Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Read Free

superseded by pessimistic ones titled “The End of This” or “The End of That.” The subjects themselves mattered less than the fact that they all either had a future or—almost more reassuringly—did not.
    We were all futurists, energized by new technologies, new theories, new business models, and new approaches that promised not just more of the same, but something different: a shift of an uncertain nature, but certainly of unprecedented magnitude. With each passing year, we seemed to be closer to some sort of chaos attractor that was beckoning us toward itself. And the closer we got, the more time itself seemed to be speeding up. Remember, these were the last years of the last decade of the last century of the millennium. The roaring, net-amplified, long boom of the 1990s seemed defined by this leaning forward, this ache toward conclusion, this push toward 2000 and the ultimate calendar flip into the next millennium.
    Though technically still in the twentieth century, the year 2000 was a good enough marker to stand in for millennial transformation. So we anticipated the change like messianic cultists preparing for the second coming. For most of us, it took the less religious form of anticipating a Y2K computer bug where systems that had always registered years with just two digits would prove incapable of rolling over to 00. Elevators would stop, planes would fall out of the sky, nuclear plants would cease to cool their reactor cores, and the world as we know it would end.
    Of course, if the changeover didn’t get us, the terrorists would. The events of 9/11 hadn’t even happened yet, but on the evening of December 31, 1999, Americans were already on alert for a violent disruption of the Times Square New Year’s Eve festivities. Seattle had canceled its celebration altogether, in anticipation of an attack. CNN’s coverage circled the globe from one time zone to another as each hit midnight and compared the fireworks spectacle over the Eiffel Tower to the one at the Statue of Liberty. But the more truly spectacular news reported at each stop along the way that night was that nothing spectacular happened at all. Not in Auckland, Hong Kong, Cairo, Vatican City, London, Buenos Aires, or Los Angeles. The planes stayed in the sky (all but three of KLM’s 125-plane fleet had been grounded just in case), and not a single terror incident was reported. It was the anticlimax of the millennium.
    But something did shift that night as we went from years with 19’s to those with 20’s. All the looking forward slowed down. The leaning into the future became more of standing up into the present. People stopped thinking about where things were going and started to consider where things were.
    In the financial world, for example, an investment’s future value began to matter less than its current value. Just ten weeks into the millennium, the major exchanges were peaking with the tech-heavy and future-focused NASDAQ reaching its all-time high, over 5,100 points. Then the markets started down—and have never quite recovered. Although this was blamed on the dot.com bubble, the market’s softening had nothing to do with digital technologies actually working (or not) and everything to do with a larger societal shift away from future expectations and instead toward current value. When people stop looking to the future, they start looking at the present. Investments begin to matter less for what they might someday be worth, because people are no longer thinking so much about “someday” as they are about today. A stock’s “story”—the rationale for why it is going to go up—begins to matter less than its actual value in
real
time. What are my stocks worth as of this moment? What do I really own? What is the value of my portfolio right
now
?
    The stock market’s infinite expansion was just one of many stories dependent on our being such a future-focused culture. All the great “isms” of the twentieth century—from