a.m. or even 5 a.m. Customers lined up in the cold outside their favorite big-box stores on Thursday night, and local news shows showed up to cover the spectacle.

By 2011 some of the most aggressive stores, such as Target, Best Buy, and Macy’s, decided that they would push the envelope even further and start Black Friday at midnight. Walmart rolled Black Friday all the way back to Thursday evening at 10 p.m. Shoppers showed up, but now they were complaining. Some were upset that they were being required to leave their families during Thanksgiving dinner in order to get a good place on line. Others felt the expanded hours just lengthened the shopping day beyond their endurance levels. Some even seemed aware of their complicity in overworking store clerks, and of how the fun of Black Friday had turned into more work for everyone.