One On One: Douglas Rushkoff on Everything Happening Now

Douglas Rushkoff hurts the way only a onetime true believer can hurt. Now a professor at New York University and the New School, he was an early fan of the Internet. “I was a slacker, and it seemed like a way to slack,” he says. “We’d all work when we felt like it.” Instead of a contemplative paradise, however, the marriage of networked technology and capitalism tortures our consciousness with an incessant, demanding present. “We’ve attached ourselves to it,” he says; “We respond to things when it wants us to, which is all the time.”

Mr. Rushkoff is the author of “Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now,” a book that examines what it means to live in a world of incessant communication, multiple identities and a nearly apocalyptic sense of powerlessness in the face of global electronic connectivity. The book’s title is a play on that of Alvin Toffler’s 1970 landmark “Future Shock,” which posited that someday change would outpace our contemporary ability to adapt. Now, Mr. Rushkoff says, the acceleration of change is asymptomatic, and the idea of adapting to achieve anything like tranquil thought is a receding speck in the rear-view mirror.

Following is an edited interview with the author, who stopped in San Francisco on his way between Los Angeles and New York.

Q.

You say we have “a new relationship with time.” What is it, and why is that a bad thing

A.

What we’ve done has made time even more dense. On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next. Present shock interrupts our normal social flow.

It didn’t have to be this way. When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we’ve strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time.

Q.

Hasn’t time been collapsing for centuries We moved from the rhythm of seasons to living by the clock in the Industrial Age. We’ve paced in front of the microwave for decades.

A.

Yes, but it has hit a point where we have lost any sense of analog time, the way a second hand sweeps around a clock. We’ve chosen the false “now” of our devices. It has led to a collapse of linear narratives and a culture where you have political movements demanding that everything change, now. The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can’t multitask, and we shouldn’t keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.

Q.

It’s a funny thing: the counterculture used to talk about “Be here now,” and the need to chase after self-awareness by seeking the eternal present. What is the difference between that world of the “now” and this one

A.

People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we’ve learned about them.

Q.

In an earlier book, you wrote about the need for everyone to learn how to write in programming languages as a kind of basic literacy for how the world now works. How is that going

A.

I learned Javascript, now I’m learning PHP and Python. Learning how to code really makes me understand that the world is made out of programs. Traffic is a grid of varying quality. Television is a read-only format. It’s also a way to think critically about digital environments. I saw the motives and choices better by looking at how they were constructed.

Q.

Between learning to code and writing this book, what habits have you changed

A.

I quit Facebook a couple of weeks ago. It’s probably bad for sales, but it felt a little hypocritical to promote my book by soliciting a lot of lightweight “likes.” I don’t mind Twitter, because I have a sense of control. With Facebook, I don’t really know where my information is going, or how it’s being used.

Q.

Reading a book takes time, and writing one takes even longer. Given how you feel about the world, how does doing one and expecting other people to do the other make any sense

A.

I was anachronistic. I spent two years writing this. I’m asking people to give me six hours in which they read it. That’s asking for more than the $26 to buy the book! But it was also an act of me claiming my time for myself. I hope people see reading this as a way to claim some of their time back too.