About book Presente Continuo: Quando Tutto Accade Ora (2014)
I got to this book because it was mentioned by Mark Kingwell on RN's Philosopher Zone's podcast dedicated to the "hipster philosopher". Answering a question on the speed of time and how it just seems to be standing now because of its actual rate of becoming, Kingwell mentioned the methaphor of the aerotraffic controller used by Rushkoff in this book to describe the way most (or rather stereotyped) users of instant media like Twitter and Facebook seem to act or their minds seem to be busy like. This short but effective cameo got me interested in the book, also coming from an author I had previously heard but never had the chance to read. As it turns out, that metaphor is actually isolated in the second chapter and plays a much more marginal role in the development of Rushkoff's discourse that I had imagined. Yet the book has a lot more and probably better to offer to a pondering reader.The topic of Rushkoff's extended and five-stranded reflection cannot be more actual and pressing. This makes for a rather long and thoughtful reading -- the more so the more present-ingrained the reader, used to multitasking and shallow operations. The core of the book stems from the observation that we are currently inhabiting that same future that till a few years ago we were still striving to conceive and contruct. We are there, and history collapses into the present. No long-term direction neither in the past nor future, just a self-feeding present, all encompassing and trivializing. Rushkoff declines this condition along five axes: collapse of narrative bringing post-modernist vagueness and shallowness to the extreme; user/consumer ubiquity through his multiple media-enacted personalities and channels (what he calls digiphrenia); compression of time, space, decisions, horizons and perspectives into a pointlike present (overwinding); finding all-explaining and self-similar patterns mostly in noise, including cospiracies; and apocalyptic thinking as the final escape from the shock.Each chapter involves a discourse that cover significantly vast ground, and can easily induce the reader to wander in own collateral reflections. This testimonies to depth of writing and the engagement in which the reader is called. Throughout, one needs to realize that the book is written by a person deeply surrounded or involved with media, networks, computers and artificiality. So the perspective on the topics is that of someone at the same time more knowledgeable of and more affected by the issues and the problems raised than an average person -- although one can easily think that the average person may well drift toward such avantguarde. Rushkoff fills the text with pseudo-philosophical discourse, references to tv series, videogames, media history, some research and personal connections between patterns à la Zizek in a way. In fact, one cannot deny that he is also drawing patterns and somehow forcing some facts to fit his grand (though interesting) schemes of things, at times overflowing into superficiality (for instance, when he summarizes behavioral economics as a science developed to increase commercial earnings of big companies; or when he contests to Nassim Taleb that while he rejects model-based forecasting he still "believes" in fractals (i.e. power-law distributions) because he dedicated a work to Mandelbrot -- which nonsense beside missing the point entirely. This personal pattern drawing is however what all intellectuals do when expressing themselves and trying to influence the description of events, and Rushkoff has some interesting views to share anyway. Most of his concerns may however be washed out by a restoring walk in the countryside or willingly disconnecting at times from the tentacles of pervasive social media and networks. He goes very close to such simple backdrop when he discusses cyrcadian rythms and how they affect phisiology in many subtle ways. He misses here the connection that such synchronizations with in-born rythms is lost mostly in artificial environments detached from the natural cadence of planetary motion and seasons. On the other hand, his criticism on the purported AI singularity and his liking it to a new apocalyptic religion is welcome and absorbing -- it is not difficult to spot such messiahnic orientation in the attitude of Ray Kurzweil and his claims of the inevitability of what he is claiming it will happen, yet few people dare to contest the zealot fanaticism of this perspective (many others possibly simply do not care yet and give priority to more stringent problems).Indeed prioritization of activities and filtering are the ways Rushkoff claims can help resolve present shock and give pause to our brains. We are not build to multitask, yet we indulge in it believing we are more efficient when doing that (which is false); we confuse news with filtered knowledge which takes time, reflection and distillation to reach, so that it is not only information overload but, maybe even more, filter failure that fills us with the burdening feeling of exhaustion and inability to catch up with all that is going on. In fact, not all that is going on is relevant in general let alone to us in particular, and we are chasing noise when we should switch off and get a heartening walk or live chat with real friends. My first thoughts after reading this book were "I need to read this again". But then I read a few other reviews and realized the difficulty I had in following Douglas Berkhof is shared by many other readers. The downside is that the chapters and themes are disjointed and too wide ranging. He overanalyzes perspectives on time from multiple disciplines truly tying them together in some type of synthesis Entertaining, but not necessarily persuasive. The author bombards the reader with interesting ideas and analogies, but without an over-arching logic trail to organize or sequence the consumption. The good points include his diverse thoughts on how technology has caused on to overly focus on the now versus the future, on the immediacy of content versus the broader context, on the flow versus the storage. I enjoyed his comparison of cubism of the early 20th century with the "mashing up of songs" in the 21st century. The contrast of chronos (time in motion) versus kronos (quality of time or the moment) resonated with me as well. I also liked the analogies of different cycles of time that run concurrently, but on increasingly larger scales. His concepts of "spring loaded" versus "stored time" were less convincing.
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I found the topic of this book fascinating, but struggled to get past the first hundred pages.
—BETH
In the words Of the poet Sweet Brown: 'Ain't nobody got time for that!'
—dinda
