Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (20 page)

Back in the late Middle Ages, the rigid power structures of feudalism were shaken by the emergence of locally minted currencies based on grain. For close to a thousand years before that, peasants knew nothing but subsistence living, in absolute obeisance to the lord whose fields they tended. Time had been standing still; the flow of history was essentially halted as aristocratic families maintained their fiefdoms. That’s why this era was often called a dark age.

There was a bit of barter between people, but this was a slow and inefficient form of trade. A person who had chickens but wanted shoes would have to find a shoemaker who wanted chickens. If only people had one thing of agreed-upon value they could use to trade, then everyone could get the things they wanted. Grain receipts provided people with just that form of early currency. Farmers brought their seasonal harvests to grain-storage facilities, where they were given receipts for how much grain they had deposited. A hundred pounds of grain would be acknowledged with a stamped, paper-thin foil receipt, perforated into smaller sections. Holders of the receipts could tear off little sections and use them to buy anything else at market. Even people who did not need grain could use the receipts, because the value was understood, and eventually someone would actually need grain and be able to claim the specified amount.

Now, while we may think of these grain receipts as a storage of value, they were, in fact, biased toward flow. Their purpose was less to store the value of the grain than to monetize and move it; they allowed for people to transact on something that would otherwise be stuck in dead storage. Pushing this de facto local currency even further to the flow side was the fact that these receipts lost value over time. The grain storer had to be paid for his services, and some of the grain would inevitably be lost over time to rodents and spoilage. In order to compensate for this, the value of a grain receipt would be lowered at regular intervals. One year it would be worth ten pounds; the next it may be worth nine. So it was to everyone’s advantage to spend the money rather than to hold it.

And spend they did. Money circulated faster and spread wider through its communities of use than at any other time in economic history.
⁸
Workers labored fewer days and at higher wages than before or since; people ate four meals a day; women were taller in Europe than at any time until the 1970s; and the highest percentage on record of business profits went to preventative maintenance on equipment. It was a period of tremendous growth and wealth. Meanwhile, with no way of storing or growing value with this form of money over the long term, people made massive investments in architecture, particularly cathedrals, which they knew would attract pilgrims and tourists for years to come. This was their way of investing in the future, and the pre-Renaissance era of affluence became known as the Age of Cathedrals.

The beauty of a flow-based economy is that it favors those who actively create value. The problem is that it disfavors those who are used to reaping passive rewards. Aristocratic landowning families had stayed rich for centuries simply by being rich in the first place. Peasants all worked the land in return for enough of their own harvest on which to subsist. Feudal lords did not participate in the peer-to-peer economy facilitated by local currencies, and by 1100 or so, most or the aristocracy’s wealth and power was receding. They were threatened by the rise of the merchant middle class and the growing bourgeois population, and had little way of participating in all the sideways trade.

The wealthy needed a way to make money simply by having money. So, one by one, each of the early monarchies of Europe outlawed the kingdom’s local currencies and replaced them with a single central currency. Instead of growing their money in the fields, people would have to borrow money from the king’s treasury—at interest. If they wanted a medium through which to transact at the local marketplace, it meant becoming indebted to the aristocracy.

Unlike local, grain-based currencies, these central currencies were not biased toward flow, but toward storage. In the new system, having money meant having a monopoly on transaction. Those who wanted to transact now needed to borrow money from the treasury in order to initiate their business cycles. Only those with large amounts of scarce capital could lend it, and they did so for a premium. Hoarding money was no longer a liability but the surest means to greater wealth.

The shift to central currency not only slowed down the ascent of the middle class, it also led to high rates of poverty, the inability to maintain local businesses, urban squalor, and even the plague. Over the long run, however, it also enabled capitalism to flourish, created the banking industry, and allowed for European nations to colonize much of the world.

Our current economic crises stem, at least in part, from our inability to recognize the storage bias of the money we use. Since it is the only kind of money we know of, we use it for everything. We naturally tend to assume it is equally good at flow and storage, or transaction and savings—but it’s not. That’s why injections of capital by the Federal Reserve don’t end up as widely distributed as policy makers imagine they will be. It’s also why government can’t solve local economic depression simply by getting a bank to lend money for a corporation to open a plant or megastore in the afflicted area. Failing local economies need flow, not more storage. Policies encouraging local peer-to-peer transactions end up allowing people to create value for one another, and a local economy to sustain itself the old-fashioned way. Top-down, central currency simply isn’t the very best tool for that job. In Japan, for example, when the greater economic recession seemed intractable, current and former government officials encouraged rather than discouraged local and alternative currency innovation. This resulted in over six hundred successful currency systems, most famously a trading network called Fureai Kippu, through which hundreds of thousands of people earn credits to pay for care of elder relatives.
⁹

Of course, the net has opened the way for more flow. Capitalism’s crisis today might even be blamed on the net’s ability to birth new businesses with almost no investment. Two kids with a laptop and virtually no capital can create and distribute music, television programming, or smart phone apps capable of earning millions of dollars. What’s a venture capitalist to do? On an innovation landscape now characterized by flow, capital competes for vehicles in which to invest. Accordingly, interest rates plummet and banks threaten insolvency.

Instead of borrowing money from banks, depressed communities can jump-start their local economies by using alternative currencies biased toward flow. Time Dollars and local economic transfer systems (LETS), to name just two, allow people to list their skills or needs on a website, find one another, and then pay in locally defined units, or even “hours,” of time. Everybody starts with the same amount, or a zero balance, and goes up or down as they receive or provide goods and services. There’s no incentive to hoard currency, since it is good only for transacting. People just try to maintain equilibrium. It is present-based currency, encouraging transactions in the here and now.

While alternative currencies have yet to solve all our economic woes, they reveal the inadequacy of a storage medium to solve problems of flow and vice versa. When we attempt to pack the requirements of storage into media of flow, or to reap the benefits of flow from media that locks things into storage, we end up in present shock.

MASHUP AND MAKEUP

The women on
The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
hurt one another’s feelings quite a lot. Every episode seems to hinge on a misunderstanding between two or more housewives over a meal, which is then amplified via text message and Facebook, and ultimately ends in a full-fledged fight. Unlike those on
Mob Wives
or one of the New Jersey reality series, these fights don’t take the form of physical, hair-pulling brawls, but there is nonetheless something intensely and unnervingly physical about the nature of these conflicts.

The only other thing characterizing the series—besides the toxic wealth of its subjects—is plastic surgery. All the people on this program wear faces frozen in time by their many procedures. The skin around their eyes is stretched tight, hiding expression lines. The women’s lips are infused with weighty collagen, muting what may be smiles and leaving their mouths in the half-opened stupor of a person with a chronic sinus infection. And their foreheads are quite literally paralyzed by botulism injections, leaving eyebrows in the locked and angular orientations of their last facelifts.

They seem to stare in wide-eyed disbelief at everything everyone says, but that’s only because they are staring, wide eyed, all the time, by default. They have no choice; they cannot blink. In the quest to lock in their thirtysomething looks, they also locked their faces in a permanent, confused glare.

No wonder they have so many misunderstandings; they are missing out on that 94 percent of human communication that occurs nonverbally. It’s not only the words we say but the visual cues we send while saying them. The tension in our mouth, the shape of our eyes, the lines in our foreheads, and the direction of our eyebrows tell what we are feeling. How else to distinguish between enthusiasm and sarcasm, or a joke and a complaint? Sometimes our faces communicate indirectly, compensating unconsciously for our words. Threatening statements may be undermined by a softening gaze or subtle smile. It’s as if our bodies know how to keep the peace, even when our words may be disagreeing.

The Housewives have no access to this dashboard of human expression. They have traded their ability to communicate and commune in the present moment for an altogether unconvincing illusion of timeless beauty. In attempting to stop the passage of time and extend the duration of youth, they have succeeded only in distancing themselves from the moment in which their real lives are actually transpiring. Incapable of engaging and connecting with other human beings in real time, they send each other false signals. Their faces don’t correspond to the ideas and emotions they are expressing, and they appear to be lying or covering up something. Or their silent signals seem inappropriate or even numb to the thoughts and expressions coming from others.

They are trapped in another version of the short forever—one in which a particular stage of one’s life is deemed to be better than the rest, and so everything before and after is remade in its image. Twelve-year-olds and forty-year-olds both aim for about age nineteen, making children look promiscuous and women look, well, ridiculous. And as any nineteen-year-old knows, it’s not actually a particularly perfect moment in life to celebrate above any other. In fact, as fashion magazines, advertisers, and fictional media focus on this age as the pinnacle of human experience, late adolescents feel even more pressure to achieve physical, sexual, and social perfection. This is not a reasonable expectation for a college sophomore; 25 percent of them engage in bingeing and purging as a weight-management technique,
¹⁰
and nineteen is the median age for bulimia,
¹¹
which may as well be the signature disease for overwinding and subsequent explosion.

We have all stuck our heels in the ground at certain moments in our lives, attempting to slow the progress of time, only to get whipped back around to our real ages once we lose our grip. These temporal compressions generate an almost spasmodic movement through time, where the trappings of one moment overaccumulate and prevent our moving on to the next. It’s present shock as Peter Pan syndrome, where the values of youth are maintained well into what used to pass for adulthood.

A growing number of names are emerging to identify these temporally compressed lifestyle choices. “Grup,” for example, is
New York
magazine journalist Adam Sternbergh’s new term for the aging yuppie hipster. Grups is the word for “grown-ups,” used on a world ruled by children in a
Star Trek
episode: turns out all the adults have died of a strange virus that quickly ages and kills anyone who has passed puberty—but extends the lifetimes of children to hundreds of years. Likewise, real-world grups are hip, indie fortysomethings who, according to Sternbergh, “look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old. It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent.”
¹²
Grups wear the vintage sneakers of their own childhoods, put their babies in indie rock T-shirts, and use messenger bags instead of briefcases.

Eventually, the time compression takes its toll, requiring some pretty intense mental gymnastics: “If you’re 35 and wearing the same Converse All-Stars to work that you wore to junior high, are you an old guy sadly aping the Strokes? Or are the young guys simply copying you? Wait, how old are the Strokes, anyway?”
¹³
Just as in the
Star Trek
episode, the realization of one’s adulthood comes on suddenly, painfully, and fatally, as the clock’s overwound mainspring suddenly releases, long overdue.

Hipsters—the fashionably antifashion young adults found in artsy neighborhoods, from Brooklyn’s Williamsburg to San Francisco’s Mission or Lower Haight—suffer from the reverse distortion. They appropriate the styles of previous generations and pack them into the present in order to generate a sense of timeless authenticity. Unlike grups, they are actually young, but operating under the tacit assumption that creativity and authenticity lie somewhere in the past. They may drink Pabst beer and wear Dickies—both brands with rich histories, such as brand histories go. But the hipsters are unaware that the many companies they feel they have discovered are utterly aware of their own repositioning and revival as hip retro brands. Zippo lighters and V-neck T-shirts may reference a moment in American working-class history, but purchasing them as fashion items is superficial at best—not a real affiliation with the proletariat. That they provide a sense of grounding and reality to young people today says less about the high quality and authenticity of mass-produced midcentury goods than it does about the untethered, timeless quality of the hipster experience. Authenticity comes to mean little more than that an object or experience can be traced to some real moment in time—even if it’s actually being purchased at Walmart or on Amazon.com.