Rushkoff describes five different kinds of present shock-- Narrative Collapse, Digiphrenia, Overwinding, Fractalnoia and Apocalypto. He argues that story has changed, from a linear sequence to more like a video game, with a world, but no ending.

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Here is a link to the audio podcast.

Thanks to Don Caldarazzo for doing the transcript.

Rob Kall: And welcome to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com. My guest tonight is Douglas Rushkoff. Douglas is the author of ten books. The one we're going to talk about is Present Shock. Welcome to the show!

Douglas Rushkoff Hi! Good to be with you.

Rob Kall: Yeah. You know, I looked at the title, and it grabbed me because I love Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, written - what, 40 years ago? Something like that?

Douglas Rushkoff Mm hmm.

Rob Kall: And then I started reading it, and this book grabbed me over and over again, in so many different ways. You've written a really good, exciting, fascinating, smart book here that I think will be very valuable for anybody who is interested in the Web. What really grabbed me is, a lot of the topics that you're discussing are things I've worked with for a long time.

But let's get started here by getting a definition. What is "Present Shock?"

Douglas Rushkoff I guess Present Shock is "The human reaction to living in a world in which everything happens now." It's a real time, always on existence, without a sense of an origin, or goals, without a past or a a future. There's really just this moment. And when you don't have those kinds of time-lines (or even the social rhythms that used to ground us temporally), you can end up in what I'm calling "Present Shock," or "A state of temporal disarray."

Rob Kall: OK. You say in your book that "If the end of the 20^th century can be characterized by futurism, the 21st can be defined by Presentism." So you've got Present Shock; what is "Presentism?"

Douglas Rushkoff Well, it's the same as - Futurism is to Future Shock as Presentism is to Present Shock. Presentism would be "The notion that we're no longer leaning towards the future, we're no longer in an Industrial Age Culture obsessed with progress, and growth, and futures." We're not leaning into the 21^st century from the end of the 20^th, living in all those 1990s with every long tail, and long boom, and next-big-things, but actually, we've arrived. We're here. This is no longer a culture that's obsessed with where we're going; we're more interested in keeping what we have with sustainability - and the now - then we are with growth and the future.

Rob Kall: But you describe that, in a lot of ways, as a liability: you say, "We tend to exist in a distracted present where forces on the periphery are magnified, and those immediately before us are ignored. Our ability to create a plan (much less follow through on it) is undermined by our need to be able to improvise our way through any number of external impacts that stand to derail us at any moment."

Douglas Rushkoff Right. That's because we're in Present Shock, not in Presentism. (chuckles) We're not really embracing the actual "present" of other people; we're not embracing the social reality. We're not aware of what phase of the moon we're in, or whether it's even day or night. We're just in an always-on continuum. So when we're chasing the "now" of Twitter, or chasing the now on our smartphones, rather than the now that we're actually in -- yeah. We end up in this state of perpetual distraction, or perpetual emergency interruption, where you can't follow through on anything.

Rob Kall: And you describe how what we're doing with our brains is, instead of using our pre-frontal [cortices] (the smart part of our brains), you say, "They push us toward acting in what is thought of as an instinctual, reptilian fashion."

Douglas Rushkoff Well right. You know, they're spending billions of dollars hiring the smartest kids out of Stanford to figure out how to get us to stay glued to our smartphones. They're not looking at "How can we help people improve their human relationships?" That's not what their shareholders want. That's not what anyone wants. What they're there to do is to figure out how to get us to impulsively and [instinctively] keep checking our phones for more emails, and potentially seeing more ads and more updates; to really stay in something very much like an addicted state with our interfaces, rather than an adaptive, or even (at best) a constructive state.

Rob Kall: What I really see this book as being about is you suggesting that we take a step back from what we're doing and how we're doing it; take a deep breath. You finish your intro saying, "When things begin accelerating wildly out of control, sometimes patience is the only answer. Press pause. We have time for this." And I spoke slowly because I think that's an important part of it. It's so easy to just rush along and talk fast, and that's part of the symptoms with what we're dealing with here.

Douglas Rushkoff Yes. The beauty of digital technology is that you can pause! That's why when the Net first came around, I thought we were all going to get so much more time, because the email didn't send you running around your apartment the way a ringing phone did. I always used to wonder what my dog thought when I would get up to answer the phone: "Is that my master ringing that bell?" When email came around it was like, "Oh my gosh! This stuff is just going to sit around and wait until I get to it."

I was from the Slacker Generation, so this was a slacker's paradise. Plus, you had all the time in the world to come up with a brilliant answer. Whether you're participating in a bulletin board that you're going to look at, download, and answer in your own time when you're offline, and then upload your answer - you sounded brilliant! It was part of the joy - that everyone sounded as smart as Christopher Hitchens! But now, when you strap these devices to yourself and try to answer in real time to everything as it comes in, people don't sound smarter online they do in real life. They sound a whole lot dumber.

But the bias of digital technology is towards pausing, towards waiting, towards doing things in an asynchronous fashion in your own time. But instead, what we've done is tried to optimize human beings for the digital, rather than optimizing the digital for people; and that ends up leaving us just racing to get to the next [thing?].

Rob Kall: Now you've identified five different kinds of present shock, or symptoms of it. Could you quickly list through what they are?

Douglas Rushkoff Yeah. The first one, I use the one that most of us see most. I call it "Narrative Collapse"; and that's really just the idea that, if you're living in a world without time, then there's no time for stories. Right? There's no beginning, middle, and end; there's just these ongoing stories, which is both good and bad.

The second phenomenon I look at is called "Digiphrenia." It's "The impact of digital technology on our sense of continuity"; and it's really just that digital technology invites us to be in more than one place at the same time. There's your "Facebook you," and your "Google you," and your "Twitter you," and they're all operating simultaneously; and things are happening in those places right now as we speak, or as our audience listens. But who knows? You can come back and there could be a storm over there.

Another one is called "Overwinding," which is "Trying to compress too much time into each little moment." It's what happens when a stock trader is trying to trade on a derivative of derivative of a derivative, which isn't really an investment anymore. They aren't investing in the future, they're trying to invest in the trade and shove as may algorithms as they can on the head of a temporal pin.

There's another one called "Fractalnoia," which is "The paranoia that results from trying to make sense of things in the present when you have no story, when you have no cause and effect, when all you have is this instantaneous feedback loop, but you're still trying to look at it and say, 'How does this make sense?'" You tend to do it by drawing connections between things. And rather than drawing patterns and inferences, you just draw lines; and we try to make sense, and it ends up in paranoia or conspiracy theory.

And finally, I look at one I call "Apocalypto," which is, "In a world that's in the present, we ache for conclusion. We'd rather things to end bad than not conclude at all." So we live in this culture where we almost wish for a zombie apocalypse, because it would be simpler than living in this steady-state panic that we're in right now.

Rob Kall: OK. So let's dive in a little bit to each of these and discuss them. Your first one is about narrative collapse; and you say in here, that "People have stopped looking to the future and are looking at the present." Explain that, and how that leads to narrative collapse.

Douglas Rushkoff Well, in the 20^th Century (for example), we organized movements by having goals. You know, Martin Luther King would have a dream, and then we would follow the charismatic leader: you know, march down Broadway arm in arm. Declare our goal, and then strive towards it. We keep pour eye on the prize, and the ends justify the means. Race to whatever it is. Stick a man on the moon, and stick the flag in, and declare that we've won. The war against Communism and the Russians: "We're going to fight this weird.." - well, it was a Cold War, which is pretty Presentist, actually. But it still had the goal of eradicating the world of Communism, and we'd know when we won.

The world doesn't really work that way anymore. Even our entertainment doesn't work that way. Kids started to play -- when I was a kid we were playing fantasy role-playing games, which worked very differently than these "winner-take-all, win-or-lose" battles. You're not playing a fantasy role-playing game in order to win, you're playing it in order to keep the game going.

So I feel that, in a lot of areas - both culturally, as we move from movies with beginnings, middles, and ends, to things more like The Simpsons, that just go on, and the audience reward has more to do with making connections than it does to getting to the end,

- or [with] movements like Occupy, which were much less about stated goals or demands (that's part of what was so confounding about them!), and much more so about process: "How are we going to reach consensus?" This is more a way of modeling a society than it is reaching a very particular win,

- to video games, which, as a central form of entertainment, have a whole lot less to do with winning than they do with playing. Certainly [in] the social games (like World of Warcraft our any of these multi-player universes), you're playing it as a way of connecting to other people and living out a story rather than getting to the end.

Rob Kall: How does this apply to the American Dream, to Democracy, to activism and the protest movement?

Douglas Rushkoff Well certainly we saw it in Occupy most clearly. On all the extremes you see where this is edging in. So on the one hand, you had the Tea Party movement - which is a present-shocked movement for sure, in that they want what they want now! It's not a patient, long struggle to something. It's, "Well, lets just shrink government. Let's just do this! We're impatient. We just want this now!" The "Terrible Twos" reaction to politics being too slow. And then on Ocuupy's side you get the opposite extreme; which is saying, "Look. None of these narratives -- they're not just slow, but we'll never get there! It's so goal-oriented that it's denying what's happening in the present moment; so we're going to forget about those demands and those over-arching goals, and instead focus on, 'What is our behavior? How can we adopt a new normative behavior that changes the world?'"

Rob Kall: Now, what you're saying in this chapter is that for thousands of years, storytelling was the way that people ordered and structured their way of seeing the world - and that's changed now.

Douglas Rushkoff Well, yeah. I mean, the Bible's actually different. But since, certainly, the ancient Greeks: the Aristotelian Arc that Aristotle discovered (or pointed out) as happening in Greek Tragedy. This idea of, "We follow a character from a begging, through a middle, to an end. We watch someone else make a series of choices that put them into danger, and bring us up the inclined plane of anxiety; and so this character makes the critical choice that saves the day, or changes the world, and then we get to sleep. Then we get that denouement, and conclusion, and sleep. It's this male orgasm-curved shape of narrative that has really driven our culture and our society since then. It's campaigns, it's moon shots, it's team sports; it's "Crisis, Climax, Sleep," which is /

Rob Kall: (interjecting) Talk about team sports! That was a fascinating part of your book. If somebody is into sports, your analysis of how sports are changing is fascinating. Talk a little bit about that. Why is it that individual sports like snowboarding or skateboarding are coming up, while baseball and football are dropping?

Douglas Rushkoff Well, extreme sports are to team sports how video games are to novels. Right? Instead of joining a team, and going on a battlefield, and fighting a polarized enemy (right? which is what football is, right? it's a battlefield simulation), instead of doing that and obeying these rules, kids are - you get your own skateboard or snowboard, and your sport is freestyle, your sport is self-directed. It's not even a spectator sport: it's an individual sport. It's much more open-ended. The early snowboarders actually refused to go the Olympics or make it an Olympic sport, because they didn't want to regiment this freestyle expression in a set of top down rules. They wanted it to be more of a bottom up, human, personal expression.

Rob Kall: Now, can you tie the sports to this change in the narrative pattern?

Douglas Rushkoff Well, sure! Traditional sports are actually tinkered with every year or two; you know, you change the rules in basketball or football to try to make the climax better: "How are we going to keep the game close to the end? How are we going to keep it fast moving?" They're looking to bring it up -- because ideally, what you get is this, "It's the last five minutes that everyone just has to watch," rather than "A game that people are tuning out as it's going along." So it's the same as a story, or writing a play, or writing a movie: you've got to have a "get." At least in the majority of games, you want it to move up to that.

A two hour sports game really is a narrative: it's a narrative of two opposing armies coming to the field of the court to have it out. Even boxing is that: it's dramatic in the classic sense of the word. Whereas, freestyle sports - the extreme sports like snowboarding, or skateboarding, or surfing (which is the original one) - they don't quite have that same, "We're going to go and do this thing a win!" There's more of a Zen to it. The pure surfer is just trying to stay in the wave as long as possible; stay in the tube or on the wave. And we're looking at his style: how is he doing it? What makes a champion surfer? It's not that he's beaten some other guy, even with the /

Rob Kall: (interjecting) And this is where you come with this idea that stories which are linear (that have a beginning, and middle, and ending, that have a protagonist who faces challenges and overcomes them) - that's changed, you're saying; so that now what we have is somebody living in the present. Can you talk a little bit more about where you see things moving away from this narrative approach that has been the way humans have functioned for as long as there has been history and before?

Douglas Rushkoff It isn't as long as there's been history and before. I think that storytelling has changed. If you look at the narrative style of the Bible, it's really different. This really [isn't] the same "Crisis, Climax, Recognition." It works differently; you almost need to be able to tie together whether it's Old Testament and New Testament, or you need to be able to tie together a story in Genesis with a Law in Numbers to see how it really works, how it ties together. It's almost a more hypertext style narrative happening there.

But, yeah; certainly for a couple of thousand years, though, we've watched characters go through things. They go through stories that have really already happened. Most stories are told in the past tense: "Then he did this, then he did that, then he did this.." And you listen, and you know that something big is going to happen; and he's going to make a decision; and he'll either get hoisted on his petard (he'll get his comeuppance), or he'll vanquish whatever his obstacle or enemy is.

And the Presentist narrative style (not that it's completely new; we've always had them with us, but they haven't been the dominant form) is something more like a video game: where, instead of watching somebody else go through a story that's already happened, you are making the decisions in real-time that bring us through the story. You're bringing yourself through that story: making choices rather than watching someone else's choices.

So there's much less predetermined about it. It's not about a story conforming to the tragic flaw, the preexisting tragic flaw of the hero. It's much more about, "Where do I want to go with this? Where am I going to bring this thing?" In some of these worlds you actually go, you make friends, and then you can walk around with them, you can decide on going on adventures. It's much more like the open-ended style of play that you had when you were a kid than it is like some kind of a board game.

Rob Kall: And what's interesting is, the game business is now bigger than the movie business; in terms of the entertainment world, it's much bigger. But I wonder: if somebody is a writer, and they're writing fiction, writing novels, is there advice that you could give them based on this Presentist narrative style, that would help them in their writing to create the kind of story that would work better for people who are becoming accustomed to Presentist narrative style?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah. There's people who are doing it, from [unintelligible] Smith to Jonathan Lethem. You know (it's kind of funny) Michiko Kakutani and the Times might call it "Post-Modern Pyrotechnics," that it's substituting for bad storytelling. But I would argue that this is good storytelling, this is the new storytelling; it's much more fractal in nature. So instead of it being a story that has a beginning, middle, and end, it's a story that your narrative is more connective and cumulative, that you're moving through a world that things open. The positive neurochemicals that get released as you read this story have to do with making connections, with drawing patterns, with making discoveries. It might feel more like a Super Mario World than a traditional novel.

We see this on TV even, on a show like Game of Thrones. [In] Game of Thrones, they pan over the map at the opening as if you're going over the map of a fantasy role-playing game. And each of these characters has good things and bad things, there's no real protagonist -- at least not yet. There's all these different characters, each moving through this world, playing literally "The Game of Thrones." We watch it week after week (well, those of us who do), and we're not looking for an ending; you're almost more enjoying the texture of this story, you're enjoying the motivations and the choices of the characters as they make them. And you don't really care if this thing -- I don't really care who wins! I don't want someone to win the throne, I want the game to keep going.

Rob Kall: I know exactly what you're talking about. Even with novels: if you're reading a long novel and you get near the end, you kind of dread the idea that you're going to lose the world that you've been enjoying, immersing yourself in. Interestingly, my kid's twenty-three now, but when he was around eight, he had a class where all the kids in the class had to write a book. And because I've worked with story all these years (I ran a conference for six years called StoryCon, a summit meeting on the art, science, and application of story),I worked with the teacher and I graded/responded to the books. And all the boys, and most of the girls, their story structure was a video game. It was amazing to see that. So even fifteen years ago, this was evolving and emerging then.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yup. We used to just call it bad storytelling. You know? And I don't think we can anymore; I think we have to acknowledge that it's real.

Rob Kall: It's interesting, I guess last year I saw the movie The Avengers, and it got me thinking about how these are top down heroes, and it would be interesting to see if it's possible to write a Joseph Campbell Heroes Journey-type story with bottom up heroes. So I contacted Chris Fogler, who literally wrote the book The Writer's Journey on how to use the Heroes Journey model for screenplays and novels, and we batted that around, and it was really interesting and fun. And I wonder: is there a way to adapt something as powerful as the heroes journey, which is the archetypal, into this current picture that you're creating here -- that makes a lot of sense.

Douglas Rushkoff: I don't think there is. Or, at least: I think it becomes one of many possible journeys. I've never been a big fan of the Heroes Journey, because it feels so -- male. You know? It feels so organized around a very (at least archetypically) masculine perspective on the world; it feels much more about the crisis and climax then it is about renewal. And while I think it's always going to be a possible path, I think that's really just it. If you really want to have a Heroes Journey, then you have to understand that now you are bringing a voluntary audience along this journey, rather than a captive audience along this journey.

Rob Kall: What do you mean voluntary versus captured?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, people now have interactive devices. People can escape your story. People don't have to submit to the storyteller anymore. They have alternatives. If you're living in a world with video games, the only way you're going to get a person to sit down and watch a normal movie from beginning, middle, to end is going to be with their permission. Before, it was the only thing we had, the only thing we could do. Now, because people understand that they could be writing their own stories, or living their own stories, or playing their own stories, they're only going to submit to a storyteller who understands, who acknowledges, that you are surrendering your authority to the author.

Shakespeare understood this. Shakespeare had all the ground-lings at the foot of the stage, and those people, if they didn't like the play, they were going to throw tomatoes at you, and scream and yell, and have sex, and do whatever they want. So he would start his plays, and he would say, "Dear audience, please, please bear with me. I understand that this stage is not really the kingdom, and that these people are not really king and queen, but we're going to try to entertain you, so bear with us." He was basically begging, because he understood he did not have authority over people unless they surrendered it voluntarily.

Rob Kall: And how is that different with a video game?

Douglas Rushkoff: I don't think it is. People can switch it off. With a video game, a kid will either enter the world or not. But I think they would get really mad (because they paid money) if they start going to a world and that world isn't how they expected it to be - or isn't as exciting, or it's too difficult. User attention is the big issue on the internet and in interactive entertainment. You see people going to a site, and they play with something for 30 seconds, and then they're gone. Then the company goes back to Stanford and hires more expensive interface designers, and says, "How do we retain them? How do.."

And they have sciences - things that they call, like, "Captology" - which are about how to make more captive interfaces. That brings the whole war on your attention to entirely new levels. If anything, that just makes it even more incumbent on those of us who are asking for nine, ten hours of people's attention to be humble about it, and to respect that our reader is giving us the gift of his/her time!

Rob Kall: You quote Aristotle, who said, "When the storytelling in a culture goes bad, the result is decadence." Has the storytelling gone bad, and is the result decadence?

Douglas Rushkoff: When the storytelling goes bad, you get Jerry Springer and Reality TV: these places where we can't tell stories anymore, we just watch. Too me, that's decadence, when you have a culture that entertains itself by humiliating people, or getting off on other peoples' pain. It's not the only response; we have that sick reality TV response class of storytelling, but we also have people who are willing to play and experiment with what storytelling can mean in this new landscape. And they'll always get criticized by critics at one point, but then they open up, and they they start experimenting, and you get renewal.

So on the one hand, there's the stuff I don't like; I talk about Forrest Gump as the kind of reaction I don't like, where they're trying to use the technology of movie making to somehow gloss over all of the inconsistencies, and bumps, and discontinuities of post-modern Western culture. We also have the stuff we like - like the Game of Thrones, and Caprica, and Jonathan Lethem, who are experimenting with storytelling without feeling either obligated to conform to traditional storytelling, or just abandoning all quality and values in an effort to get attention by any means necessary.

Rob Kall: You say (a little later in the chapter) that "The new challenge for writers is to generate the sense of captivity as well as the sensations and insights of traditional narrative, but to do so without the luxury of the traditional storyline. So they come up with characters who simply wake up in a situation, and have to figure out who they are, or what the heck is going on around them." Now, that's kind of like what happens in the Heroes Journey; after the character gets the call, and crosses the threshold, and is on the road in their new adventure. So in a way it's a piece of the Heroes Journey; without, maybe, the beginning and the first couple of steps, and maybe without the end.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. And you're not watching some other hero do it. You are the hero.

Rob Kall: Now does this apply when people are posting on blogs, or commenting, or -- how does that fit into when people interact on the internet nowadays? Because you're talking about interaction, you're not just talking about being a passive recipient of information.

DC: Yeah. In some ways the participatory culture of the net (blogging, tweeting) puts us all up in the authors seat. We're all in some ways driving the story, whether it's the fictional story of a Harry Potter fan site, or the non-fiction story of our culture, our Democracy, our brands that are competing. We're all out there talking about this. But sometimes what then we don't acknowledge (or don't realize) is, "Well, what's the platform on which we're doing all this storytelling? Are there certain rules that we've incorporated? Is there stuff that we're acknowledging or not about 'what are the limits?'"

Because if you're going to be Tweeting, say, then you're all accepting, "OK, then this is communication that happens in 140 characters." If you're going to be doing things on Facebook, then you are understanding that the only way to communicate with things or to hear what people want to say is to "Like" them. Right? You can't listen to Mitt Romney or someone you might not like unless you're "Liking" them. So when everyone becomes an author, then the people with true authority over society become those who build the platforms on which all this authoring is taking place.

Rob Kall: Content management creators? Content Management System Creators? As..

Douglas Rushkoff: To some extent, yeah. If you look at the thing as Content Management Systems, or social networks, or whatever they are. Or, most people don't even understand (or aren't aware) that each of us is getting a different internet: that your Google search results are different than mine; the things your Facebook will update you on are different then the things they'd update me on. And that's all driven by algorithms that are trying to help increase our product purchases and our clicks on various sorts of things. So we're ending up -- you're in these spaces that look peer-to-peer, and level, and open, but they're actually highly controlled.

Rob Kall: OK. So - I'm going to leave that. There's so much more in that chapter. It's a very rich chapter; if you're a writer, if you're into the media, it's very valuable. You're next chapter is Digiphrenia, and you talk about "Flowing" there. Another piece of my background is Positive Psychology, and there's a whole body of research on Flow. Is that the flow you're talking about, or are you talking about something else?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah. It's that flow and more; but yeah, flow is the easiest way to say it - you know, the sense of continuity, and movement, and really being in "A now," and how the increased number of choices that we encounter necessarily break our flow. Even if you choose not to answer the call waiting because you want to stay in the phone call you're in, the phone call you're in has still been broken! That flow has been broken by the necessity to make that choice at all.

Rob Kall: I really like that, I like that example. You describe that as perhaps the first time technologically that we experienced that sense of interruption from our more analog connection with people.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. And the experience we had before that, which was difficult but different, was: remember what it would be like to be on the phone with one person when you're kind of expecting a call from someone else? Or where your parents are expecting a call from someone else, like, "Get off the phone because your Grandma is going to call, and she's sick." So you'd have to say, "Oh! I can't talk. I really have to go because ..." It was different, right? That was very Industrial Age. You can only really do one thing at a time, and you've got hurry up with the thing so you can be available for the next thing - as opposed to the more digital sensibility, "Well we can do both. I'm going to be on the phone, but while I'm on the phone with you, I'm actually available to the fact that Grandma might call, and then we're going to have to break this thing" - because we're so willing to be simultaneous.

Rob Kall: And what this chapter describes is how there are so many different ways, now, that we are disrupted, and distracted, and interrupted, and it really changes just the way that we go through the day, and produces a shallower way to commit to the present, really.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. And that's hard - which is why, now (oddly enough) it takes discipline to commit to the present. It takes discipline to say, "Look: I'm really not going to answer my phone at all." We use work as an excuse: "Oh, you're in a meeting, so you've really got to do this thing." Certain things you can use as excuses, but the kinds of things we should be able to use as excuses, like "I'm playing Lego with my daughter." You know? That's sacred space, baby! I'm not going to answer my thing, I'm not going to worry, I'm not going to try to check my Twitter Feed out of the corner of my eye while I'm doing that, because it's going to hurt both. You know? It's going to reduce the quality of both of those things.

But we feel compelled to check; we feel compelled to be in more than one place at the same time, to keep more than one persona active in the now. That almost always either gets us in logistical trouble - where, like me, we schedule ourselves to be in more than one place at a time. I let my Google calendar run my day, and I've ended up where, because Skype wouldn't connect me to that phone number for ten minutes, now we're ten minutes behind, I don't know if this next person is going to be standing waiting for me somewhere, and then I'd dump the one after that, so it's like, "What have I done?" If I didn't have a Google Calendar to go down to this granularity - you don't schedule your day with no minutes in between! You just don't live quite that fast.

Rob Kall: It seems to me that what this leads to is a change in our values.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yes, definitely. We tend to undervalue our flesh and blood reality, you know? We tend to devalue the human experience, we tend to devalue night and day; we tend to devalue the seasons. And we treat time as somehow generic, because it's all interchangeable. We should have learned that that doesn't work in the industrial age, when we understood jet lag, or we understood that cancer rates of shift workers are higher than those of people who just get to work during the day. Because we do what we have clocks in us; we have an organic, a natural human relationship to the passage of time that just is not recognized in a digital landscape.

Rob Kall: This is the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township, reaching metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by Opednews.com. My guest tonight is Douglas Rushkoff. He is one of the Digerati. Has has written ten books about how our technology is changing us. His current and newest one that just come out is called Present Shock, and we've been discussing how it's is a description of how we've been changed. You say, Douglas, in your chapter on Digiphrenia, "If we could only catch up with the wave of information we feel, we would at least be in the Now. This is a false goal. For not only have our devices outpaced us, they don't even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense."

Douglas Rushkoff: Right. (laughs) You said it, and all I can really do is re-iterate. We are living (many of us anyway) in a state of constant distraction, and most importantly, it robs us of our social reality. You walk into a room where there's ten people logged in on their devices, and there's no group cohesion, there's not sense of a genuine social network between those people. The social networks that they do have are these highly mediated corporate social networks that they join and that limit their range of interaction to that which is favorable to the brand managers who are paying for that place to begin with.

When you deny yourself your genuine organic social reality, you lose your social power - and your political power. We lose our home-field advantage against all of the abstractions that have attempted to repress humanity since the beginning of institutions! So I'm really calling for people not to abandon digital technology at all, but to make their digital technologies conform to their real lives rather than the other way around. To optimize technology to humans rather than optimizing humans to technology.

Rob Kall: Now, you talk about clocks a lot. You talk about the development of the technology of clocks, and you talk about biological clocks. You say, "The body is based on hundreds, perhaps thousands of different clocks - all listening to, and relating to, and synching with everyone and everyone else's." Talk a little bit more about that aspect of time and clocks, and how that applies to the book.

Douglas Rushkoff: Well, the Greeks had two words for time: one of them was kronos, which is "Time on the clock; chronology." That's one's pretty easy, right? "It's 5:15." The other word for time they had was kairos, And kairos means "Timing" - like, "Readiness." It has nothing to do with the clock, and everything to do with, "Is this a propitious moment for something?" So time is, "What time did you crash the car?"

"4:01."

Timing is, "What time are you going to tell dad you crashed the car?"

It's not "4:16." It doesn't matter what time on the clock. You're going to tell dad you crashed his car after he's had his drink, but before he's opened the bills. It's a sense of timing that's human; and it's not defined abstractly, but through events and how we move.

The more I researched about time, the more I found out that human beings have been in one way or another denying timing, or controlling timing, or repressing human timing. Whether it's trying to shove people into the calendar systems of 1000 B.C. when we got text, or manuscript - writing, really - and we were able to write down time and contracts. Or when we got the clock, and we were able to start a "Time is money" society, where people worked hours instead of working to create value. Or now, in a digital society where we have digital clocks, that make every moment equivalent. They're all different forms of kronos that take us out of kairos.

What I'm trying to do is to say that digital technology may be the first one that's uniquely poised to reintroduce us to kairos, because it's programmable; because we can program our devices to conform to human time, we can begin to rediscover all of the aspects of time that modernity and industrialization has hidden from us, or obscured from us. The one I've been playing with lately is the Lunar cycle. New neurochemistry and research is pointing to the possibility that the neurochemicals in our brains change over the course of a lunar cycle. Just as a woman already knows about a lunar cycle - definitely there is a biological reality to the lunar cycle. Just as it changes the tides, it tends to change our neurochemistry.

If we start looking at the four weeks of a lunar cycle, it seems that four different neurotransmitters tend to dominate our brain chemistry over the different four weeks of the cycle. So, the first week of the lunar cycle we're dominated by acetylcholine, where we're more willing to make friends and open ourselves to new ideas. In the second week we're in serotonin, which is great for getting a lot of work done and being very industrious. In the third week we're in the dopamine phase, where we now want to party, and relax, and thrill seek, and do our extreme spots. Then in the fourth phase we move into more of a norepinephrine-dominated state, where we do a lot of systems thinking; for me, it's good for organizing the chapters of a book, or it's good for drawing up a constitution, or doing structural analysis, sort of /

Rob Kall: (interjecting) And you said in your book, using this, and adopting this idea (which I think is described by Dr. [unknown name]) [has] actually increased your effectiveness about 40%. That was incredible!

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah my word count is -- I wrote less days, but my total word count went up. I think what writers have to do is realize there is no such thing as writer's block - there's just the wrong time to write! If you can accept that - that if you're not writing, it's because your supposed to be doing something else. Maybe you're supposed to be researching, or experiencing, or germinating, or thinking, or something else. Usually it's because you're forcing it. Right? You're out of synch. And yeah, you can push through; you can take a Dexedrine or Adderall, and usually blast right through that writer's block. Because what does speed do? Speed breaks through time! (laughs) Right? It takes you out of time, it creates an artificial acceleration. Burt eventually, unless you're using it on special occasions, it catches up with you.

Rob Kall: OK. I'm going to jump ahead, because we only have so much time left, and I'm really interested in "Fractalnoia." In Fractalnoia, you talk about fractals and how the fractal way of perceiving connections and multiple layers helps people find patterns where they connect to other things, and that leads to conspiracy theory. Can you talk about Fractalnoia and conspiracy theory?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah. It's funny - I was listening to a late night radio show, one of those great conspiracy shows about aliens and all that stuff. And this woman called in, and she was talking about the nuclear power plants in Japan - you know, when the Tsunami came and flooded them, and then they had the fires, and blew up - and she was saying that she figured out how it all fit together. Right? The Japanese hadn't signed a certain trade agreement, and Obama was angry at them for that, so they used the HAARP station (it's this communications experiment going on in Alaska that's shrouded in mystery) to change the weather and create the tsunami, because these chem-trails that come out of the back of airplanes that allow them to conduct electricity better in the atmosphere, and then control the weather in this way - and that's where these hurricanes have been coming from, and..

And it was just bizarre! And I realized she was trying to make sense of the world, of all these different pieces of the story - that are all out there, but she was doing it in the present tense! She was doing it by trying to draw lines between things. When you have a cause and effect, when you have linear time, you can understand things through stories, through the kind of narratives that we were talking about. Not constructed narratives, but "This led to that, led to this, led to that." There's enough time in the feedback loops of a regular culture to really parse the cause and effect. "This led to that, and that led to this!" When things are happening instantaneous[ly] in an instantaneous feedback loop, you can't move that way anymore. You can't understand things through a story, you have to understand things through the "snapshot." You see things as a still life, and you end up just drawing pictures, drawing lines between those things.

Rob Kall: And it's the connections, you're saying, that are proliferating so much.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right.

Rob Kall: You say in this chapter, "While we may blame the internet with the ease that conspiracy theories proliferate, the web is 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." And I have to say: I'm struggling with this now.

I run a website, Opednews, and we get people wanting to submit conspiracy theory-kinds of ideas, the latest being that every new violent event that occurs in America is a "False Flag," which is what Alex Jones has been claiming, that "The government did it." And we're trying to come up with some answers, but how do you figure out what is a conspiracy theory and what is something that needs to be seriously looked at? Although -- and that's a challenge. So how do you - talk about this "Connection" situation. Do you have any ideas for us on how to address this?

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah. I think the reality of it is, we're moving into an increasingly decentralized and chaotic cultural landscape where things are going to come from all sides at once. It's not like you can kill the head of al Qaeda and stop terrorist bombings. It's more of a viral, decentralized, memetic, bottom up thing. It doesn't mean that it's random; it just means that you can't understand it as, "Oh. This bad guy did this thing, which led to that thing, which led to this!"

For folks like the conspiracy theorists out there, it's more comforting to them. It's comforting to believe that Obama or the government was somehow behind these things, than that they just happen. You know, that we're living in a world where this can pop up anywhere. That you're not safe, that you don't know who the enemy is, because there is no enemy; the enemy is within, the enemy is everywhere.

Rob Kall: Well put. Now what they would say, because I've been involved in these conversations is, "Well wait a minute. There's evidence here. This weapon was in the wrong place, and this photograph showed this,. And hey! That guy his uncle's cousin was connected to the CIA." How do you explain, how do you answer that without saying, "Oh it's just that you're more comfortable that way," which they'll take as an insult?

Douglas Rushkoff: "I'm sorry. Everything is connected to everyone. Everything is connected to everyone. If I blew something up, you could make all the same connections. You'd find it. You'd find it. You'd find out, "Oh, the person's on Prozac, that means what?" It doesn't mean it's not true, it just means it's not intentional or causative. Prozac is a coercive agent. Right. Prozac does it asks people to conform to a depressing and exploitative reality rather than take charge of it. "If you don't like your society, if it's depressing you, than take this drug. Right? Because you're the problem." It doesn't mean that people making Prozac have been hired by the government to come up with a system of social control, it means that the marketplace itself is a character in this thing. It's not human, it's not intentional, it's not alive; but the market places a certain inertia, and it will come up with things that help a market culture contain itself over time.

Rob Kall: So in a sense what you're saying is, along the lines of say, Clay Shirkey, and how it's a filter problem.

Douglas Rushkoff: In some ways, yeah. I don't really believe in it as a filter failure so much as that people are trying to draw lines between things rather than recognize patterns. Or they start to recognize patterns but they can't stop. You know? Pattern recognition, I think we've got to close on this, but pattern recognition is the skill that Marshall McLuhan said would be the most important thing in an electronic age. And in our Digital Age (which really goes beyond Electronic Age), it is the most important thing to be able to recognize patterns but not to get ruled by them. To see them as rhythms, to see them as hints, as clues, but not to get so locked down, not to need them to be so absolutely true.

Rob Kall: Well where you go with this is that this idea that fractal patterns that are coalescing on the internet - that it seems like they're creating the connections, but that the idea is to look with other people at them, to get to the -- and if there's -- you mention the comments.

Douglas Rushkoff: Right.

Rob Kall: I don't know if it was in this chapter, but you talk about the commons, and the commons to me is very important, that's our shared resources. How does that tie in with this?

Douglas Rushkoff: Well the idea of a commons was really just that when people try to do this alone, they can really go crazy pretty quickly. When you look at -- it's funny, there used to be a law in Judaism that you have to study Torah with at least nine other people, you have to have a minion. And it's the few times in Jewish History when people were allowed to do it alone that they went crazy, right? They went into weird Messianic worship and [ unintelligible phrase] and crazy, crazy stuff happened. And it's because they didn't have the buffering effect of a network, of other people. If we start to think of both our intellectual and our spiritual heritage as a commons rather than as a personal thing - right, you don't get personally saved, there's no such thing, it's everybody or nobody - than you end up in a much healthier and more buffered journey together.

Rob Kall: So to wrap it up you say, "Art least in a fractal one's relationships matter more than one's accumulated personal knowledge: the shared overtakes the owned. Connections supersede the ego."

Douglas Rushkoff: Right.

Rob Kall: A beautiful idea.

Douglas Rushkoff: That's the shift from the Renaissance to what we're in now. The Renaissance invented the individual: "The Renaissance Man," the individual in relationship to everything else; personal perspective and perspective pain. Everything was objectified. In our age, called The Digital Age, it's about your connections. You only exist insofar as you're connected to other people and things, and you end up in a world where you're much less a solo singer than you are someone who's resonating with that which is around you. It's as much about listening as it is about speaking. You know? Not so people have to pick /

Rob Kall: (interjecting) I've come to believe that we're transitioning from an era of information to an era of connection, and this seems to tie in directly to that.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah. Absolutely. It's all we can hope.

Rob Kall: We've got two or three minutes left. You're last chapter is Apocalypto, and you talk about Preppers and Zombies. Preppers are fascinating. I've been telling my audience recently you've got to watch at least one show - there are TV channels on it now. What's your explanation of the psychology behind Preppers?

Douglas Rushkoff: It's sort of the same thing with this aching for conclusion. Preppers would rather that the world end than that it keep on going! You know, (laughs) it's so much simpler, it's just - a zombie apocalypse is easier to imagine than next year, right? Who knows what's going to happen in the next election. Displayed over Facebook feeds, its gonna - God knows what it's gonna do.

Where the Prepper reality, everything is in it's place, you're in a nice little RV, you know? You can just sit on that hilltop, and have a shotgun, and shoot zombies, who are relatively slow moving. You don't have to answer the cellphone. You don't have to make money. It's just a conclusion. At least all the frenzy goes away, and you get the simplicity that so many people are longing for. And what I'm arguing is we can get that without the zombie apocalypse, we can get that without destroying the world. We can actually /

Rob Kall: (interjecting) Without the singularity.

Douglas Rushkoff: Yeah.

Rob Kall: So I'm going to wrap up with one last question. A few weeks ago I interviewed a Russian dot-com multimillionaire who was investing a fortune in bringing together leading scientists from around the world including Ray Kurweil and Robert Thurman (who's not a scientist, he's a Buddhist monk). But his goal is to develop by the year 2045 a collection of technologies that will enable people to download their being, their consciousness, into a substrate that can be repaired easily and last forever. And my question is, by 2045, will what it is to be human, what it is to be that being of ourselves be very different from who we are now? And will the technology have an effect on what ends up getting downloaded there, if they can do it? (Which they really think they can.)

Douglas Rushkoff: They can't do it, they're crazy.

Rob Kall: (laughs)

Douglas Rushkoff: The whole thing is science fiction. It's not real. It won't happen. They're underestimating what humanity is, and what consciousness is. They've got the medium and the message reversed. There's' no such thing. If we still believe this by the time we get there, we're just program zombies anyway. You cannot upload people; you can only upload zombies, data files. So - I wouldn't worry about it.

Rob Kall: What is the difference between what they think they can upload and what you think can't be uploaded?

Douglas Rushkoff: The same difference between a zombie and person. If they really know that, then they'd be able to do it, but they don't. It's undefinable. It's like saying "What is life? Where is God?" You know?

Rob Kall: OK. Then what is your -- go ahead.

Douglas Rushkoff: The questions are unanswerable. But I'm ready to Present Shock here myself, I've got..

Rob Kall: Yeah, you've got to go, so what's your website, and how can people find out more about you?

Douglas Rushkoff: Just go to Rushkoff.com, or ideally, buy the book Present Shock at any bookstore near you.

Rob Kall: And I strongly recommend it. We barely touched on the ideas in this, and it's a great book. Thank you so much. The Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM, and I've been speaking with Douglas Rushkoff.

Authors Bio:

Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.

Check out his platform at RobKall.com

He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity

He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com

more detailed bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.

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Rob was published regularly on the Huffingtonpost.com for several years.

Rob is, with Opednews.com the first media winner of the Pillar Award for supporting Whistleblowers and the first amendment.

To learn more about Rob and OpEdNews.com, check out A Voice For Truth - ROB KALL | OM Times Magazine and this article.

For Rob's work in non-political realms mostly before 2000, see his C.V.. and here's an article on the Storycon Summit Meeting he founded and organized for eight years.

Press coverage in the Wall Street Journal: Party's Left Pushes for a Seat at the Table

Talk Nation Radio interview by David Swanson: Rob Kall on Bottom-Up Governance June, 2017

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