rushkoff. he looks at how our society is reacting to this new world reflected by the rise of the tea party, occupy wall street and zombie apocalypse fiction. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> you're all welcome to sit in the front here, too, if you're floor people. >> well, first of all, thank you, everybody, for coming tonight to celebrate the launch of doug's latest book, "present shock." um, i think doug has been giving lots of talks about the book that i've seen just in the last few days, and so to start us off i think we just are going to get to it. briefly just to contextualize, doug and i have known each other for a few years. i helped him do the research on "present shock," and he's now a blogger at the new inquiry in addition to all of his other accomplishments. and so, doug, can you just tell us what "present shock" is?

>> yeah. i can. well, first, thanks everybody for coming and being here in person and sharing your time. in some ways i think the most radical thing about the book, "present shock," is that it's a book at all, you know? a book is kind of anachronistic, and so is gathering in a bookstore in an age when everything does seem to happen now. ..

humanly possible as y2k approached klm grounded the airline fleet in fear that the changeover was going to down the planes because the computers wouldn't be able to handle the switching tickets. we got 9/11, which was also a huge break in continuity. we had the dot-com boom billion. and in february and march people stopped think about what are my investments going to be worth someday and what they are worth right now? they are worth nothing and sold them and the stock market crashed. there was a leaning forward, you know, this, you know, in a homage there was aceps of future shock of things changing. the 1990s were leaning to the

millennium going for ward kind of got there. there's that. the moment of pause where we go wait a minute, we are actually here. we are in the future everyone was describing. that happened at the same time that we changed from a kind of an analog society to the digital society. and, you know, the real difference occurred to me when i was at disney world a few weeks ago on our vacation. there was a little girl standing on the line and it said like ninety minutes until goofy how long you have to wait. and her dad said what is a minute? and i thought, that's an interesting question. you know,ed in the last era, in the last century a minute on a nice round clock face is a portion of an hour. and an hour is a portion of the day. it's the way we break up the

cycle of our planet of our day, of our lives. in a digital reality, a minute is not some portion of something else, it's a duration. it's like an absolute. it sits there. when my dad replaced my alarm clock when i was a kid. he replaced the analog with a digital alarm clock, and my life changed. yoins used to sit there at night watching the secondhand go around and think we're in a fresh minute. it's 9:02 we're getting around toward the bottom. we are half way through the minute. now in the tail end of the minute and starting over. now moving to 9:03. it's 9:03! a fresh new minute. then i got my digital alarm clock and it was the old kind with the railroad sign numbers that flipped down and it was

like 9:02, 9:03. each minute was nothing the thing moving forward something was else. each minute was paused. so present shock for me is largely of dealing with that. it's dealing with the fact that time now feels suspended, and in each one of these moments, thanks to digital technology, there's a since of infinment choice. the tweeter feed and sms and facebook updates and this and that. this sense of constantly being pinged by all of these different things. the irony when we are trying to keep up with the digital manifestation of the moment, we lose track of the moment that we're in. you know, not to get too zen buddhist on you. we are actually here now, and, you know, we're so busy trying to keep up the device and these

things and all the pings. the pings are trying to keep up with us. so "present shock" in the simplest is the lawsuit l effort -- lawsuit l effort to keep up with time and we lose track of timing of the real timing we're in. it's sort of the difference between what the greeks would call kronos time of the clock and and the times. what is the best time tell dad you crashed the car? it's nothing do with time. it's timing. after you had the beer, before he opened the bills. right. and that's the kind of time that humans are in if we're alive and aware of what is going on around us. so, you know, as i look at the society that we're in, i realize that in are these various ways in which we are in present shock rather than the present. right. i believe there's been a shift

from a society that leans forward, from an mechanical industrial age society that is goal-oriented and industrial oriented. even the money we use has a clock in it. it's lent out at interest. you have to pay it back over time. the businesses are racing to get bigger. they have to pay back the debt structure. there's a sense. there should be, there could be a liberation from all of that as we move to a digital reality. there's sort of this all the time in the worldness to a digital life that we could embrace if wen't so busy trying to catch up. i looked at the five, i call them syndrome, through which we experience "present shock." we exercise nap the first is simple. narrative collapse. and the idea there is that in a presentist society it's hard to tell a story.

to follow a story. to live by the story. right. stories is what we have been using since aristotle's time or before to share our vawms fop make our points. right. it goes back as far as the bible in greek tragedy and comes up to the ox sei five commercial. the girl is going to go a prom and it pops the zit and gets worse. you go up and finds the o x y five. and she's relieved and we can go to the prom and we are watched the character to go to tension and finally relax. except now with digital device with remote controls, dvr, with vcr, pause button, and changing the channel we don't have to sit through the narrative anymore. especially if we don't trust the story teller. i don't trust the advertiser. we go away and leave the story before it reached the peak.

stories, the whole notion of striving toward a goal whether it's exapt lymph, come communism . end expwrufs the means journey to some goal no longer makes sense. not when we worked for a company and crash the pension before we get it. not when we volt for obama and we think we wait a minute. where is the u.s. part of this. it's back to something as usual. so without stories, it's easy to feel rutterless. we don't have a goal. we don't have a sense of anything. i think there are some inklings of present alternative to narrative collapse. one of them is an easy one. talk about this before the occupy movement. people were so unnerved and unsettled by the occupy movement. they wouldn't state their goal or demand. what is it you want?

we're doing it. what are your demands? >> we're not dmappedding anything from you. we're not doing this for something else. we're doing this right. an internet-style political movement. right and it's not part of some great narrative about winning a war, fighting something and beating the bad guy. it's about obtaining new kind of normative behavior right now. right. that not just exemple plies but actualizes the things we talk about. the difference between a society for whom books and stories is the predominant entertainment medium and one where video games is. video games for the violence and problems in the early stage, they do point the way toward a more presentist style of engagement. in the video game you're not watching a character go through a story, beginning, middle, and

end. you are the character making choices in real time. you are living in the present. right. and in a game, you know, if you read someone like james "finite and infinment game." you're not playing the game in order to win and tend. you're playing the game in order to keep the play alive. right. it's more like a grant sei role-playing game. you come up with new ways to keep the game going. it's a sustainable story to narrative rather than one aching for conclusion. it's no longer crisis climax, release, and sleep. that sort of male orgasm curve of narrative. instead it's how long can we keep it going. it's a much better question to ask in a world you're living in now rather than that sort of colonial expansionist, win the day victory world. narrative collapse is one of them. the second one which comes from

the video game impulse is dig friday ya. what it like to live in a world where we are making all the choices automatic the time? what digital world tells us particularly the commercial digital world. you can make both choices. you don't have to choose this or that. you can choose this and that all at the same time. for me the challenge of living digitally is not information overload. it's not never about that. i'm not going read it. i'm not going look at it. you can't overload. i'm not going look. that's the easy one. the real trick is digital technology is really good at making copies of things. but it's really hard to maining make copies of people. it's hard to make copies of yourself but meanwhile there's five or ten different manifestation, different instances of you operating simultaneously all over the place. there's the facebook account. it's happening right now. it's happening now.

mark disuker zuckerberg is advertising your face. the twitter feet -- feed. the sms. there are different instances of you whateverring simultaneously. i was trying to log to my google calendar in berlin, of all places, after i unsuccessfully tried from the airport and here and there. and google came back and said, sorry, we can't let you in. you appear to be logging in from too many places at once. and when google no longer believeses i'm a human being. there's too many instances of for me to believe i could be human. that's how i know i'm in trouble. [laughter] right. there's this -- there's a digital sense. a sense in digital time that every moment is like every other moment. right that time is somehow generic. 3:02 might as well be 3:04.

as human beings living in real time and space sun up and sun down. we understand we don't live like that. over moment is not like every other moment. the more we learn about biorhythm and biological clock we learn how many different biological natural pieces like that. jet lag used to be new age folk lore. pitchers traveling west to east if worse than pitchers traveling to west to east. once they believed to they looked and said maybe time isn't all the same. you can't schedule yourself to a thousand things. in the research i was looking to the each week of the lunar cycle a different neuro cycle tends to control your brain. you go through different weeks.

you know that everybody is in dopamine week. that's party week. don't try to get anything done. if they are open to new idea. sell them stuff. er is they're going to be in flight or fight organizational structural thinking. if you understand that not as some weird crystal potion but the fact we are biological creature, we have been for hundreds of thousand of years time was not generic. you can program your device to conform to me rather than trying to stretch me across the devices. the third syndrome, i'll go through them. the third i looked app i called overwinding. and actually got the idea when i was reading "brilliant, the long

now." , you know, rather than every year or day. and i was trying to think of my life in 10,000 year time spans and i realized i wasn't experiencing it as a long now. i was experiencing it at kind of a short forever. it's really hard to have the weight of 10,000 years on every little moment. here's the plastic bottle. where will i throw it out? if there's not recycling bin do i have to think about the 10,000 years of the bottle sitting in the landfill. what i have done? what is going on. it's this overwinding is this misapplication of one time expwail scale to another. it's new york stock exchange. they go it's okay. you don't have to wait. you can make your money on the trade. you're not going it make money by investing. what happened when they try to invest in facebook. they bought it and said i didn't

make any money. they started selling. if the buying of the stock was going to make the money. so for those kind of people we are derivative. derivative of derivative. which is saying this stock over time or this stock over time other -- over time. trying to burrow to the moment so you are making money on the ray of change rather than the change at all. if you don't believe me that's become the thing. the derivative exchange bought the new york stock excomplaining. the market that was built to time the regular market got bigger than the market itself. which was already in a distractions of supply and demand the economy we're supposedly living in on which it's based. it became a race of how many al gore rhythm can you -- when you make a trade on e-trade goldman sachs make a trade based on your

trade. they are literally time traveling. you are trading in their past and they are trading in your future. that's a weird one. on a human level overwinding is what happens on "housewives of orange" it's it is fascinating. it gave me the idea for the book. they have the botoxed faces. stuck in the horror little smile and sit and have meals and get in fights. right. they have meals and communication misunderstandings. i'm thinking, what is going on here? here are all of of these women who tried to lock their faces at 29 years ago of age. they there trying to freeze time in that one moment of 29 years old. what do they do? the result of sitting with someone else in real time. they can't be present in the moment. their faces can't register the appropriate emotional responses

to the situation. so one says my daughter is being tested for cancer. the other goes. i'm sorry to hear that. and the first one they do the cutway and said i don't think she meant that at pull. she meant it, she couldn't express it. she was no longer available to the real moment because she locked herself overwinding herself to the other moment. she couldn't just be where she actually was. another one, the fourth one, the weirdest is called -- it's what happens when there's no longer time between the thing you do and the feedback you get. right feedback is how we judged everything in our business, in our farming. you plant' the seeds, you wait three months and see how it grew.

the red sweat shirt did well. we're going to do more or less. right so like is it the marketing campaign or the person seem to tweet before it before we came out with it. we should change our marketing campaign. are we respond together tweet or i had tweet responding to what we have done? when it's all in the same moment no longer have time to understand things. so you try to understand things in the instant use picture. right. when you try to understand things as a snapshot, the only way you can make sense is by drawing connections between things. right so something is happened. okay. freeze frame. this must be connected to this to connected to that. and start like sounding one of the conspiracy they are resists on the "art bell show" you are drawing qerkses between things that are not connected. the real way to make sense of

feedback is through frack tow. they are the beautiful drawings, these visual representations of feed bank loops. the way to understand them is not to drw direct compa between them. not to draw equivalent sei do pattern recognition. right. pattern recognition meanses seeing how it's kind of like that is kind of like that. it's not exactly the same. bacteria, do this. people must do that. bacteria do that and people are different. maybe we do something different. in order to make sense of the world in the present tense. you have to get a bit more asian. you have to stop looking at the summit and start looking at the landscape it's it the skill of unfocussing your eyes and seeing what is going on. rather than focusing on each little piece because you don't have too time parse causes and effect. the last syndrome i look at in the book is called blarng

it's the it's easier to imagine a zombie apocalypse than next week. when you are live something reality that is presentist. it's just we have to just maintain. just sustain in a steady state, it can become unbearable. we take our good old 20th century paradigm and overlay them on a reality that doesn't really fit that. singularity and information will just e volve to a greater state of complex. the smartest digital people say it's digital. it's going to conform to a story we have been using. they take the christian narrative, the capitalist narrative and throw it on the

digital. right. the beauty of the digital it could break a spree from the industrial aged time is money, make everything faster, keep going paradigm. that was the beauty of the beginning. it was makers and slackers and weird doughs part of the original cyber movement. we will going get free. i'm going get to work whenever i want in my underpants. i beet to trade with people directly and not through corporation. i'm not going have to invest in the crap. we deal with a sustainable way to return to peer-to-peer marketplace. return to et sei. the bizarre. they took the digital revolution, they called it, and apply it to industrial-age value. the digital age became the calling card. instead of being new. we teach you how to make it the accelerant. the last gasp. another steroid l infection in the failing economy.

what it lead to the sense of digital as something as information as something that has it's own mind. and human beings, right, we are just serving information on the evolutionary journey toward consciousness. once it reaches that, we humans can go away. but that as far as i see it has has the medium and the message reversed. information is a by product of humanity. it's our tool. sister our contest. we are the thing that we are the thing and even we're not, i'm going fight for us. i'm one of the humans. it's call for us to reclaim our humanity in the seemingly depersonalizing digital technology and read that the genuine opportunity is not to be

programmed in to submission by our technologies or the corporations behind them. but to seize the day that's the gist of it. [laughter] when "present shock" comes from. you say it's about us conforming to the digital technology. i'm wondering when is the phenomena. are there other forces that work in is making this "present shock" moment come to fry ice. and two, you mentioned that 9/11 was the breaking continuity. you use an example of us moving to y2, k.

is a western experience. it is it a new york city experience? is someone in rural ohio experiencing "present shock" right now? is somebody in mumbai experiencing "present shock"? how do you see this phenomena that sort of fitting to the global identity. >> that's a good one. i'm no a tech no determinist. it happened and now we are rippling in so response to that. it emerge to something beyond our industrial age. it puttered i.t. out in a number of ways. time is money was great for colonial empire trying to expand around the globe. it's part behalf allowed western

europe to go take over a whole lot of the world. but we actually reached the end we reach the limit of that. there's nowhere else to take over and the places we still try to take over virtually through world bank loans that force them to open the market. the countries got wise to that. at the end of the 20th century. wait a minute. taking this might not be a good thing. and they started a push back. so we kind have reached the limits at the same time that we, you know, magically for whatever reason we plugged our computers to the phone line and got the internet. the internet took off, i would argue, because of a culture readiness for it. i guess you can call it reader response theory. we were ready for a peer-to-peer culture. you know, just as jet travel was ready for something other than spoken hub flights. you know, human beings were

ready for something other than outsourcing everything they do to a corporation. it wasn't working. we weren't -- it wasn't working anymore. so digital dj come at the different time, i don't know if we would have embraced it quite the same way. one it came throw, for a couple of aren'ts -- reasons it ended up really taking over. it ended up doing a lot more than we might have suspected. part of that is because of what i think is digital technology. more natural appropriate way of being used. but part of that is because dying corporate culture of dying top down culture ended up grabbing it. right. really taking it as a way of extending it itself to, you know, inappropriately to the next era. you can't blame them. they're going fight. as for whether everybody is this or just some of us, i would argue there's kinds of "present

shock" that affect high-tech urban dwellers a lot more than other other people, but if you're working for a corporation and your shifts are being determined by machine, if you are on netflix in ohio where you are and now, you know, watching media that has been created by big data engines, like "house of cards" it was assembled. they used big data. people who like -- they looked at the number. people who like kevin spacey like david and political entry. they create the thing. sort of the way you manufacture a cheese doodle. make people compelled to watch it. do you feel anything? no it's weird andty. like it's almost made by a machine. it's a perfect thing. that's a sense of "present shock."

if you're time shiforting that's "present shock." day and say did you seee next scwhree. you don't spoil for it for me. you have to watch it on your own. it's not a bad thing. so you agency, an ton my over when you are watching and when. you lose the other. you lose the other thing. as far as other parts of the world, yes and no. in some sense they are less in "present shock" and their part of the present -- culture who never had to intend to the industrial age. every time you get a new renaissance. in the last we were repressed feminism, we repressed indigenous people.

we repress peer-to-peer culture. value creation and exchange. we repress the consult to a larger extent. we see it coming wack. we see occupy. the are kayak revival. those are weird but i would argue positive steps. something i think is interesting about your work in general throughout all the bookings you have written is sort of -- your subject matter always changes but the message tends to be there is a program determining by interested power that we have to identify and see. for example, you used in your last program urban planning and sort of the revelation you had a young boy realizing that there

was real estate moneyed interest in the way the streets are laid out or the way where the parks are placed. and so on. once you can learn to read the world as a program, then you can claim agency and subvert it and hack it. a departure, i think from that of taking place in the book it seem like everyone is screwed by present schock. it's, you know, there's a trough if i across the board. capitalizing on the phenomena. >> what you're referring to is it was my initial hit, you know, before met at a timive

psychedelic eye opening experience. when i was in seventh grade learning how to program for the first time. and i realized that i could make what was on the tv set. you know, that when you save a program in primitive computer language. when you save a program you have to choose whether you save it as a read only program or rewrite file. i realized at that moment, gosh, television is read only. it's read only content. but that's only because they made it read only content. they could have made it rewrite content and i could actually make this stuff. and i started looking out until the world, and i look at the grid pattern of new york and said somebody -- this isn't just city. somebody made this city. they choose to make this city this way. you go to other cities and they don't have grid pattern. they are round.

someone choose. looking at the world no longer as a set of given circumstance but the set of chces that people made. go like that. it wasn't city about beauty, you know, it wasn't the city to contemplate. as i looked at that. i start to look at every other system. i looked at money. money is a program. money we use was invented in about 11u it replaced the other monies. because there was a peer-to-peer economy rising out of control.

rich people to stay rich. we wake up and think it's money. this is money. which is antigeneral semantic. it's not money. what is this stuff? what we use as money. we think of this as money. we live in a world where certain monopoly have maintained it's money. if it's something the only program you have. you tend to take it at face value. every computer had the windows operating system. there would be no such thing as an operating system. it's a computer. physical until you have choice you don't know there is choice. when the digital age came we can program stuff. judaism is the usinger participation and the open-source religion and belief system. we come up with a behavior thing and keep renewing it and arguing

how judaism had gotten locked down because of persecution. we lost the open-sourced quality. i don't see present schock as more negative in that sense. i see "present shock" as an invitation to look at an even deeper program. right. an even deeper one which is the biological program. our emotional program. our social program. and not the program as if it's been create by someone else. the one that comes from us. we are actually creatures. , you know, we are creatures and how do we make ourself more available so when we do all of this programming we can do programming that is constant with who are. how can we create situations and be with other people. it's a haj. we have the asperger's with are spending so much time on computers look for words for queues. 98 percent of human

communication is nonverbal. whether the breathing in rhythm whether the pupils are guylating or contracting. all the stuff we have grown to respond mirror neuro in our brain and releasing dopamine when people are agreeing with you. how do you get that in -- you can't. what i'm trying to do in present schock is sort of give people clues and hints how to reconnect to some of these more fundamental rhythm. there when there's a break in continuity. it's an opportunity for the mice to play. there's an opportunity if we are liberated from the bunch clock. and we're moving to the other highly more fluid form of time then there's also an opportunity for us to reengage some of these more biological emotional, i would argue socially healthy relationships to the pass act of

time. >> one more question. and open it up t the audience but just to conclude hearing you say that i have to observe that there are all of these people together lives in the room. you are looking at your phone, i can see. and here promoting a book which is incredibly old fashioned analog technology we are using to get the message across. so i guess you extrapolate upon this, why is it a book and why is that medium for the message you're giving right now about "present shock." >> the hubris of writing a book, on the one hand claiming that i'm allowed to take a year to contemplate a sickle thing. right. it's saying that there may be ideas that can't be conveyed in bull bullet list. i can't tweet this quite.

partly i'm saying because we

embrace digital time and move to this doesn't mean that all of these other times don't coexist with that. right. yes. we're moving to a culture where video game logic and making choices in real time is the dominant predominant form of communication and entertainment and emersion. it doesn't mean that all the others go away. they can still be there. we can go to the opera. we can play softball. even if everyone is doing extreme sports and reading tweets. there's a place for these kinds of experiences. i come from the world. i'm a book person. that's where certain kinds of ideas are home. right. that's where i'm at home. so that's there. but i'm doing it with a full knowledge that the way i sell a book these days is not by saying you need this. your business is going fail if you don't get this. if you don't understand digital time you can't market to

people. it's like what is that? buy this or else. read this or you're in trouble. that's the self-help book. you need this help. no. it's not you don't need this. right. but it's cool. you are allowed this. you are allowed this. you're a human being living in the 21st century. you're allowed to have time. you're allowed to have some time. and ironically the more time you take, the more time you have. it works the opposite way. the more you try to catch up. the less time you have. the faster you answer your e-mail. the more they come in. the slower you answer you see people shovel the problems without you. and they really do. [laughter] so i guess it's that. you know, that books are such a wonderful discipline. both as an author and as reader to say, now i'm reading this

book. i'm reading this book. if i can create more excuses for people to say, no. i'm reading a book. then i've cone my job. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] do you have any questions? >> yeah. please wait for the microphone to get to you. she'll be in charge of finding the people, i guess. >> hi. >> hey. >> thank you so much. my question was i was wondering if any aspect of your assessment can be connected to the unemployment rate. do you see any sort of correlations or associated factors? >> absolutely. yms , i mean, first of all since when is unemployment a bad thing? seriously. everybody has been there. we have to create jobs. we have to create job. do you all want jobs?

you want stuff. you don't want jobs you want the stuff you get for having an job. they are an art fact of the industrial age. people didn't used to have jobs. they made stuff and sold it. it wasn't until chartered corporations came and put everybody out of business that we had to work far company. instead of being paid to make a thing. you are paid for the time that you put in for the corporation. you are selling your time. it's what the bible calls slavely. it's servitude. the -- we don't need jobs because we have enough stuff. there's more than enough houses. they are burning down houses and destroying them in california to keep the prices high. there are so many in foreclosure. we can't let people just live there. we have to tear them down. we are destroying food every y month. we burn it to keep the market price on food high. so what with they are starving.

the only reason we need people to have jobs so is we justify diffying out the tough we have to them. not because we need them to make more stuff. instead we create new excuses for people to have jobs to make for stuff we end up sticking in storage units. there's too much stuff. we have more stuff than we need. we create new excuses to buy stuff on black friday. how the housing starts. are we tearing down more woods and building more houses. it's not healthy. why? the industrial age requirement of the economy to grow. right. so i think that i don't know in our lifetime. i think we'll get to the place and realize we can have robots tilling the soil and doing the stuff in the field. and we can just eat it. that's not a bad thing. and when we work, we work for meaning. when we work we work to make it better. when we work we are healthing the sick and teaching children and feed ourself.

not just to trying to import more plastic crap from china in order to keep this economic machine going. it's a program that out lived the welcome. >> do you think -- sorry. do you think that the reason that digital platformings lack narrative that you were saying earlier based on the fact there's a lack of context awareness maybe? meaning if it knew more about where we were at any given time, and how we were feeling it seems to be going that way. that would kind of remedy the problem? >> well, it might remedy the problem or create a new one. right. the illusion of narrative and digital technology is generally what they call predicted momgding. so they use big data age sis to figure out johnny is 12. we can tell from the statistical profile he's going to be gay by the time he's 14.

mary is 36, we tell from the way she's tweeting and whatever she's probably going to be dealing with infertility issues. they can send you the ads an things that can help you manifest the person you are most likely to be. that's not story telling. that's life creation. right. that's turning people in to programs rather than letting people be the unpredictable weird things they. i think there's a confection you can get in digital spaces. it's much more like bee vis and butt head or simpsons or mystery science theater. it's more of meta sensibility you can see frames within frames. you see media more in a frack tal sense then you do in a linear sense. the way we make sense of thing is recognizes. when you watch the simpson. what is the snit homer -- you

recognize this is a sat tire of that other form of media. when you recognize the satire you feel more orientedded. what we are moving forward is a moment to moment sense of orientation and grounding we get from screens within screens from relationships of things to other things or this to that. from getting the joke really more than getting to the end. [inaudible] [laughter] perfect moment. >> how do you think "present shock" is affecting the way wars are fought today. >> it's interesting, i mean, on the one sense, we're learning to think of wars less as things as we win and chronic situations

get involved in. you don't win a war. it turns out. you never really won a war. you just won the battle and killed people. there is a sen of war now as an ongoing state. we won really interesting phenomena is -- i talk about in the book is drone fighting. drone fighting is a dig fridayic proich to war. here you are. the soldier. you are in a room outside las vegas, all right. flying a plane that is in afghanistan killing people far away. then you take off your thing, you get in your car, you go home and you have dinner with your wife and kids. it turns out that drone pilots who are doing virtual combat experience higher level of post-traumatic stress order that night ones in the actual battle

field. i would argue because of the new way of fighting war in a "present shock" universe. you are trying to manifest who two cells at once. that's really what is going start to happen now. and in some ways that's a positive sign. because we're saying oh my gosh, there's this other part of me. like us as a nation. there's part of us doing this thing not constant with the values with what you are. we have to reconcile them. the more we alienate them it more it seems distant. it gets, you know, pretty weird. you are in charge. you need it for the mass media audience. -- [inaudible] we don't get to the -- [inaudible]

why don't you say machine world? >> i think there's a difference between living in the machine world and living in a more digital world. i don't think we live in a digital world. i think we live in a real world. a car drivers. a steam shuttle does this. [inaudible] kinds of things i look at they create more choice. when i look at digital age technology like computers

robotics. i look at things that you set in motion and then have something like a life of their own. they try to survive. they change things. a kind of sits there. i think there's a different bias. you can argue it's part of the same continuum. [inaudible] >> you can. the curl this -- culture that builds around the invention of text being different than the printing press. whenever reason is different than the kind of culture that builds up around computers digital technology.

it could be the reasons why could be completelytpid. based on nothing but our per accepting how they work. they have different media environment. there's a lightbulb. right. the lightbulb create an environment of light. we don't care about the content. there's no content in lightbulb until you put something in front of it and have words. a t create answer environment. air-conditioning creates an environment. television creates an environment. telegraph creates an environment. and digital technology creates an environment too. it's not the digital technology making it happen, but as our culture changes, we adopt digital tools. our values change, we change the tool we develop and the tools we

develop change the way we see things. >> how much -- the difference between the culture around print and the internet. how many are inhesht to an environment of digital curlture and how much it's a new media and the past ten or twenty years is unregulated. it's wild rest. it's become less like that? >> it's interesting. , i mean, i have all felt like we are in danger of folding the digital media environment to the industrial age. that's been the main thing i have been kicking and screaming about since 1998. why futurist suck. and the thing i gotten mad about is the thing was here. it was 2002 reality hackers person. i thought here we got the technology.

digital means we make the world and then i saw everyone talking about this is coming. the tsunami is coming and going to change the business and go this. invest in that. it can keep grows. and on the say day jerry garcia died it went public. i thought i wonder if the potential i'm saying -- seeing far new digital media environment will be subsumed. ty may well be. i believe if it's. most will die. i really believe that. i think we reached the limit of that way of doing things. i'm trying to create the most appetizing ways of of describing

what it might be like to have a steady state sustainable approach to life together. we stop looking at life as individuals. our life as a nation. rather the thing we're going to keep doing. >> are you taking the media revolution that is shooken us up and changed our lifestyle and using if -- different so we can change the other things that are different too like nation hood and the other stuff. as opposed to letting it go back to the way it was. >> i don't know if it was. when i look at -- i've gotten to be in the board room. why look at the way corporations exist now, they're dying. they are sitting on the money. they live on an economic operating system designed to help them collect money. don't know how to make money with the money anymore. corporate profitability has been

going down over the last fifty or sixty years to almost nothing. they don't know how to keep doing it. istle like they are at the cross roads too. i have lots of signs of hope. glimmer of hope. i also think of a genuine media renaissance. i don't call it a revolution. they feel 20th century. it's around the clock. a revolution. i think it as a renaissance. we retrieve old ideas and reborn in a new context. the kinds of stuff repressed by the original renaissance. when we became centralized and became monarchy. all the stuff that got repressed. i feel like they are picking up. and where is the beginning of it? they take hundreds of years to happen or a thousand years to

happen. so i'm trying to remain hopeful at how some of the signs seen. >> go you think digital technology are helping or hurting society of goals? light end of poerty. >> i think they can help or hurt. when we are using digital technology to sell more cell phone to more people in less time and stick kids in caves. it's hurting. when we use it to give developing nations open source it's helping. when it's hurting we use it to allow for peer-to-peer marketplace to emerge and alternative currency and new

economic model. it helps. it's powerful stuff. i've been advocating for people to learn how to use it. a we can at least if we don't know how to program ourself we'll at least be aware of the biases of the digital environment where happening. we can look at something like facebook like i recently did and said it's not fun for me. it's making me feel vulnerable and yucky. i'm going to stop. i'm going to stop. it's not really progress on the grand scheme of thing. to the extent we feel we allowed to make choices about what technologies enhance our lives and what don't.

it's the beginning of doing good things with tech brothers and bad. i think it came up a couple of times. digital stuff everywhere is let's consider running to the way things were. which every whiskey brands wants to tap in to. i think you said something interesting about the, like, the value that got repressed before the revolution. i'm curious for you to expand on that. you touched on indigenous culture. what are some of the values you might see come back to life? >> right. well, the beauty of a renaissance is everything old is new again. it's not about going back to the good old days. you can't go back. neither, i'm a progressive. neither can you lean forward.

msnbc model lean forward is opposite of fox's that dilingsal values. you can't go either way. we're here right here now. it means question be available to things that were unavailable before. we see , i mean, in a more primitive form you go to the renaissance festival and it gets where everybody is addressed medieval. we associate the means from. the activities that last memory of have of them is the mid evil bizarre. we bring that back. by we bring it back in a new context. instead of having a peer-to-peer grain based currency you tear pieces of foil and go to a grain store. you end up with a peer-to-peer currency in your iphone. you can use it and go somewhere else with it. so you bring the old forms. in term of indigenous culture, i think they have access to certain things that we're only now finding, again, through

science. .. they have the thing. that's why we do this. if we go back to the ancient jewish calendar before the romans corrupted it, they had a true lunar calendar that was respecting a lot of these different rhythms, but, you know, they -- we lost that. yes, some of it feels really old and we can't find -- we can revive some ancient wisdom again. you start reading your tao te ching an tai saying, oh, they

understood that there was that shape and time. that's what they're going for. there is shared to time. maybe they knew it and we can combine that with computers. you know, it was sort of like we had james joyce and kind of got part of it. mechanic at part of it. now reassert a -- sort of trying to do it. >> all right. the american talk. i will sign books and stuff. >> you mentioned above for the dichotomy of industrialism. how does that logic speak to places like india where the industry is superimposed. >> i don't really, really know. i've with up thinking more about china because they're more in the news that india. and a look at, you know, moments, but i am looking at it culturally as a spectator, solid of the chinese olympics.

10,000 people standing there doing tai chi and logarithm. are they trying to and -- demonstrate the industrial age prowess or an older clock. a sense of sink the bear involved in. i sometimes sorry for cultures that adopt the digital age kind of mentality without passing through the same kinds of things these assets powerful tools. i mean to my work at a place called code academy trying to teach code to people. in america people who go on code academy are doing it generally because they want to, like, create a product, make something and do a startup and learn how to code and launch an iphone application. we get e-mails from glenn in the and their like to my wanted to greek. can you give me incentive it's like going to the job. when you realize that people are

poor and have never been allowed to do anything, it's a great and beautiful thing. no, my god. do they even know what they're getting themselves into. the work farms for american diesel companies. three already have these like labor murals in china or india. so this is the book really about culture that is about anything else. i am writing it weigh more about us than it is about them. wallow i am really interested. more interested in what their reaction to this will be. in other words, will their reaction, i if i get e-mails about this book, will it become of, my gosh, this is interesting we're suffering to the same things or will it become of, you silly americans. you did not know this all along.

it's something i guess i will find out. >> i think unfortunately we're going to have to stop there. having to answer more questions. >> yes. >> so douglas will sign books over here, and the cash register is upstairs if you need to select the buck. thank you all for coming. [applause] >> you're watching book tv on c-span2, 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books every weekend. >> here's a look as some of the upcoming but there's an festivals happening around the country.

>> one of the problems with the judges are appointed a public defenders is that the public defender's job is reliant on their approval, and judges are judged on their efficiency of it, how fast do they process cases, how quickly did they get through the docket. so they're going to want a public defender that goes along and gets along, that does the

bidding. and that is a real challenge. and in new orleans for a long time, the system was also that one public defender was assigned to one court room and the same judge. so there were always arguing before the same judge to read and the problem with that is that they were then kind of trading clients, and away. okay. coming you know, my private paying clients, you know, if you kind of let me spend a little time and take his case to trial, okay, will persuade his client to plead guilty. of words, this sort of trade-off going, like you can cash in your favors only on some of your clients, and it really made for a very corrupt system down there. >> if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. karen houppert on the right to free representation sunday at 9:00 on after words, part of book tv this weekend on c-span2. >> the title, "saving justice"

comes from bob's decision not to resign. [laughter] nixon did not plan it, but he just blundered into it. bob believe that the president has the authority to control everyone in the executive branch and to fire insubordinate personnel. cox had proclaimed his insubordination on national tv. whether a president is wise to exercise that authority is for history to the side. attorney-general richardson had promised the senate that he would maintain a special prosecutor in place. and he thought, therefore, that he had to resign when nixon asked him to fire cox. but bob bork had not made any such promise, and he thought that the president entitled today his own grave if he

insists. he also thought that he should not gain by the deed and certainly should not appear to be at toady. so he planned to fire him in quite. in richardson and william, the deputy attorney general, talk to not of resignation. there was no line of succession in the department of justice after the solicitor general. so if bob had walked the plank, the department of justice would have been leaderless. no one knew who the president might to install. richardson, ruggles' house, and bork all feel that it would be political show, leading the assistant attorney general and much of the department of senior leaders to resign and crippling the department. so, bob bork save justice by staying. had he quit in protest he probably would have been treated as a national hero and confirmed to the supreme court in 1987. perhaps he would have been apinted by president ford in

1976 to the seat that went to john paul stevens. he was on the list that was sent to president ford of possibilities. but had he quit, the nation, as a whole, would have suffered. he stayed in office, the s. g. office. he was so determined not to benefit that he turned down an opportunity to be appointed as attorney general. he turned down the chance to work from the attorney general's more elegant office. he avoided the attorney general's private dining room, and he even turned down the attorney-general show for a limousine during the time that he was acting attorney general. i cannot say much more about those times. they occupy the last six months of 1973, and added not arrive in the solicitor general's office until mid 1974. but everything that bob bork says in his book he said in 1974 as well.

richardson and the people who worked with him most closely than such as edmund case and keith jones still the same story . end boards narration in the book is entirely consistent with the man that i knew for four years. intellectual, considering consequences before acting to end absolutely honest. he is also the funniest man i ever met. that did not come through in his 1987 hearings, but the book is full of his wit. the life of a solicitor general, like the life of a judge, is reactive. of the people decide what suits to bring. the solicitor general controls the government's presentation in those suits to the supreme court . what petitions to pile call response to file, merits, briefs from oral argument, and the solicitor general also the size when the government will appeal an adverse decision by district court or seek rehearing in the court of appeals.

the solicitor general has a party decide when it that all to participate in amicus curiae and the supreme court or court of appeals. it is a broad portfolio and requires a large base of knowledge plus the ability to learn fast. the solicitor general does not control who litigates about what, and he does not start the process within the justice department. cases that arrive are farmed out to a litigating division, civil, criminal, civil rights and antitrust, tax, lands and natural resources and the environment. they make recommendations which go to the sg assistance and the piece. sometimes there is an internal conflict. the department of justice includes the bureau of prisons and the criminal division, and those people always want to defend organs and guards in suits by prisoners. the civil-rights position ten step the pentaprism eyes.

the criminal division statutory position is weak the solicitor general has to resolve those issues personally. bob bork conducted many conferences, not allowed to stop fights within the government, but also to hear presentations by private counsel. one of the offices traditions that anyone to mulligan, potential me to scary i, can be heard by the solicitor general personally. he asked sharp questions. he tried to advance the positions of the executive branch, not his own views. and never saw an favre is own position and never thought -- cy misunderstand an argument. >> you can watch this and the programs online at c-span.org.

>> driven by this certainty that religion and reason are in different boxes. science and religion are in different boxes. that to actually are at war with each other. they are in medical to each other. someone who's rational is not religious. someone who is a religious is not rational. the antidote. now this to myself, is the ultimate irrational idea because the a believe that religion is a medical science and reason in the west is completely untrue. religion underpinned science and reason. >> next weekend, author, columnist, and winner of the orwell prize for journalism, melanie phillips, will take your calls, e-mails, facebook comments, and tweets. three hours live next sunday at noon eastern here on c-span.

>> kristan hawkins, executive director of the group students for life of america presents a collection of essays that focus on students' efforts to stop abortion. this is about 45 minutes. [inaudible conversations] >> good afternoon. i am michele easton, president of the clare boothe luce policy institute, an organization aimed at the very pro-life. welcome to those of you here in washington d.c. and those in the c-span audience all over america and the world. welcome to the march conservative women's network luncheon. thank you for being with us today and a special thanks to our partner, the heritage foundation and bridget wagner here for coasting the conservative woman's network with us every month. now, i am so pleased to introduce today speaker, kristan hawkins, t