Abstract
In 1970 Alvin Toffler dedicated an influential book to what he labelled “future shock,” showing how people were trying to cope with the changes surrounding them, and underlining their lack of readiness to deal with the future. The following decades have been characterized by a shared sense of leaning forward that has involved people, markets, and technology. Rushkoff argues that since the turn of the millennium, we have witnessed a shift from “futurism” to “presentism.” Even if Rushkoff does not provide a systematic definition of the term “present shock,” the book offers a rich variety of examples and arguments in order to build a thorough analysis of the concept.
The book consists of five chapters that analyze the five main domains in which present shock can be more clearly identified, and proposes a set of neologisms to describe the concept: Digiphrenia is defined as “the way our media encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time” (p. 7), referring to always on connectivity and to our multiple “virtual selves”; Overwinding is the effort “to squish really big timescales into much smaller” (p. 136) ones as many adults live in a “short forever” (p. 139), based on the idea that a particular stage of their lives is better than the others; Fractalnoia is presented as a syndrome that describes our sometimes misleading need to find patterns between different systems as we make sense of the world “only in the present tense” (p. 198). Meanwhile, the uncertainties of present shock, a condition that does not provide any end or beginning, lead to Apocalypto, the widespread dream of an apocalypse.
This book cannot be properly defined as academic. Its arguments do not rely on a wide set of citations, nor of evidence from empirical research. Moreover, it does not systematically engage with the existing literature. For example, the opening chapter is dedicated to the collapse of narrative. Here, Rushkoff shows that people have lost interest in traditional narrative and have also, in broader cultural terms, lost their reliance on the grand narratives that used to orientate our experience and our values in the past. In proposing such ideas, the author does not provide any clear reference to the work of postmodern theorists such as Lyotard on the end of grand narratives. When suggesting that people have lost interest in traditional narrative, the author provides several examples from popular culture, ranging from TV shows, movies, to videogames. However, he does not engage systematically with the voluminous literature debating the role played by storytelling in contemporary popular culture.
Nevertheless, the author offers rich insights into many different fields, ranging from finance to popular culture and from military organization to business, and proposes an interesting hypothesis on the way we experience and make sense of the world today. The book is written in a clear and engaging manner and offers an original perspective that helps readers contextualize their everyday experience within a broader conceptual framework.