Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (36 page)

10
. The Renfrew Center Foundation for Eating Disorders, “Eating Disorders 101 Guide: A Summary of Issues, Statistics and Resources,” published September 2002, revised October 2003, www.renfrew.org.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Adam Sternbergh, “Up with Grups,”
New York
, March 26, 2006.

13
. Ibid.

14
. Search YouTube for “Smells Like a Feeling.”

15
. Zachary Lazar, “The 373-Hit Wonder,”
New York Times
, January 6, 2011.

16
. Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,”
New York Times
, July 21, 2010.

17
. Opera Solutions website, www.operasolutions.com/about-us.

18
. Stephanie Clifford, “Thanksgiving as Day to Shop Meets Rejection,”
New York Times
, November 10, 2011.

19
. Bill Gentner, senior vice president for marketing, quoted in Clifford, ibid.

20
. Richard Barbrook,
Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village
(London: Pluto, 2007).

21
. John Hagel, “The 2011 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-Term Change,”
Deloitte & Touche—Edge Report, 2011
, www.deloitte.com/us/shiftindex.

22
. See my book
Life Inc.
(New York: Random House, 2009), 120.

23
. Liz Moyer, “Fund Uses Behavioral Finance to Find Value Plays,” CBS MarketWatch, June 28, 2011, www.marketwatch.com.

24
. Uttara Choudhury, “Behavioral Economics has Never Been Hotter,” Braingainmag.com.

25
. Robert D. Manning,
Credit Card Nation: The Consequences of America’s Addiction to Credit
(New York: Basic Books, 2000).

26
. “Corelogic Reports Negative Equity Increase in Q4 2011,”
BizJournals
, March 1, 2012, http://assets.bizjournals.com/orlando/pdf/CoreLogic%20underwater%20mortgage%20list.pdf. Also: “Despite Home Value Gains, Underwater Homeowners Owe $1.2 Trillion More than Homes’ Worth,”
Zillow Real Estate Research
, May 24, 2012, www.zillow.com/blog/research/2012/05/24/despite-home-value-gains-underwater-homeowners-owe-1-2-trillion-more-than-homes-worth.

27
. For a quick explanation and confirmation of these facts, see Serena Ng and Carrick Mollenkamp, “Goldman Fueled AIG Gambles,”
Wall Street Journal
, December 12, 2009. For a lengthy but compelling account of the entire Goldman Sachs saga, see Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s
Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed, and Corruption Led to Economic Armageddon
(New York: Times Books, 2011).

28
. See gaming and Internet analyst Kevin Slavin’s terrific presentation on this history to the Lift11 Conference at www.livestream.com/liftconference/video?clipId=pla_08a3016b-47e9-4e4f-8ef7-ce71c168a5a8.

29
. Kevin Slavin, “How Algorithms Shape Our World,” TedTalks, July 2011, www.ted.com/talks/kevin_slavin_how_algorithms_shape_our_world.html.

30
. Nina Mehta, “Automatic Futures Trade Drove May Stock Crash, Report Says,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, October 4, 2010. See also Graham Bowley. “Lone $4.1 Billion Sale Led to ‘Flash Crash’ in May,”
New York Times
, October 1, 2010.

31
. Brian Bremner, “The Bats Affair: When Machines Humiliate their Masters,”
Bloomberg Businessweek
, March 23, 1012, www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-03-23/the-bats-affair-when-machines-humiliate-their-masters.

32
. For the basics, see Alexandra Zendrian, “Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark Pools,”
Forbes
, May 18, 2009.

33
. John Henley, “Greece on the Breadline: Cashless Currency Takes Off,”
Guardian
, March 16, 2012.

34
. Ibid.

35
. Eric Westervelt, “Fiscal Localism on Rise in Germany,” NPR,
All Things Considered
, July 15, 2010.

36
. Judson Green’s history and philosophies are taught at the Disney Institute in Orlando, Florida, which I attended as part of my research for this book. For more, see The Disney Institute and Theodore Kinni,
Be Our Guest: Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
(Glendale, CA: Disney Editions, 2011).

37
. Michael McCarthy, “War of Words Erupts at Walt Disney,”
USA Today
, December 2, 2003.

38
. Dr. Ofer Merin, quoted in Catherine Porter, “Israeli Field Hospital Carries on Inspiring Work in Japan,”
Toronto Star
, April 4, 2011.

39
. Joichi Ito, “Innovating by the Seat of Our Pants,”
New York Times
, December 6, 2011.

40
. Robert Axelrod,
The Evolution of Cooperation
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

CHAPTER 4: FRACTALNOIA: FINDING PATTERNS IN THE FEEDBACK

1
. Steven Johnson,
Where Good Ideas Come From
(New York: Riverhead, 2010).

2
. Kevin Dunbar, “How Scientists Build Models: InVivo Science as a Window on the Scientific Mind,” www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~dunbarlab/pubpdfs/KDMBR99.pdf.

3
. Kevin Roberts, interviewed in Barak Goodman, Rachel Dretzin, and Douglas Rushkoff,
The Persuaders
, PBS,
Frontline
, 2004.

4
. “Chevy Tahoe, Trump Create Open Source Fun,”
Oil Drum
, April 3, 2006, http://energyandourfuture.org/story/2006/4/3/164232/5126.

5
. In a later riff on the same phenomenon, Shell’s website for people to create advertisements promoting drilling for oil in the Arctic—http://arcticready.com—was eventually revealed to be a fake but not before hundreds of attack ads were created which utilities people thought had been provided by Shell. See the media-activist site http://YesLab.org for more on this.

6
. See the website for the company at http://valvesoftware.com.

7
. http://boingboing.net/2012/04/22/valve-employee-manual-describe.html.

8
. Ibid.

9
. László Méro,
Moral Calculations
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1998).

10
. See my book
Life Inc.
(New York: Random House, 2009)
.

11
. Archibald MacLeish, “Bubble of Blue Air,”
New York Times
, December 25, 1968, p. 1.

12
. Lenora Foerstal and Angela Gilliam,
Confronting Margaret Mead: Scholarship, Empire, and the South Pacific
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 126–27.

13
. Steven Pinker, quoted in Nick Gillespie, “Hayek’s Legacy,”
Reason
, January 2005.

14
. James Surowiecki, quoted in Gillespie, ibid.

15
. See Manuel De Landa,
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

16
. Jeff Sommer, “A Market Forecast That Says ‘Take Cover,’”
New York Times
, July 3, 2010.

17
. Philip E. Tetlock,
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

18
. Walter Kirn,
Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever
(New York: Doubleday, 2009).

19
. Richard Nisbett, quoted in Joshua Cooper Ramo,
The Age of the Unthinkable
(New York: Little, Brown, 2009).

20
. Ramo,
Age of the Unthinkable.

21
. Ibid.

22
. You can find out more or download the demo at www.thebrain.com.

23
. You can see Jerry’s Brain at http://jerrysbrain.com.

24
. April Rinne and Jerry Michalski, “Polymaths, Bumblebees and the ‘Expert’ Myth,”
Washington Post
, March 28, 2011.

25
. Gordon Bell, Gordon Bell home page, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/ (accessed August 11, 2011).

CHAPTER 5: APOCALYPTO

1
. Mathew Barrett Gross and Mel Gilles,
The Last Myth
(Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012).

2
. Rocco Castoro, “Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy,”
Vice
, April 1, 2009, www.vice.com.

3
. John Brockman, “The Technium and the 7th Kingdom of Life: A Talk with Kevin Kelly,”
Edge
, July 19, 2007, www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kelly07/kelly07_index.html.

4
. Kevin Kelly,
What Technology Wants
(New York: Viking, 2010), 187.

5
. Ibid., 188.

6
. Ibid., 189.

7
. Ibid., 356.

8
. Richard Dawkins,
The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).

9
. See my book
Program or Be Programmed
(New York: Or Books, 2010).

10
. For a great chronicle and analysis of the apocalypse meme, see John Michael Greer,
Apocalypse Not
(Berkeley, CA: Cleis Press, 2011).

Axelrod, Robert.
The Evolution of Cooperation
. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Barbrook, Richard.
Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village
. London: Pluto, 2007.

Boorstin, Daniel J.
The Image: Or, What Happened to the American Dream.
New York: Atheneum, 1962.

Brand, Stewart.
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

Brockman, John.
Afterwords: Explorations of the Mystical Limits of Contemporary Reality
. New York: Anchor, 1973.

Carr, Nicholas G.
The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

Carse, James P.
Finite and Infinite Games
. New York: Ballantine, 1986.

Dawkins, Richard.
The Selfish Gene
. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

De Landa, Manuel.
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.

Eriksen, Thomas Hyllard.
Tyranny of the Moment: Fast and Slow Time in the Information Age.
London: Pluto Press, 2001.

Fogg, B. J.
Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do
. San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2003.

Fuller, R. Buckminster.
Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969.

Greer, John Michael.
Apocalypse Not: A History of the End of Time
. Berkeley, CA: Viva Editions, an Imprint of Cleis, 2011.

Gross, Mathew Barrett and Mel Gilles.
The Last Myth
. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2012.

Innis, Harold Adams.
Changing Concepts of Time
. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.

Jacobs, Jane.
Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics
. New York: Random House, 1992.

Johnson, Steven.
Where Good Ideas Come From
. New York: Riverhead, 2010.

Kelly, Kevin.
What Technology Wants
. New York: Viking, 2010.

Korzybski, Alfred.
Selections from Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
. 5th ed. Fort Worth, TX: Institute of General Semantics, 2005.

Kurzweil, Ray.
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence
. New York: Viking, 1999.

———.
The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
. New York: Viking, 2005.

Landes, David S.
Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World
. Cambridge, MA: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1983.

Lanier, Jaron.
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

Lasch, Christopher.
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978.

Leach, William.
Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture
. New York: Pantheon, 1993.

Levine, Robert.
A Geography of Time: The Temporal Misadventures of a Social Psychologist, or How Every Culture Keeps Time Just a Little Bit Differently
. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

McLuhan, Marshall.
Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
. Critical Edition. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko, 2003.

Méro, László.
Moral Calculations: Game Theory, Logic, and Human Frailty
. New York: Copernicus, 1998.

Montgomery, David.
The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865–1925
. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Mumford, Lewis.
Technics and Civilization
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Postman, Neil.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Ramo, Joshua Cooper.
The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What to Do About It
. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009.

Rifkin, Jeremy.
Time Wars: The Primary Conflict in Human History
. New York: Henry Holt, 1987.

Rushkoff, Douglas.
Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
. New York: Random House, 2009.

———.
Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age
. New York: Or Books, 2010.

Shirky, Clay.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
. New York: Penguin, 2008.

Strate, Lance. Introductory Note to “Eine Steine Nacht Muzak.”
KronoScope
10, no. 1–2 (2010).

Strate, Lance, Ronald L. Jacobson, and Stephanie B. Gibson.
Communication and Cyberspace: Social Interaction in an Electronic Environment
. 2nd ed. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2003.

Turkle, Sherry.
Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
. New York: Basic Books, 2011.

Wiener, Norbert.
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
. 2nd ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954.

Zimbardo, Philip G., and John Boyd.
The Time Paradox: The New Psychology of Time That Will Change Your Life
. New York: Free Press, 2008.