#present shock

“It’s like I’m in a meta prison of my own mirrored image all the time” 🪞

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Vimeo called "Present Shock" by Douglas Rushkoff talks about how social media has affected our inner clocks.

Present Shock by Douglas Rushkoff

I first discovered Douglas Rushkoff when he wrote a comic book series called Testament. The book was decent idea-wise, beautiful art-wise, but did not really connect all of the dots. Nonetheless, I read Rushkoff’s articles whenever they appear and grabbed his recent book from 2013 a few years back. His main arguments centers on “presentism.” In other words, how everything has become built on NOW.…

How Growth Became the Enemy Of Prosperity

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Douglas is a professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at CUNY/Queens and author of more than a dozen bestselling books about media, technology, and culture, including Program or Be Programmed, Present Shock, Media Virus, and his latest, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity.(More…)

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Douglas Rushkoff has a thing for zombies. Though I think I understand what he’s saying, I’m not sure I follow his logic. Here’s what I’ve gathered:

We live in a world where we are constantly forced to deal with the present moment- where a notification takes us out of whatever we are doing because everything happens in real time. We don’t have a reprieve from the hustle and constant vigilance of our daily lives. We don’t plan for a greater future because we are too distracted by everything happening. right. now.

Rushkoff says this explains our obsession with apocalyptic scenarios. He thinks that feeling like there’s no “turning off” or ending our culture of constant availability leads people to fantasize about a big, sweeping, dramatic end of times- an apocalypse.

Many people, scientists even, agree that an apocalypse that involves zombies is plausible, if not probable. These people are stocking up and prepping (being a “prepper” is a thing among this crowd) for an apocalypse which will come and free them from the never-ending feedback loop. The same goes for our cultural fascination with zombie narratives (even though I think this fascination has existed since Night of the Living Dead, long before present shock.) If the world is always on, people “ache for a conclusion,” he argues.

Internet culture and the passage of time have a complicated relationship.

If you’re a digital native, and you’ve ever had the overwhelming urge to post a joke, meme, or livetweet an event as soon as possible before someone else thinks of it, you know what I’m talking about.

As things on the internet get older, they lose appeal and value, and the longer something has been on the internet, the less exciting it is. Everyone is after the authenticity of being among the first to discover something. 

It’s my personal opinion that if you’re a good internet citizen, you believe in keeping jokes on the platform they originate from. There’s nothing worse than one of these:

A tumblr post screencapped and posted on Facebook by one “comedy” Facebook page and then shared by another and then shared by a Facebook friend of mine. I had to spend about 90 seconds scrolling to find an example of this.

For anyone who participates in a content creation platform like Tumblr or Reddit or (dare I say) 4Chan, seeing recycled jokes on another platform weeks, months, or years later makes you cynical about certain platforms like Facebook. A piece of this is that those original platforms feel like a community with many inside jokes, and letting other people who don’t “belong” to those communities in on the jokes feels like cheating. Another point is that different social channels have rules and formats to what they post and cross-platform posting takes those posts out of context.