Rushkoff breaks up “presentism” into five symptoms or challenges and matches each with constructive solutions for pressing the pause button. The “aha-moment-per-page ratio in Present Shock is high. Once you identify these concepts for yourself, you will start to see them everywhere.

1. Narrative Collapse: Rushkoff identifies both the sensationalism of reality TV and the meta-stories of The Simpsons and Family Guy as examples of how we no longer have the time or patience for linear stories. From entertainment to financial investment, the payoff has to be virtually instantaneous in order to justify our attention. Politically, he shows how these impulses play out both in the Tea Party and the Occupy movement. A news cycle divested of linear time, pushes politicians into present tense reactions with unsustainable results. Rushkoff’s sympathies are clearly more with Occupy who confounded conservatives and the mainstream press by having a large impact without an easily identifiable goal. In remix culture and contemporary activism, he sees the potential for us to seize the narrative frame and use them in new ways to invent innovative story forms and flexible agendas.
2. Digiphrenia: Because technology enables us to be aware of and have control over multiple conceptual spaces simultaneously, our attention is increasingly divided. Whether we are “multi-tasking” at work or piloting drone strikes in Afghanistan from a suburban office park in Las Vegas, we are not in the present moment (in a zen sense) but actually in fragments between moments that happen to be occurring at the same time. The key to avoiding these dislocation, Rushkoff suggests, is to understand the difference between time as data flow (like a Twitter feed) and time as data storage (like a book.) Knowing when to be in “the now,” and when to insulate yourself from it can help you reclaim control of your time and attention.
3. Overwinding: The “shock” part of future shock really comes from how much time we have “springloaded” into the present. From financial derivatives to the piracy of intellectual property, Rushkoff shows how we use leverage “to squish huge timescales into much smaller ones,”  attempting to capture the value of (others’) labor in the click of a mouse. This is why Black Friday gets earlier and earlier each year or why shaving a couple of milliseconds off the time to execute a computerized trade confers significant advantage. But we can also use this fact in more constructive ways to “springload” time into things, like the example Rushkoff cites of the fully functional “pop-up” hospital that Israel sent to Japan after the Tsunami.
4. Fractalnoia: One of the biggest risks in the barrage of big data spawned by our digital lives is that our abilities of pattern recognition are imprecise. When we succeed at making sense of the world in one scale or time frame we easily apply that “fractal” pattern elsewhere, often inappropriately. As the pace of change increases, our feedback loops get shorter and shorter until all we have is feedback screech. Computers, operating out of human time, can in fact discern patterns in that noise, but it is up to us humans to put those patterns in the correct context. When we fudge the hierarchy we end up with conspiracy theories and unsupportable science.
5. Apocalypto: The time pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal. Rushkoff links together not only “Preppers” in their bunkers and cryogenic “Singularity-ists,” but also the current cultural fascination with zombies as examples of our wish to “level up” (in game parlance) out of our present situation. These grand finales are fantasies, like the doomsday predictions about the end of the Mayan calendar, but they speak to a powerful yearning. Rushkoff suggest we resist these temptations and instead, “let up on the pedal just a bit… [and] envision slow paths to sustainability that don’t require zombies or the demise of the majority of the world’s population.

See www.jonblumb.com/William_s_burroughs.

“This isn’t only about beauty, or intelligence, or experience, Sophia, or what I’ve written as fiction. It’s about something just being plainly wrong. Murder is illegal for a reason. I’m sure to murder someone would be a significant learning experience, but that does not make it right. The world is disintegrating—it is becoming more of a stupid, terrible, violent place and it is better to not contribute to it. I know when I was younger I liked to write about violence, even about sexuality. But that was when violence and rampant sexuality were not so common as they are today. Believe me, Sophia, you know I’m no conservative. I just think that with the world heading where it is, it is important to fight the good fight.”

Believe me, I’m no conservative. But when it comes to issues of sexuality, I feel like a puritan because the other side is fundamentalist in the other direction. This started via a post on Feministing that I found uniquely dumb: Feminism is totally cool with Beyonce posing in her underwear, which includes the sentence: “Beyonce’s image–which, yes, is damn sexy–is part of her multimillion-dollar career. Call me if Hillary Clinton starts doing strip dances for the Austrian ambassador or something, and maybe we’ll stage a feminist intervention.” Something has been lost in feminism if objectification is now a symbol of freedom, rather than being totally constraining. Obviously, Beyonce’s appearance has an impact on how all women are regarded.

In the quest to break sexual taboos, people have become permissive of everything – and it makes me feel like a conservative to write that. You can be pro-choice, and still think abortions aren’t the greatest idea. Religious puritanism is terrible, no doubt. But saying that all expressions of sexuality are healthy and constructive is another kind of fundamentalism.

The discussion led to this book, which seems to address this problem:

Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig–the new brand of “empowered woman” who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces “raunch culture” wherever she finds it. If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better, making sex objects of other women–and of themselves. They think they’re being brave, they think they’re being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, New Yorkmagazine writer Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.

In her quest to uncover why this is happening, Levy interviews college women who flash for the cameras on spring break and teens raised on Paris Hilton and breast implants. She examines a culture in which every music video seems to feature a stripper on a pole, the memoirs of porn stars are climbing the best-seller lists, Olympic athletes parade their Brazilian bikini waxes in the pages of Playboy, and thongs are marketed to prepubescent girls. Levy meets the high-powered women who create raunch culture–the new oinking women warriors of the corporate and entertainment worlds who eagerly defend their efforts to be “one of the guys.” And she traces the history of this trend back to conflicts between the women’s movement and the sexual revolution long left unresolved.

On Dangerous Minds, another argument broke out in favor of pornography: The Porn Identity: Is online pornography warping the minds of an entire generation of young men? People were up in arms that the post criticized porn culture as potentially affecting how a generation views sex.

This is the stupidest piece of moralistic crap you’ve ever published. Poor guy felt guilty about his wanking, and suddenly we’re in danger of losing an entire generation to sexual perversions. What a fucking joke. (10 likes)

This is crazy to me. To think that unlimited access to porn is not going to have a societal impact is delusional. Alcohol and heroin can be deeply unhealthy. Why something so loaded as porn doesn’t fit in this category, I have no idea. All consensual sex isn’t just some beautiful expression of freedom – but sometimes is just an expression of self-abuse like alcoholism. Like the gun debate, people are unwilling to see how there might be a negative impact overall. People like their guns, I guess.

Porn has its place. It should exist and it always will exist. Superficial beauty has its place. But in a culture that is become more stupid and superficial, porn seems a symptom of that – rather than breaking taboos. Are Paris Hilton or Kardashian really an ideal to aspire to? Or are they the worst of America? I say the latter – and that has an impact on everybody.

What concerns me about the repudiation of the Hookers is that the 9/11 Truthers are being tarred with the same “crackpot” brush. Yes, many of the September Eleventh conspiracy theories are implausible, and too often veer, as conspiracy theories unfortunately tend to do, toward the anti-Semitic. But unlike with Sandy Hook, 9/11 conspiracy theories flow from a scientific fact: whatever the 9/11 Commission Report might claim, fire generated by burning jet fuel is not hot enough to melt steel. As with JFK’s “Magic Bullet,” the official version asks us to pretend that the laws of physics do not exist. This opens the door for alternative versions, however ridiculous, that must at least be considered—even if, as was probably the case in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, the cover-up was well-intended, and not the case of an evil shadow government doing evil shadow-government things.

This is simply not the case with Sandy Hook. As Sattin eloquently explains, Hooker theories are founded on things like erroneous initial news reports and false tweets. I’ve seen more compelling evidence for the existence of Santa Claus. There is no Sandy Hook equivalent of the Zapruder film.

Another criterion, when evaluating conspiracy theories, is the “Cicero test”; we must ask ourseves: Cui bono? It’s not enough to suggest that the official record is wrong; without a motive for the deceit, absent some obvious beneficiary, there can be no conspiracy. To wit: there are any number of reasons any number of people could have benefited from the removal of JFK from office. The attacks of 9/11, similarly, had countless ripple effects, sparking a massive re-investment in the U.S. military, two wars that cost trillions of dollars, and that legislated erosion of our privacy with the Orwellian name, the Patriot Act, to name but three. Many, many organizations, corporations, states, and individuals benefited, directly or indirectly, from the events of that day.

FULL TRAILER from Amardeep Kaleka on Vimeo.

“The purpose I see with these entities in their communication is that they’re preaching a new gospel. And, the Bible warns of angels preaching gospel. I do believe they are a part of a demonic hierarchy, and the entities involved in the abduction experience are the elite of that hierarchy; it seems like we’re dealing with fallen-angels. The abilities that the fallen-angels have are mirrored by these entities, but the message they come with is not that of the Judeo-Christian God. It’s against them.”

Moving on, we turn our attentions to Ray Boeche. An Anglican priest who served as the Rector of the Celebration Anglican Church in Lincoln, Nebraska for nearly a decade, Boeche is also a former Nebraska State Director for the Mutual UFO Network, and the recipient of a B.A. from Peru State College and a Th.M. degree from St. Mark’s School of Divinity. His opinion on the UFO controversy is clear, as he detailed to me in 2007:

“As a pastor and someone who’s trained as a theologian, I can’t come to any other conclusion than there is some sort of spiritual deception going on here. In so many of these kinds of alien contacts, the entities involved make a denial of Christianity. Anytime the spiritual issues are addressed, there is always some sort of denial of the validity of Christianity and the validity of the Bible.”

If you’re interested in Part II of TABOTD, it’s basically the novelization of this scenario. UFO disclosure leads to religious hysteria, which isn’t science fiction so much as inevitable – and a very good reason why it hasn’t happened yet.

I can hear the answer: well, we need military-style weapons so that it doesn’t get really out of hand. It’s already out of hand. This quote says it:

“If the reason you own guns is to respond to tyranny – you would have acted by now.”

Meanwhile, real people are dying in real life.

The problem is basic – people who are most afraid of tyranny are those who think Obama is a Marxist. Obama. It’s hard to take these people seriously – especially when they didn’t care about the Patriot Act the first time around. And they don’t even seem to care about indefinite detention – so long as Muslims are the targets. The main thing they scream about is “socialism” in relation to a minor increase in taxes on rich people. The same people who scream about a minor regulation on 30-clip semi-automatic weapons. I don’t what the hell is wrong with the human race that people get this upset about shit that is not that big a deal.

Do you think people should have unlimited access to machine guns? No? Then you know how gun control advocates feel. Gun control has nothing to do with tyranny, militias, or Hitler, but general safety. Gun control might not work – James Holmes or Adam Lanza might find another way to kill people. But it could work. And this could is more important than stopping an imagined Fourth Reich.

There’s already a tyranny of mass murder happening today: “In 2010, guns took the lives of 31,076 Americans in homicides, suicides and unintentional shootings.  This is the equivalent of more than 85 deaths each day and more than three deaths each hour.” If the government was doing this to its own citizens, people would be revolting. Yet those who are most paranoid about government genocide are the most complicit in letting this continue.

Maybe it comes down to this: I fear a lunatic with a loaded gun far more than I fear my government. And I hate what’s become of the government.

You and I are literally surrounded.

The gun-grabbers in the Senate are about to launch an all-out-assault on the Second Amendment. On your rights.

On your freedom.

Just the other night, President Obama urged them to act. And then he went one step further, spelling out the 23 different Executive Orders he will take to get your guns.

My friend, our freedom is under direct assault.

From those who want take your guns. From those who want to shred our Constitution, and as our good in friend Rand Paul from Kentucky says, from those who want to be King.

Let me tell you, Mitch McConnell is ready to lead the fight to protect your rights.

Will you stand with Mitch today?

Our Founders fought a revolution to secure our rights. They would have been appalled by what they heard from an American president the other day.

A letter from the leader in the Senate is calling for revolutionary war against his own government. Do they want another Oklahoma City? Because that’s who this kind of language speaks to – fanatics, not the majority of gun owners who are for gun regulations.

Maybe he wants to drive up the frenzy so the gun control debate becomes untenable. People were already bringing guns to health care town halls. Gun control town halls could lead to an actual rampage. Which would lead to further gun regulations, not less.

Why in the fuck would you want to make unstable people more paranoid? This is what Mitch McConnell is saying: he wants more gun violence.

Wow, this is the whole thing. It is so short and simple. I used to think I did not understand the grammar — did it only refer to ‘a well-regulated militia’? — but now, having been reading a lot more Eighteenth century language lately, I think I do: ‘A well regulated militia’ is necessary for the protection of a free people, SO the people’s right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed — it is a preparatory clause — so really the stress as I now understand it is on the latter — ”the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.’ period. I hate guns but it seems pretty damn clear that the constitution gives us the right to keep and bear arms and ‘shall not be infringed’ is clear also.AMENDMENT II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

A minor ban on semi-automatic weapons is not going to increase the likelihood of corrupt government. Congress doesn’t give one shit if the people are armed. And if the pro-gun wing of the country did revolt, they’d replace fascism with a greater fascism.

My problem with this is it treats the 2nd amendment like it’s scripture. Even scripture isn’t scripture. The 2nd Amendment makes about as much sense as ““You shall have no other gods before me” in the Ten Commandments. Modernity has moved on from that. People are meant to evolve – to adapt and change according to the environment. So are countries.

It is no great surprise that gun rights fanatics are less likely to believe in evolution, and more likely to worship old time religion. The “tyranny” they’re most afraid of is their own irrelevance.

I still think psychedelic research/decriminalization is one of the most profoundly important issues going. The foundation of civilization is education. Psychedelics are education.