Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now By Douglas Rushkoff
Yesterday: Digiphrenia.
Chapter 3 — Fractalnoia
They matter less for the solutions they come up with or the accusations they make than for the underlying need driving them all: to make sense of the world in the present tense. When there is no linear time, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way they are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result; instead, the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once, from so many different sources, that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time. Without the possibility of a throughline, we’re left to make sense of things the way a character comes to great recognitions on a postnarrative TV show like Lost or The Wire: by making connections.
While we may blame the Internet for the ease with which con- spiracy theories proliferate, the net is really 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. Or as the social networks might put it to you, “Jane is now friends with Tom.” The connection has been made; the picture is getting more complete.
It’s as if we are slowly connecting everyone to everyone else and everything else. Of course, once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We’re back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy. Or as Cheryl put it, “Everything is everything.”
Tomorrow: Apocalypto
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