Overwinding: The Short Forever — Excerpt From Douglas Rushkoff’s Present Shock

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now By Douglas Rushkoff

Yesterday: Apocalypto

Chapter 5 — Overwinding: The Short Forever

What’s it like to envision the ten-thousand-year environmental impact of tossing a plastic bottle into the trash bin, all in the single second it takes to actually toss it? Or the ten-thousand-year history of the fossil fuel being burned to drive to work or iron a shirt? It may be environmentally progressive, but it’s not altogether pleas- ant. Unless we’re living in utter harmony with nature, thinking in ten-thousand-year spans is an invitation to a nightmarish obsession. It’s a potentially burdensome, even paralyzing, state of mind. Each present action becomes a black hole of possibilities and unintended consequences. We must walk through life as if we had traveled into the past, aware that any change we make—even moving an ashtray two inches to the left—could ripple through time and alter the course of history. It’s less of a Long Now than a Short Forever.

This weight on every action—this highly leveraged sense of the moment—hints at another form of present shock that is operating in more ways and places than we may suspect. We’ll call this temporal compression overwinding—the effort to squish really big timescales into much smaller or nonexistent ones. It’s the effort to make the “now” responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.

Overwinding happens when hedge funds destroy companies by attempting to leverage derivatives against otherwise productive long-term assets. Yet—as we’ll see—it’s also true when we try to use interest-bearing, long-distance central currencies to revive real-time local economies. A currency designed for long-term storage and in- vestment doesn’t do so well at encouraging transactions and ex- change in the moment. Overwinding also happens when we try to experience the satisfying catharsis of a well-crafted five-act play in the random flash of a reality show. It happens when a weightlifter takes steroids to maximize the efficiency of his workouts by growing his muscles overtime. In these cases it’s the over-winding that leads to stress, mania, depletion, and, ultimately, failure.

That’s all folks. Thanks to Douglas for letting us republish his work here.

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