it's more like a fantasy role-playing game where you keep coming up with new ways to keep the game going. it's a sustainable strategy to narrative rather than a game for conclusion. it's no longer crisis climax relief and sleep, that sort of male orgasm curve of narrative. it's how long can we keep this thing going, which is a much better question to ask in a world that you're living in right now rather than that colonialist take, expansionistic, when the day victory world. narrative collapses one of them. the second one which comes from this videogame impulse is something michael digiphrenia. that's really what isn't like to live in a world where we are constantly making all of these choices all the time? what digital world tells us, the commercial digital world is you can make both choices. you don't have to choose this or that. you can choose this and that and

this and that all at the same time. for me the challenge of living digitally is not information overload. it's never been about that. i'm not going to look at it. him you can't overload. i'm just not going to look. that's the easy one. the real trick is digital technology is really, really good at making copies of things. but it's hard to make copies of people. it's hard to make copies of yourself, but meanwhile, here's five or 10 different manifestations, different instances of you operating simultaneously all over the place. there's your facebook account. it's happening right now. mark zuckerberg is advertising with your face t is someone else right now. it's going on. there is your twitter feed going on. there's your webpage, there's your sms right thing. there are all these different instances of you behaving simultaneously. i was trying to log into my google calendar in berlin of all places after i unsuccessfully

tried, and google came back to me and said, sorry, we can't let you win. you appear to belong to and from too many places at once. when google no longer believes that i'm a human being, there's too many instances of me for even a to believe i could be human, that's how i know i am in trouble. right? there's a digital sense, a sense in digital time that every moment is like every other moment. that time is somehow generic. but as human beings living in real time and space, we understand we don't live like that. every moment is not like every other moment. so the more we learn about biorhythms and biological clocks, the more we find out just how many different biological natural timepieces there are in this. things like jet lag could be

seen as new age folklore. they didn't believe in jet lag until there was baseball managers, baseball managers realize pitchers traveling west to east did worse than pitchers traveling east to west. once they believed, the state department believes it and they said maybe time is in just all the same. you can't just scheduled yourself into a thousand things. the research i was looking into it turns out that each week of the lunar cycle, a different moral chemical tends to dominate brain chemistry. they go through a week of serotonin, a weakened dopamine and the week of north enough for them. so you know that everybody is in dopamine week, party week, right? don't try to get anything done. serotonin week you will work really hard.

looking at things from afar. but if you understand that, not as some weird, you know, crystal potion new age witchcraft but rather as the fact that we are biological creatures, we have been for hundreds of thousands of years for whom time was not generic, we can go wow, you mean i can program my devices to conform to me rather than trying to stretch me across these devices. a third syndrome and i will go to these fast, the third syndrome i look out i called over pointing. i got the idea when i was reading stewart brand's brilliant along now which is this called for us to think of time and 10,000 or time spent rather than just every year or every day. i was trying to think of my life in 10,000 year time spans and i realized i wasn't expecting it as a long after i was experienced at as a short forever. it's really hard to have the weight of 10,000 years on every little moment. here's his plastic bottle, whereby coastal out of?

to have to think but think of the 10,000 is the bottle will be sitting in the landfill? what have i done? what's going on? it's this, overwinding is this sort of misapplication of one timescale onto another. overwinding is what the new stock exchange tries to do when people are no longer patient enough to invest now, to make money fighters now they say it's a kick from the left away. you can make your money on the trade. tonight going to make money by investing. what happen when people tried to invest in facebook. they said wait a minute, i didn't make any money yet and they started selling. they thought the buying of the stock was going to make money. now we have derivatives. which are what? which are really just basically saying this stock over time or the stock over time overtime. trying to just burrow into the

moments we are making money on the radar change rather than the thing will change it all. if you don't believe me that that has become the thing, just last month the derivatives exchange bought the new york stock exchange. the market that was built to time the regular market got bigger than the market itself. which was already in -- supposedly lived in which all this is based. it became this raise the common algorithms can sit on the head of a pin. when you make a trade on e*trade, goldman sachs looks at the trade and makes a trade based on your trade before you trade even goes through. they aren't time traveling. you are trading in their past and their trading in your future. that's a weird one. on a human level though, overwinding is like what happens on housewives of orange county. do you ever watch that show? it's what gave me the idea for the book. [laughter] i was watching them and they

have these botox, frozen faces stuck in horrible little smile things, and they basically sit and have meals and then get in fights. they have meals and have communication misunderstandings. and i'm thinking, what's going on here? here are all these women who try to lock their faces at 29 years of age. they are trying to freeze time in that one moment of 29 years old. but what did they do? what's the result? is when they're sitting with someone else in real time, they can't be present in the moment. their faces can register the appropriate emotional response is to the situation to one of them says my daughter is being tested today for cancer. the other says i'm so sorry to hear that. than the first one, they do the kind of what and since i don't think she meant that at all. she meant it but she couldn't express a big issue is no longer available to the real moment because she locked herself overwinding herself into this other moment.

she couldn't just be where she actually was. another one, the fourth one which is kind of the weirdest one is called fractalnoia. really it's what happens when there's no longer time between the thing you do and the feedback you get. feedback is how we have judged everything in our business, farming rights come to plant the seed, you wait three months and you see how it grew. this one is kind of sparse. i will put my seats closer together next time. then you get feedback from much later, it grew a little better. or in business, we will make red sweatshirt or put them out in the market. at the end of the quarter you find a red sweatshirts did well. and instantaneous aside your feedback loop is so fast you can't really parched the causes from the effects anymore. is this our marketing campaign? we should change your marketing campaign but are we now responding to the tweet or is this tweet responding to what we've done? we are in the same moment.

when it's all the missing moment you know longer have time to try to understand things. you know longer have stores to understand things we try to understand things in and instantaneous picture. when you try to understand things in a snapshot, the only way you can make sense is by drawing connections between things. somethings happen, freeze frame, so this must be connected to that most executives must be connected to that. you start senate one of the conspiracy theorist. because you're drawing connections between things that are not connected. a real way to make sense of feedback, of rapid feedback as to what we call fractal, these beautiful drawings, visual representations of feedback loops. but the way to really understand them is not just draw direct comparisons between things. it's not to draw equivalence these tickets to do what is called pattern recognition. pattern recognition is seeing how this is kind of like that, kind of like that.

it's not exactly the same. it's like bacteria do this, that means people must do that. bacteria do this and people are different but maybe we do something similar. in order to make sense of the world and the present tense you have to get a bit more asian. you have to stop looking at the subject of the picture and start looking at the landscape. it's the skill of unfocused in your eyes and sing what's going on rather than focusing on each little piece because you don't have time to parse causes and effects. the last syndrome that i look at in the book is called apocalypto and it's a fun one, kind of the idea it's easy for us to imagine a zombie apocalypse thing is for us to imagine next week. when you're living in a world that is always on, when you're living in a reality that is just present, we've got to just maintain just to sustain the steady state, it can become unbearable. we take our 19th or fifth

century paradigms and overlay them on the reality that doesn't really fit that. it's what a lot of my peers are doing now when they see the rise of digital technology, they get all -- they say except for the fact that technology will soon surpass us will have his singularity and information will just evolve to us greater state of complexity whether they done? a smarted digital people say it's all digital except it's also going to conform to this story we've been using for all this time before. they take the christian narrative, their biblical narrative, the capitalist narrative and they just throw it on the digital. the beauty of the digital was that it could break us free from the industrial age, time is money, make everything faster, keep going paradigm. that was the beauty at the beginning. that's what it was makers and slackers and where does that were part of the original cyberpunk movement. we're going to get free. i'm going to get to work

whenever i want in my underpants become going to get you trade with people directly and not through corporations. not going to have to invest in this crap. we're going to do in a much more sustainable way as return to a peer-to-peer marketplace, return to the bizarre. what did they do instead? they took the digital revolution as they called it and they applied it to industrial age values. the digital age became the calling card for the nasdaq stock exchange but don't worry instead of something new we will teach you how to make it the excitement, the last gasp, another steroidal injection in the failing economy. and what it led to the extent of digital as something as information as something that has its own mind, that has its own evolutionary path. and human beings, we are just serving information on an evolutionary journey towards consciousness. once it reaches that, we humans can go away.

but that as far a as i see thatt has the medium and the message reversed. humans are not in the service of information. information is a byproduct of humanity. it is our tool, our content. we are the thing. we are the thing come and even if we are not, i'm going to fight for us because on one of the humans. so what present shock alderman is is a call for us to reclaim our humanity in the face of seemingly alienating digital technology, and to realize that the genuine opportunity is not to be programmed into submission by our technology or the corporations behind them, but to seize the day and use these technologies in a way that is consonant with this. programs into conform to who we are rather than us to conform to it. that's the gist of it.

>> one thing i want to understand better, sort of combining what you open and your conclusion just now is where present shock comes from. so you say it's about us conforming to our digital technology. i'm wondering, one, is this technology determined phenomenon or other of the forces at work in late capital, and two, you mentioned that 9/11 was a great in continuity, an example of us move into 2000 y2k. it makes me wonder if this is a western experience, i would even say is this new york city experience. if somebody m.o. by interested in present shock? how to see this phenomenon fading into our global identity? >> that's a good one.

i'm not a techno- determined innocent. i wouldn't say vision technology happen and now we are all rippling in response to that. i think digital technology emerged kind of coincidence with our readiness for something beyond the industrial age. so the industrial age kind of puttered itself out a number of ways. international age was great. time is money was great for colonial empires trying to expand around the globe. the growth imperative of capitalism is part of what allowed western europe to go takeover all of the world. we actually reached, we reached the limit of that. there's nowhere else to take over into places that we still try to take over, virtually the world bank loans, those countries got wise to that at the end of the 20 century.

wait a minute, taking this loan might not actually be a good thing. they started to push back. we can reach those limits but at the same time we magically for whatever reason we plugged our computers into our phone lines and got the internet. but i don't, internet took off i would argue because of a cultural readiness for it. i guess you can call the reader response theory. we were ready for a peer-to-peer culture. just jet travel was ready for something other than spoken hub flights. human beings were ready for something other than outsourcing everything they did to a corporation. it wasn't working. it wasn't working anymore. said digital technology, at a given time, i don't know if we would have embraced it quite the same way. once again though, for a couple of reasons it ended up really

taking over. it ended up doing a whole lot more than we might have suspected. part of that is because what i think is digital technology is almost more natural appropriate way of being used, but part of that is because the dying corporate culture, dying top gun culture in did a really grabbing it, right? really taking it as a way of extending itself into an inappropriate into the next era. but you can't blame them. they are going to fight. as for whether everybody is in this are just some of us, i would argue that there's kinds of present shock that affect high-tech urban dwellers a lot more than other people. but if you're working for a corporation and your shifts are being determined by a machine, if you're on netflix and akron, ohio, or wherever you are and you are now, you know, watching

media that's been created by big data engines, you know, like what's the show, house of cards. house of cards was assembled, they use that data. they said people who like -- a look at the numbers. people who like kevin spacey also should like political intrigue so we will create this thing, sort of the way to manufacture jane goodall. it makes people compelled to watch. to feel anything afterwards? no, it's weird and if you like it's been made by a machine instead of people. it's the perfect thing. that's a sense of present shock. if your time sending a television that his present shock. now you can go to work the next day and say egc house of cards last night, don't spoil it for me. you just have to watch it on your own. it's not a bad thing. yet agency, autonomy over which are watching and when you watch it but use -- uses of the thing.

and a source other other other parts of the world, yes and no. in some sense they are less in present shock and they're part of the -- indigents cultures who never quite had to contend with intellectual page, their values and systems end up being part of what is retrieved and the digital era. every time you get a new renaissance, that's what i would argue we are income every time you get a new renaissance you retrieve the value that was repressed the last time. we repressed and value creation and exchange, and we repressed the occult to a large extent. now we are seeing those things come back, the burning man. we see occupy. we see the archaic revival. and those are weird, but i would

argue positive steps. in some sense the indigenous cultures that are somehow left out of present shock and participating again. >> so something i think is interesting about the work in general throughout all that you've written is your subject matter always changes but the message tends to be that there is a program determined by some interested power that we have to identify and see. so for example, used in your last book program or deprogrammed was our urban planning. the revelation that as the employed realizing that there was real estate money interest in the way the streets are laid out or in the way over the parks are placed in so. once you can learn to read the world as a program, then you can claim agency and subverted and package. a departure i think from that is taking place in this book is it seems like everyone is screwed

by present shock. there's atrophied across the board, and, in late capitalism the stock markets get a crashes and a student at and so on and so forth. so is there a program in present shock and even if not, is anyone benefiting come is anyone capitalizing on this phenomenon? >> yeah, i mean, what you're referring to is kind of my initial hit, you know, before even any kind of meditated psychedelic eye-opening experience. it was 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 say the program and primitive computer language, when you say the program or file

that you're working on it had to choose whether you will save it as a read-only program or as a read/write file. so i realized at that moment oh, my gosh, television is read-only. it's a read-only content, but that's only because they made a read-only content. they could a native read/write content and i could actually make the stuff that i started looking out in the world and i look at the grid pattern of new york and i said oh, my gosh, somebody, this isn't just city. somebody made this city. they chose to make the city this what it's like to go to other cities and they don't have grid patterns. someone shows. i started looking at the world no longer as this set of given circumstances but the set of choices that people may. sometimes consciously and sometimes with very specific agenda. not the various once but agenda. they make new york city like this to maximize motion. this was supposed to be about a money city so we'll maximize efficiency and out everything

movable like that. it wasn't a city about beauty, about, it wasn't a city to contemplate to kansas city to get things done. so as i looked at that i started to look at every other system. i started to look at money and say oh, my gosh, money. money is a program. the money we use was invented in about 11 or 1200. it replace all these other kind of money because there was a. he did economy that was rising out of control. the aristocracy did know how to maintain control so the made all that money and illegal and said look, if you guys want to transact you've got to borrow money at interest. it was a way for rich people doetosay rich is simply by being rich. it was a clever idea to get work. but now we wake up the we think this stuff is money. because this is money which is sort of anti-general semantics. you never say this is something else but it's not money. what is this? what is this stuff? this is what we use now as money. we think of this as money. we live in a world where certain

monopolies maintain that this is money. so if it's something build a program have you tend to take at face value. every computer has a windows operating system on a. it would be no such thing as an operating system. it's just a computer. and tell you a choice you don't even know there is choice. until the is an alternative you don't know it's there. that's the sort of driving for that a lot of my stuff. when the digital age came, we can program stuff. i looked at judaism that way, sort of this revolution and user but his pitch a sort of open source religion rather than belief systems we will sort of come up with a behavioral thing and i was arguing like how judaism had gotten locked down in the 20 century and we lost that open source quality. i don't see present shock as more negative in that sense. i see present shock as an invitation to look at an even deeper program.

and even deeper one which a biological program or our social program. and not the program as if it's been great by someone else but the one that actually comes from us. we are actually creatures, no, we are creatures and how to make ourselves more available so that when we do all this programming we can do programming that's consonant with who we are. how do we great situations, how can we be with other people which is such a challenge these days. we all have this kind of asperger's because we spend so much time on computers looking at words for cues 94% of human communicate and is nonverbal. it's whether you're breathing, in rhythm with the other person, whether your pupils are dilated or contracting. all the stuff that we have grown to respond to in our brains and releasing dopamine when people are agreeing with you. how do you get that in programs? you can't.

so what am trying to do in "present shock" is a gay people clues and hints as to how to reconnect to some of the sort of more fundamental rhythms. when does a break in continuity there's an opportunity for the mice to play. there's an opportunity if we are liberated from the punch clock, from the industrial age clock and we're moving into this other highly more fluid form of time, then there's also an opportunity for us to reengage some of these more primal biological emotionalcome and i would argue socially healthy relationships through the passage of time. >> i have one more question and then open it up to the audience. but just to conclude, hearing you say that i have to observe that there are all these people together live in this room. none of you guys are looking at you phones that i can see, and we're sitting here promoting a

book which is in credit old-fashioned analog which are using to get this message across. so i guess you can extrapolate upon this but why is this a book and why is that the medium for the message you're getting right now about present shock? >> the hubris of writing a book is, on the one hand claiming that i'm allowed to take a year to contemplate a single thing, right? it's saying that there may be ideas that can't, in a digital, and the thing, i can't tweak this quite. and it's also inviting people, inviting, not demanding but inviting people to kind of surrender their autonomy over seven or eight hours of their life, income or innocence to take a back, but to surrender it to me as an author to say you're going to be with me for seven or

eight hours so i can actually engage with you on a level that i can't in a cnn column, that i can't in the tweak, that i can in an article that again in a single talk. and ideally it's a way of saying that we are allowed to do this. we are allowed to dedicate seven hours to something. we don't have to shove it into that one plane ride and if you didn't get done with by the end of the plane ride, lived in the seat back there. wayman, who says that? who says we're not allowed to do that? i realized a book as anachronistic in a digital age, and i'm not, and partly by doing that what i'm saying is just because we embrace digital time and move into this doesn't mean that all these other times don't coexist with that. yes, we are moving into a culture where sort of videogame logic in making choices in real time is the dominant, the predominant form of communication and entertainment and emergent. but it does mean all the others just go away.

they can still be there. we can still go to get opera. we can still play softball. even if anyone is doing strange sports and reading tweets but they're still a place for these kinds of experiences. i come from that world. i'm a book person. that's where certain kinds of ideas, that's were i'm at home. so that's there, but i'm doing it with the full knowledge that the way i sell the book these days is not by saying you need is coming your basis is going to feel if you don't get this committee diminished in digital time and you not be able to market to people. by this or else, read this or you're in trouble. that's the self-help book maxim. right question need this. no. you don't need this. but you are allowed this. you are allowed this.

you are a human being living in the 21st century. you are allowed to have time. you are 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 last time you have. the faster you in your e-mails, the more enough coming. the slower your answer your enough the more you see people somehow solve those problems without you. and they really do. so i guess it's that, you know, that books are such a wonderful discipline. both as an author and the reader, they know. i'm reading this book. if i can create words for people to say no, i'm reading a book, then i've done my job. >> thank you. >> thank you. [applause] >> do you have any