As for Long Now, I loved reading it and I greatly admire Stewart Brand. But it’s really hard to put the weight of 10,000 years on each moment: it feels less like “long now” and more like “short forever.”
Looking into the distant horizon every time you are left with a piece of plastic for which there is no suitable recycling container makes me feel overwhelmed by history and the future, and does not fit with the temporary liberation of the digital age. So instead, I started looking at how we elicit appropriate behaviors in ourselves and others, and out of the moment?
Education exacerbates the pressure to perform in the present for an indefinite future where the companies you work for don’t really care about you anyway.
RU Syrian: Most (or perhaps all) of the symptoms of current shock are considered pathologies. To what extent is this struggle a result of a competitive economic system and the lack of a social “safety net”?
Douglas Rushkoff: Almost all of it. The initial idea of cyberpunk was that networked computers would allow us to do our work at home, as freelancers, and then transact directly with our peers over networks. Digital technology would create tremendous slack and allow us to apply its asynchronous and decentralized qualities to our own work and lives.
Instead of working for someone – as we have been doing since the dawn of the industrial age – we would free ourselves from the time-is-money rat race and become creators. Then business and marketing caught wind of this and it went from a bottom-up popular renaissance to a top-down financial revolution.
So instead of using digital technology to create more creative time and space for people, we use it to take more time of people. The technologies we developed were much more focused on retaining consumers’ attention, monitoring employees, and keeping people engaged 24/7. Email, for example, is not inherently annoying. He would stay there and wait until we got to him. It’s the people on the other end of the email who have raised their expectations. And we, who have agreed to continue checking, or to be notified every time someone looks for us.
And that’s a primary form of Present Shock: turning these asynchronous stack devices into living appendages in real time.
Editor’s Note: This interview was conducted via email between RU Sirius and Douglas Rushkoff, beginning with a set of questions and a series of follow-ups combined. All questions and answers were then edited for length and flow.
Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90
