Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Read online

  Though technically still in the twentieth century, the year 2000 was a good enough marker to stand in for millennial transformation. So we anticipated the change like messianic cultists preparing for the second coming. For most of us, it took the less religious form of anticipating a Y2K computer bug where systems that had always registered years with just two digits would prove incapable of rolling over to 00. Elevators would stop, planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would cease to cool their reactor cores, and the world as we know it would end.

  Of course, if the changeover didn’t get us, the terrorists would. The events of 9/11 hadn’t even happened yet, but on the evening of December 31, 1999, Americans were already on alert for a violent disruption of the Times Square New Year’s Eve festivities. Seattle had canceled its celebration altogether, in anticipation of an attack. CNN’s coverage circled the globe from one time zone to another as each hit midnight and compared the fireworks spectacle over the Eiffel Tower to the one at the Statue of Liberty. But the more truly spectacular news reported at each stop along the way that night was that nothing spectacular happened at all. Not in Auckland, Hong Kong, Cairo, Vatican City, London, Buenos Aires, or Los Angeles. The planes stayed in the sky (all but three of KLM’s 125-plane fleet had been grounded just in case), and not a single terror incident was reported. It was the anticlimax of the millennium.

  But something did shift that night as we went from years with 19’s to those with 20’s. All the looking forward slowed down. The leaning into the future became more of standing up into the present. People stopped thinking about where things were going and started to consider where things were.

  In the financial world, for example, an investment’s future value began to matter less than its current value. Just ten weeks into the millennium, the major exchanges were peaking with the tech-heavy and future-focused NASDAQ reaching its all-time high, over 5,100 points. Then the markets started down—and have never quite recovered. Although this was blamed on the dot.com bubble, the market’s softening had nothing to do with digital technologies actually working (or not) and everything to do with a larger societal shift away from future expectations and instead toward current value. When people stop looking to the future, they start looking at the present. Investments begin to matter less for what they might someday be worth, because people are no longer thinking so much about “someday” as they are about today. A stock’s “story”—the rationale for why it is going to go up—begins to matter less than its actual value in real time. What are my stocks worth as of this moment? What do I really own? What is the value of my portfolio right now?

  The stock market’s infinite expansion was just one of many stories dependent on our being such a future-focused culture. All the great “isms” of the twentieth century—from capitalism to communism to Protestantism to republicanism to utopianism to messianism—depended on big stories to keep them going. None of them were supposed to be so effective in the short term or the present. They all promised something better in the future for having suffered through something not so great today. (Or at least they offered something better today than whatever pain and suffering supposedly went on back in the day.) The ends justified the means. Today’s war was tomorrow’s liberation. Today’s suffering was tomorrow’s salvation. Today’s work was tomorrow’s reward.

  These stories functioned for quite a while. In the United States, in particular, optimism and a focus on the future seemed to define our national character. Immigrants committed to a better tomorrow risked their lives to sail the ocean to settle a wilderness. The New World called for a new story to be written, and that story provided us with the forward momentum required to live for the future. The Protestant work ethic of striving now for a better tomorrow took hold in America more powerfully than elsewhere, in part because of the continent’s ample untapped resources and sense of boundless horizon. While Europe maintained the museums and cultures of the past, America thought of itself as forging the new frontier.

  By the end of World War II, this became quite true. Only, America’s frontier was less about finding new territory to exploit than it was about inventing new technologies, new businesses, and new ideas to keep the economy expanding and the story unfolding. Just as Mormonism continued the ancient story of the Bible into the American present, technologies, from rocket ships to computer chips, would carry the story of America’s manifest destiny into the future. The American Dream, varied though it may have been, was almost universally depending on the same greater shape, the same kind of story to carry us along. We were sustained economically, politically, and even spiritually, by stories.

  Together these stories helped us construct a narrative experience of our lives, our nation, our culture, and our faith. We adopted an entirely storylike way of experiencing and talking about the world. Through the lens of narrative, America isn’t just a place where we live but is a journey of a people through time. Apple isn’t a smart phone manufacturer, but two guys in a garage who had a dream about how creative people may someday gain command over technology. Democracy is not a methodology for governing, but the force that will liberate humanity. Pollution is not an ongoing responsibility of industry, but the impending catastrophic climax of human civilization.

  Storytelling became an acknowledged cultural value in itself. In front of millions of rapt television viewers, mythologist Joseph Campbell taught PBS’s Bill Moyers how stories provide the fundamental architecture for human civilization. These broadcasts on The Power of Myth inspired filmmakers, admen, and management theorists alike to incorporate the tenets of good storytelling into their most basic frameworks. Even brain scientists came to agree that narrativity amounted to an essential component of cognitive organization. As Case Western Reserve University researcher Mark Turner concluded: “Narrative imagining—story—is the fundamental instrument of thought. Rational capacities depend upon it. It is our chief means of looking into the future, of predicting, of planning, and of explaining.”1 Or as science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin observed, “The story—from Rapunzel to War and Peace—is one of the basic tools invented by the human mind, for the purpose of gaining understanding. There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.”2

  Experiencing the world as a series of stories helps create a sense of context. It is comforting and orienting. It helps smooth out obstacles and impediments by recasting them as bumps along the way to some better place—or at least an end to the journey. As long as there’s enough momentum, enough forward pull, and enough dramatic tension, we can suspend our disbelief enough to stay in the story.

  The end of the twentieth century certainly gave us enough momentum, pull, and tension. Maybe too much. Back in the quaint midcentury year of 1965, Mary Poppins was awarded five Oscars, the Grateful Dead played their first concert, and I Dream of Jeannie premiered on NBC. But it was also the year of the first spacewalk, the invention of hypertext, and the first successful use of the human respirator. These events and inventions, and others, were promising so much change, so fast, that Alvin Toffler was motivated to write his seminal essay “The Future as a Way of Life,” in which he coined the term “future shock”:

  We can anticipate volcanic dislocations, twists and reversals, not merely in our social structure, but also in our hierarchy of values and in the way individuals perceive and conceive reality. Such massive changes, coming with increasing velocity, will disorient, bewilder, and crush many people. . . . Even the most educated people today operate on the assumption that society is relatively static. At best they attempt to plan by making simple straight-line projects of present-day trends. The result is unreadiness to meet the future when it arrives. In short, future shock.3

  Toffler believed things were changing so fast that we would soon lose the ability to adapt. New drugs would make us live longer; new medical techniques would allow us to alter our bodies and genetic makeup; new technologies could make work obsolete and comm
unication instantaneous. Like immigrants to a new country experiencing culture shock, we would soon be in a state of future shock, waking up in a world changing so rapidly as to be unrecognizable. Our disorientation would have less to do with any particular change than the rate of change itself.

  So Toffler recommended we all become futurists. He wanted kids to be taught more science fiction in school, as well as for them to take special courses in “how to predict.” The lack of basic predictive skills would for Toffler amount to “a form of functional illiteracy in the contemporary world.”4

  To a great extent this is what happened. We didn’t get futurism classes in elementary school, but we did get an abject lesson in futurism from our popular and business cultures. We all became futurists in one way or another, peering around the corner for the next big thing, and the next one after that. But then we actually got there. Here. Now. We arrived in the future. That’s when the story really fell apart, and we began experiencing our first true symptoms of present shock.

  NARRATIVE COLLAPSE

  Toffler understood how our knowledge of history helps us put the present in perspective. We understand where we are, in part, because we have a story that explains how we got here. We do not have great skill in projecting that narrative ability into the future. As change accelerated, this inability would become a greater liability. The new inventions and phenomena that were popping up all around us just didn’t fit into the stories we were using to understand our circumstances. How does the current story of career and retirement adjust to life spans increasing from the sixties to the one hundreds? How do fertility drugs change the timeline of motherhood, how does email change our conception of the workweek, and how do robots change the story of the relationship of labor to management? Or, in our current frame of reference, how does social networking change the goals of a revolution?

  If we could only get better at imagining scenarios, modeling future realities, and anticipating new trends, thought Toffler, we may be less traumatized by all the change. We would be equipped to imagine new narrative pathways that accommodated all the disruptions.

  Still, while Star Trek may have correctly predicted the advent of cell phones and iPads, there are problems inherent to using science fiction stories to imagine the future. First, sometimes reality moves even faster and less predictably than fiction. While stories must follow certain plot conventions in order to make sense to their audiences, reality is under no such obligation. Stuff just happens, and rarely on schedule. Second, and more significant, stories are usually much less about predicting the future than influencing it. As a medium, stories have proven themselves great as a way of storing information and values, and then passing them on to future generations. Our children demand we tell them stories before they go to bed, so we lace those narratives with the values we want them to take with them into their dreams and their adult lives. Likewise, the stories and myths of our religions and national histories preserve and promote certain values over time. That’s one reason civilizations and their values can persist over centuries.

  The craft of futurism—however well intentioned—almost always comes with an agenda. For those who were already familiar with the Internet, the first issues of Wired magazine seemed glaringly obvious in their underlying purpose to marry the values of the net with those of the free market. The many futurists who emerged in the late 1990s simply couldn’t help but predict futures in which the most important specialists to have around would be—you guessed it—futurists. The stories they came up with were tailor-made for corporations looking for visions of tomorrow that included the perpetuation of corporate power. Futurism became less about predicting the future than pandering to those who sought to maintain an expired past.

  Meanwhile, all this focus on the future did not do much for our ability to contend with the present. As we obsessed over the future of this and the future of that, we ended up robbing the present of its ability to contribute value and meaning. Companies spent more money and energy on scenario planning than on basic competency. They hired consultants (sometimes media theorists, like me) to give them “mile-high views” on their industries. The higher up they could go, they imagined, the farther ahead they could see. One technology company I spoke with was using research and speculation on currency futures to decide where to locate offshore factories. The CFO of another was busy hedging supply costs by betting on commodities futures—with little regard to emerging technologies in his own company that would render the need for such commodities obsolete. Some companies lost millions, or even went out of business, making bets of this sort on the future while their core competencies and innovative capabilities withered.

  As people, businesses, institutions, and nations, we could maintain our story of the future only by wearing increasingly restrictive blinders to block out the present. Business became strategy, career became a route to retirement, and global collaboration became brinksmanship. This all worked as long as we could focus on those charts where everything pointed up. But then the millennium actually came. And then the stock market crashed. And then down came the World Trade Towers, and the story really and truly broke.

  The discontinuity generated by the 9/11 attacks should not be underestimated. While I was writing this very chapter, I met with a recent college graduate who was developing a nonprofit company and website to help create relationships between “millennials” of her generation and more aged mentors of my own. She explained that her generation was idealistic enough to want to help fix the world, but that they had been “traumatized by 9/11 and now we’re incapable of accessing the greater human projects.” Somehow, she felt, the tragedy had disconnected her generation from a sense of history and purpose, and that they “needed to connect with people from before that break in the story in order to get back on track.”

  This was also the generation who used their first access to the polls to vote for Obama. She and her friends had supported his campaign and responded to his explicitly postnarrative refrain, borrowed from Alice Walker’s book title: “We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change we seek.” What a call to presentism this was! Young people took Obama at his word, rising to the challenge to become change rather than wait for it. Of course, it turned out to be more of a campaign slogan than an invitation to civic participation—just more rhetoric for a quite-storybook, ends-justify-the-means push to power. It would be left to the Occupy movement to attempt a genuinely presentist approach to social and political change. But Obama’s speechwriters had at least identified the shift under way, the failure of stories to create a greater sense of continuity, and the growing sense that something much more immediate and relevant needed to take their place.

  BIG STORIES

  Traditional stories, with traditional, linear arcs, have been around for a long time because they work. They seem to imitate the shape of real life, from birth to death. Like a breath or lovemaking, these sorts of stories have a rise and a satisfying fall; a beginning, a middle, and an end. While it seems quite natural to us today, this familiar shape didn’t become the default structure of stories until pretty late in human history, after the invention of text and scrolls, in literate cultures such as ancient Greece.

  The Bible’s stories—at least the Old Testament’s—don’t work quite the same way. They were based more in the oral tradition, where the main object of the storyteller was simply to keep people involved in the moment. Information and morals were conveyed, but usually by contrasting two characters or nations with one another—one blessed, the other damned. Epic poems and, later, theater, followed the more linear progression we might better associate with a scroll or bound book. There’s a beginning and there’s an end. Wherever we are in the story, we are aware that there are pages preceding and pages to come. Our place in the scroll or book indicates how close we are to finishing, and our emotional experience is entirely bound up in time.

  Aristotle was the first, but certainly not the last, to identify the main parts of this kind
of story, and he analyzed them as if he were a hacker reverse-engineering the function of a computer program. The story mechanics he discovered are very important for us to understand, as they are still in use by governments, corporations, religions, and educators today as they attempt to teach us and influence our behaviors. They are all the more important for the way they have ceased to work on members of a society who have gained the ability to resist their spell. This has put the storytellers into present shock.

  The traditional linear story works by creating a character we can identify with, putting that character in danger, and then allowing him or her to discover a way out. We meet Oedipus, Luke Skywalker, or Dora the Explorer. Something happens—an initiating event—that sends the character on a quest. Oedipus wants to find the truth of his origins; Luke wants to rescue Princess Leia; Dora wants to get the baby frog back into its tree. So then the character makes a series of choices that propel him or her into increasingly dangerous situations. Oedipus decides to find and kill the murderer of King Laius; Luke becomes a Jedi to fight the Empire; Dora enlists her monkey pal, Boots, to help her bring the baby frog through the scary forest to its home. At each step along the way, the character proceeds further into peril and takes the audience further up the path into tension and suspense.

  Just when the audience has reached its peak of anxiety—the place where we can’t take any more without running out of the theater or throwing the book on the floor—we get our reversal. Oedipus learns that the murderer he seeks is himself; Luke learns that Darth Vader is his father; Dora learns she herself holds the answer to the ugly old troll’s riddle. And with that, finally, comes full recognition and release of tension. Oedipus blinds himself, Luke brings his dying father back to the light side of the force, and Dora gets the baby frog to its family’s tree. Most important, the audience gets catharsis and relief. The ride is over. The greater the tension we were made to tolerate, the higher up the slope we get, and the more we can enjoy the way down.