Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

Hosts Celeste Carey and Cecil Prescod speak with Douglas Rushkoff about his In his new book, PRESENT SHOCK: When Everything Happens Now, Rushkoff introduces the phenomenon of presentism, or – since most of us are finding it hard to adapt – presentshock.

Alvin Toffler’s radical 1970 book, Future Shock, theorized that things were changing so fast we would soon lose the ability to cope. Rushkoff argues that the future is now and we’re contending with a fundamentally new challenge.

Whereas Toffler said we were disoriented by a future that was careening toward us, Rushkoff argues that we no longer have a sense of a future, of goals, of direction at all. We have a completely new relationship to time; we live in an always-on “now,” where the priorities of this moment seem to be everything.

http://www.rushkoff.com/present-shock/