Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (26 page)

WINDING UP

Instead of avoiding all time compression whatsoever, we can use our knowledge of its strengths and weaknesses to our advantage. There are ways to pack time into projects in advance, so that the vast hours or years of preparation unfold in the instant they are needed.

As the first fire-using cave people realized, the natural world is spring-loaded with energy that can be released in the present as heat. A tree is a few hundred years of sun energy, stored in wood. Oil stores still more years of energy, and coal even more. That’s why they’re called
fossil
fuels. We release the densely packed investment of millennia of life in order to power our world right now. In doing so, we deplete the reserves available for the future faster than they can be replenished. We also pollute the future faster than it can be cleaned.

When storage fails, we turn to flow. In the face of fossil fuel’s shortcomings, we are attracted to sustainable and renewable energy resources such as wind and solar. They don’t appear to deplete anything: the sun keeps shining and wind keeps blowing. They don’t leave any residue for our grandchildren to breathe in or clean up. The problem is that they are not truly continuous. The sun goes away at night, and winds are irregular. The answer, again, is to compress and store the energy of one moment to use at another.

This is harder than it seems. The current barrier to renewable energy (other than reluctance to disrupt today’s fossil fuel markets with a free alternative) is our inability to store and distribute energy efficiently. Current battery technology is not only inadequate to the job, it also requires the mining of rare earth metals such as lithium and molybdenum, which are as easy to deplete as oil. We end up weaning our cars off oil only to make them dependent on other even more leveraged and scarce battery materials. The solution lies in our ability to find ways to compress and unwind energy in as close to real time as possible, so that the materials we require for battery storage needn’t be as concentrated as lithium. It also involves learning to spend our energy more frugally than we did in the twentieth century, when we had no idea coal and oil—or that atmosphere—may be in limited supply. Nature stores energy on a very different timescale than human combustion technologies can burn it.

Maybe this is why Prometheus was punished by the gods for bringing fire to mortals. Perhaps the tellers of this myth sensed that fire was unwinding the stored time of the gods—of nature—and unleashing a force beyond human understanding or control. Interestingly, his punishment was a torturous present shock: he was tied to a cliff where an eagle consumed his liver, perpetually.

We humans cannot live entirely in the short forever, however. Building a civilization has meant learning to store time and spring-load things carefully and deliberately. We can do so without angering the gods or destroying our world. Spring-loading doesn’t even have to be an artifact of the fossil record; it can be an entirely intentional and predictable strategy.

Taking their cue from nature, many businesses and organizations have learned to pack time into one phase of their work so that it can spring out like a fully formed pup tent when it is needed. The Shaare Zadek Medical Center employed this strategy to erect an instant set of operating rooms, clinics, and wards in a soccer field in Japan, serving victims of the 2011 tsunami. Although field hospitals have been used by the military for close to a century now, the doctors at Shaare Zadek took this concept to a whole new level by creating ready-to-ship, expandable medical centers that can be air-dropped virtually anywhere. “If you drop our group in the middle of a desert, we can work,” explains one of the hospital’s cardiac surgeons.
³⁸

Shaare Zadek has been working on the process since 1979 but reached public attention after the Haitian earthquake of 2010. The Israeli hospital achieved mythic status, providing earthquake victims with a level of care that wasn’t accessible to them even under normal circumstances, such as modern respirators and properly cross-matched blood transfusions. In Japan, Shaare Zadek was not only the first field hospital on the ground, it was also the most equipped, offering everything from obstetrics to ophthalmology. The field hospital has gone on twelve missions so far, each one serving as a new iteration that compounds upon the previous ones. As a time-management scheme, Shaare Zadek models spring-loading at its best: weeks of physical loading and preparation plus years of experience and learning are all packed into shipping containers that open and expand instantaneously on site, where they can be used in an emergency—when there is no time to spare.

We see new forms of spring-loading occurring across many different sectors of society, particularly as we move into increasingly digital spaces. Joichi Ito, Internet entrepreneur and director of MIT’s Media Lab, for example, believes that the development cycle of new technologies needs to be compressed. The formerly distinct processes of prototyping a product and releasing it onto the net have become the same thing. Arguing for flow over deliberation, Ito explains, “It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something. The product map is now often more complex and more expensive to create than trying to figure it out as you go. The compass has replaced the map.”
³⁹
In other words, instead of researching the market, prototyping a product, testing it, and then building a real version later, the developer compresses these processes into a single flow—planning, building, testing, and releasing simultaneously. It’s the Tao of unwinding the past while winding the future, all in the same present.

Such a strategy depends on a community willing to help. Customers must see themselves as beneficiaries of their own investment in alpha- and beta-level software, competitors must see themselves as participants in the overall value creation unleashed by the project, and the initial developers must trust in their ongoing ability to innovate even after what they have shared is copied by others. It requires some underlying commons for it to work, because only the commons has a stake in the long-term repercussions of our actions. So far, most of us seem incapable of thinking this way.

That’s what is meant by the tragedy of the commons. A bunch of individuals, acting independently and out of self-interest, may deplete a shared resource even though it hurts everyone in the long run. It applies to corporations that externalize costs such as pollution, but it’s what happens when net users illegally download music and movies, expecting others to pick up the tab. It is in each person’s short-term self-interest to steal the music. Only the sucker pays. But when everyone thinks that way, there’s no one left to pay for the musician, and the music stops altogether.

The individualistic act of stealing the music or depleting the resource is a form of compression, robbing from the future to enjoy something in the present at no cost. As long as we live as individuals, the distant future doesn’t really matter so much. The philosophy of the long now would suggest that the only way to see past this immediate, consumer-era self-satisfaction is to look further in the future. Have kids. Once we see that our long-term self-interest is no longer served, we may all, individually, change our behaviors. Even if we are thinking selfishly, prioritizing “me in the long run” isn’t quite so bad as “me right now.”

There’s some good evidence that long-term thinking—even self-interested long-term thinking—pushes people to more collaborative solutions. In Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments, for example, individuals are likely to testify against their accomplices in return for lighter sentences. The game is simple: two people are arrested and separated. If one testifies against his partner and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent one goes to jail for a year. If both remain silent, they both get just one month in jail. If both betray, they each get three months.

So the worst possible outcome for an individual is to stay silent while the partner rats him out. This leads many to seek the safest, seemingly most self-interested way out—betray the opponent. The more times people play the game, however, the more likely they are to choose the more collaborative solution. They realize that they will have to play each other again and again, so it is now in their self-interest to demonstrate that they won’t betray the opponent. The collaborating team gets the shortest total sentence if both stay silent. This sense of cooperation increases the greater the possibility of having to play again. As political scientist Robert Axelrod explains it, once “the shadow of the future”
⁴⁰
lengthens, we have the basis for more durable relationships.

And that’s certainly a step in the right direction. We are no longer content burning the past to pay for the present, because all of a sudden there’s a future to worry about. I didn’t truly start worrying about global warming or the depletion of water until I had a daughter, who by her very existence extended my mental timeline. But the more we ponder the future in this way, the more paralyzed we become by the prospect of the long now—frozen with that plastic bottle over the trash can.

Inconvenient truths tend to create more anxious neurotics than they do enlightened stakeholders. Those most successfully navigating the short forever seem to be the ones who learn to think wider, not longer. We must be able to expand our awareness beyond the zero-sum game of individual self-interest. It’s not the longer time horizon that matters so much to alleviating our present shock as it is our awareness of all the other prisoners in the same dilemma. This is why the commons offers us not only the justification for transcending self-interested behavior but also the means to mitigating the anxiety of the short forever. The greater community becomes the way we bank our time and experience.

Or think of it this way: the individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time. In presentist interactions, such as those conducted through alternative currencies in Greece, the individual can no longer horde value. But the greater community is activated, and more goods and services move between people. The town that had no merchants, restaurants, or service providers now gets them, debt-free. Meanwhile, the community’s experience with each vendor becomes part of its shared, stored, knowledge bank.

In a living community, one’s reputation becomes the purest form of time binding and the easiest way of benefiting from the commons. The number of successful transactions next to your username on eBay is the community’s accumulated experience with you as a seller and buyer, all boiled down into one number. In a network of self-interested individuals, such as the music stealers online, the files may be rated but not the people who uploaded them. They remain anonymous, not just because they are breaking the law, but because they understand that they are violating the commons.

The way to move beyond the paralyzing effects of the short forever is to stop trying to look so far into the individual futures of people or businesses, and instead to become more aware of what connects them to everyone and everything else right now.

FRACTALNOIA

FINDING PATTERNS IN THE FEEDBACK

“E
verything is everything,”
Cheryl declares, as if having solved the puzzle of life. The late-night-radio caller says she finally gets “how it all fits together.”

She is speaking, at least initially, about chemtrails. Cheryl is convinced that the white vapor trails being drawn across the sky by planes actually contain more than jet exhaust. “The patterns have changed. And then when the tsunami hit, it all suddenly made sense. I could see the big picture.”

The picture Cheryl has put together looks something like this: the condensation trails left in the wake of airplanes have been changing over the past decades. They form very particular patterns in the sky, and they do not fade as quickly as they used to. They also appear to contain shiny, rainbowlike particles within them. This is because they are laced with chemicals that eventually shower down upon us all.

Like the thousands of other chemtrail spotters in the United States, Cheryl was mystified and concerned, but could only theorize as to what the chemicals were for. Mind control? Forced sterilization? Experimentation with new germ-warfare techniques? Then, when Japan was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, so soon after that nation had rejected an American-led trade pact, she realized what was going on: the chemtrails are depositing highly conductive particles that allow for better long-distance functioning of the HAARP weather-controlling station in Alaska, run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). As everyone knows, HAARP, the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, isn’t just for researching the ionosphere, but for broadcasting signals that can change the weather, create earthquakes, and manufacture consent for the coming world government.

The host of the program calls her analysis “illuminating” and says he’ll be having a chemtrail expert on very soon to help “tie together all these loose ends, and more.”

Cheryl’s theory of how it all fits together isn’t unique. There are dozens of websites and YouTube videos making similar connections between the weather, military, economy, HAARP, natural disasters, and jet emissions. And they make up just a tiny fraction of the so-called conspiracy theories gaining traction online and in other media, connecting a myriad of loose ends, from 9/11 and Barack Obama’s birthplace to the Bilderberg Group and immunizations.

They matter less for the solutions they come up with or the accusations they make than for the underlying need driving them all: to make sense of the world in the present tense. When there is no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way they are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result; instead, the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once, from so many different sources, that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time. Without the possibility of a throughline we’re left to make sense of things the way a character comes to great recognitions on a postnarrative TV show like
Lost
or
The Wire
: by making connections.

While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which conspiracy theories proliferate, the net is really much more culpable for the way it connects everything to almost everything else. The hypertext link, as we used to call it, allows any fact or idea to become intimately connected with any other. New content online no longer requires new stories or information, just new ways of linking things to other things. Or as the social networks might put it to you, “Jane is now friends with Tom.” The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.

It’s as if we are slowly connecting everyone to everyone else and everything else. Of course, once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We’re back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy. Or as Cheryl put it, “Everything is everything.”

The ease with which we can now draw lines of connectivity between people and things is matched only by our need to find patterns in a world with no enduring story lines. Without time, we can’t understand things in terms of where they came from or where they are going to. We can’t relate to things as having purpose or intention, beginnings or endings. We no longer have career paths, but connections and org charts. We don’t have an economy of investments over time, but an economy of current relationships. We don’t relate to the logic of sequential PowerPoint slides anymore, but to the zoomable canvas of Prezi, a presentation utility in which a single complicated picture is slowly revealed as the sum of many connected parts. We don’t have a history of the world but a map of the world. A data visualization. A story takes time to tell; a picture exists in the static moment.

We can’t create context in time, so we create it through links. This is connected to that. This reminds us of that. This reflects that. The entire universe begins to look holographic, where each piece somehow reflects the whole.

It’s a sensibility we find reinforced by systems theory and chaos math. Fractals (those computer-rendered topologies that were to early cyberculture what paisley was to the 1960s) help us make sense of rough, natural phenomena, everything from clouds and waves to rocks and forests. Unlike traditional, Euclidean mathematics, which has tended to smooth out complexity, reducing it down to oversimplified lines and curves, fractal geometry celebrates the way real objects aren’t really one, two, or three dimensions, but ambiguously in between.

Fractals are really just recursive equations—iterations upon iterations of numbers. But when they are rendered by computers, they churn out beautiful, complex patterns. They can look like a coral reef or a fern or a weather system. What makes fractals so interesting is that they are self-similar. If you zoom in on a shape in the pattern and look at the image at a much higher scale, you find that very same shape reappearing in the details on this new level. Zoom in again and the patterns emerge again.

On the one hand, this makes fractals terrifically orienting: as above, so below. Nature is patterned, which is part of what makes a walk in the woods feel reassuring. The shapes of the branches are reflected in the veins of the leaves and the patterns of the paths between the trunks. The repeating patterns in fractals also seem to convey a logic or at least a pattern underlying the chaos. On the other hand, once you zoom in to a fractal, you have no way of knowing which level you are on. The details at one level of magnification may be the same as on any other. Once you dive in a few levels, you are forever lost. Like a dream within a dream within a dream (as in the movie
Inception
), figuring out which level you are on can be a challenge, or even futile.

Meanwhile, people are busy using fractals to explain any system that has defied other, more reductionist approaches. Since they were successfully applied by IBM’s Benoit Mandlebrot to the problem of seemingly random, intermittent interference on phone lines, fractals have been used to identify underlying patterns in weather systems, computer files, and bacteria cultures. Sometimes fractal enthusiasts go a bit too far, however, using these nonlinear equations to mine for patterns in systems where none exist. Applied to the stock market or to consumer behavior, fractals may tell less about those systems than about the people searching for patterns within them.

There is a dual nature to fractals: They orient us while at the same time challenging our sense of scale and appropriateness. They offer us access to the underlying patterns of complex systems while at the same time tempting us to look for patterns where none exist. This makes them a terrific icon for the sort of pattern recognition associated with present shock—a syndrome we’ll call
fractalnoia
. Like the robots on
Mystery Science Theater 3000
, we engage by relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined. The tsunami makes sense once it is connected to chemtrails, which make sense when they are connected to HAARP.

It’s not just conspiracy theorists drawing fractalnoid connections between things. In a world without time, any and all sense making must occur on the fly. Simultaneity often seems like all we have. That’s why anyone contending with present shock will have a propensity to make connections between things happening in the same moment—as if there had to be an underlying logic. On the business-news channels, video footage of current events or presidential press conferences plays above the digital ticker tape of real-time stock quotes. We can’t help but look to see how the president’s words are influencing the Dow Jones average, as if sentiment on the trading floor really was reacting in live response to the news. Or maybe it is?

In an even more pronounced version of market fractalnoia, online business-news services such as the
Wall Street Journal
’s website or CBS MarketWatch rush to report on and
justify
stock market fluctuations. They strain to connect an upbeat report from the European Central Bank to the morning’s 50-point rise—as if they know there is a connection between the two potentially unrelated events. By the time the story is posted to the Web, stocks are actually lower, and the agencies are hard at work searching for a housing report or consumer index that may explain the new trend, making the news services appear to be chasing their own tails.

This doesn’t mean pattern recognition is futile. It only shows how easy it is to draw connections where there are none, or where the linkage is tenuous at best. Even Marshall McLuhan realized that a world characterized by electronic media would be fraught with chaos and best navigated through pattern recognition. This is not limited to the way we watch media but is experienced in the way we watch and make choices in areas such as business, society, and war.

Rapid churn on the business landscape has become the new status quo, as giants like Kodak fall and upstarts like Facebook become more valuable than oil companies. What will be the next Zynga or Groupon? Surely it won’t be another social-gaming or online-coupon company—but what would be their equivalent in the current moment? How do we connect the dots? On the geopolitical stage, war no longer occurs on battlefields or in relationship to some diplomatic narrative, but as a series of crises, terrorist attacks, or otherwise disproportionate warfare. Where and when will the next attack take place?

The trick is to see the shapes of the patterns rather than the content within them—the medium more than the message. As I have come to understand the cultural swirl, media events tend to matter less for whatever they are purportedly about than for the space they fill. Charlie Sheen did not rise to Twitter popularity merely by being fired from his sitcom and posting outlandish things; he was filling an existential vacuum created in the wake of the Arab Spring story immediately preceding him. In effect our highly mediated culture creates a standing wave; the next suitable celebrity or story that comes along just happens to fill it. Or, as I explained in my book
Media Virus
, the spread of a particular virus depends no more on the code within the virus than it does on the immune response of the culture at large.

However counterintuitive this may seem: sometimes the best way to see where things are going is to take our eyes
off
the ball. We don’t identify the next great investment opportunity by chasing the last one, but by figuring out what sorts of needs that last one was fulfilling, and the one before that. We don’t predict the next suicide bombing by reading the justifications for civil unrest in a foreign-policy journal but by inferring the connections between nodes in the terror network. Like a surfer riding the tide, we learn to look less at the water than at the waves.

In doing so, and as we’ll see in this chapter, we quickly realize that pattern recognition is a shared activity. Just as the three-dimensional world is best perceived through two eyes, a complex map of connections is better understood from more than one perspective at a time. Reinforcing self-similarity on every level, a network of people is better at mapping connections than a lone individual. As author and social critic Steven Johnson would remind us, ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups, or what he calls “liquid networks.”
¹
The coffeehouses of eighteenth-century London spawned the ideas that fueled the Enlightenment, and the Apple computer was less a product of one mind than the collective imagination of the Homebrew Computer Club to which both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak belonged.

The notion of a lone individual churning out ideas in isolated contemplation like Rodin’s Thinker may not be completely untrue, but it has certainly been deemphasized in today’s culture of networked thinking. As we become increasingly linked to others and dependent on making connections in order to make sense, these new understandings of how ideas emerge are both helpful and reassuring. For example, researcher Kevin Dunbar recorded hundreds of hours of video of scientists working in labs. When he analyzed the footage, he saw that the vast majority of breakthroughs did not occur when the scientists were alone staring into their microscopes or poring over data, but rather when they were engaged with one another at weekly lab meetings or over lunch.
²