The Age Of Earthquakes: A Guide To The Extreme Present

The Age of Earthquakes. p2-3: Illustration by Wayne Daly

‘Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it.’ Mike Pinnington talks to author, writer and editor Shumon Basar about his new book, The Age of Earthquakes, and why the future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would…

Late last year an email arrived. A very welcome email. Its subject message simply read: ‘Coupland, Obrist, Basar update McLuhan’s Medium is the Massage.’ As hooks go – if I happen to be your quarry – that’s a pretty good one.

But if McLuhan was dealing with an unfolding nascent multimedia age, what would he make of today’s reality star-filled digital soup? For every tasty morsel of hyperreal info-snack there lies in wait a barely quantifiable amount of digi-landfill to wade through and, before encountering the next thing that might, just might, be food for the brain (or soul), there lies in wait only empty calories in the form of code to contend with. This is the world tackled by The Age of Earthquakes… Mike Pinnington interviews one of its ‘Zeitgeist triumvirate’ authors, writer and editor Shumon Basar.

“McLuhan was a truly non-linear thinker. Critics accused him of not making sense. But this is part of his genius”

The Double Negative: The book extends Marshall McLuhan’s famous thesis on the influence of technology and the media on culture to today. What would he make of where we are now?

Shumon Basar: While McLuhan is held up as a prophet of the digital age he never got to see (he died in 1980), people often forget that his insights on electric media often came about by applying interpretations of ‘old media,’ like Elizabethan pamphlets and the novels of James Joyce. He was a truly non-linear thinker. Critics accused him of not making sense. But this is part of his genius. He never truly explained anything. He provided us with the means with which we should become aware of our surroundings as they ‘happen to us.’ So, predicting what he’d say about our ‘extreme present’ is prone to all kinds of failure. I’d like to think that our book is our fiction of imagining McLuhan’s amoral response to right now.

The Age of Earthquakes. Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar. The three authors were 3D printed into miniature faux-marble busts. Photograph by Marc Falk

What and who was the initiating factor for The Age of Earthquakes?

A great and unknowable algorithm computed by the universe? If not that, then, probably the fact that in 2010 Douglas Coupland – one of the two other authors of the book – had published an unconventional and illuminating biography of McLuhan. Through his rediscovery of McLuhan’s body of work, Hans Ulrich Obrist and I became aware of how little we knew about McLuhan and how significant his approach is for the Internet addled world. The three of us agreed that it was time to do a Medium is the Massage for the 21st century. And we got to work.

“Before we prostrate ourselves to Apple or Google or Cisco we should know what the consequences will be. What they are”

The book is described as a self-help book for this particular time on planet Earth. Reading it, to me it felt more of a warning, a kind of cautionary tale. Is that fair?

We are fascinated by the dominance of the ‘self-help’ book genre today, and the way in which non-self help books from the past (e.g. Machiavelli’s The Prince) can become retrofitted to – hey! – become self-help books for our precarious times. It’s the upshot of free-market, secular freedom: we’re freer but also more alone in our freedom and every action is our sole responsibility. That’s scary.

So, The Age of Earthquakes extends this notion to almost every aspect of our lives. Because it’s almost impossible to understand what’s happening to you when it’s happening to you. There is no reflexive distance when you’re trying to get from one task to the next, or from one end-of-industry to the next. Before we prostrate ourselves to Apple or Google or Cisco we should know what the consequences will be. What they are.

The Age of Earthquakes.  p14-15 =  LEFT: Douglas Coupland, Sexy Marshmallow Foamy Pop Head, 2008; RIGHT:  Douglas Coupland, Big Oil No.001, 2014

Dealing with what you call the ‘extreme present’, in what way do you think this particular time is more extreme for us experiencing it than say, those living through the height of Cold War tensions, or indeed, the fall of the Berlin Wall or other periods?

One of our new words is ‘Proceleration’ which means, ‘the acceleration of acceleration.’ Two forces make our present ‘Extreme’ in a way that is unique to now. The first is that technology is ‘procelerating.’ We live in a world where cars can drive safer than people and we land a spacecraft on an asteroid gezillions of miles away and all this is happening while we gulp our organic granola comforted by the knowledge our smartwatch will tell us if we are about to have a heart attack. At the same time, we are outsourcing more and more of our physical and psychical activities to machines. Our memories are in the ‘Cloud.’ It isn’t that the world as a whole is necessarily more volatile or extreme than before. But the way in which we experience and understand it is.

“No one 50 years ago, neither McLuhan nor Philip K Dick, predicted Google”

In another 50 years, if someone updates The Age of Earthquakes, what force of technology will be impacting culture and society? Will it take the form of Todd, the evolving AI app outlined in the book?

That’s a lovely speculation. But. We firmly believe that no one — not even futurists — know what the future is going to bring. No one 50 years ago, neither McLuhan nor Philip K Dick, predicted Google, even if some of its qualities have been imagined by poets and writers for centuries. The nature of technological invention, like McLuhan’s mind, is deeply non-linear and weirdly contingent. There are two invisible scales at which radical changes are taking place: the nano and the planetary. More and more we are just the hardware between these two tendencies, a sort of after-effect accident of our own inventions.

The Age of Earthquakes. Illustration by Wayne Daly

An impressive array of artists’ works accompany and illustrate the book, in many cases extremely appropriately. What brief did they have? Did any of the works inform the writing?

Wayne Daly is the graphic designer who has done to our book what Quentin Fiore did to The Medium is the Massage. His materials were our words and the artworks ‘mindsourced’ from 35 international visual artists. The process involved us sending the text-only manuscript to these artists with one simple request: if anything you read resonates with anything you’ve done or are thinking about, please send it to us. It yielded an incredible response. The artists vary in generation (many born after 1989, others just after WWII) and geography (South Africa, The Gulf, China, California). They deepen the neurology of the book.

We’re interested in the exponential way meaning develops when an image meets words. A third space emerges. It’s also simply how we are literate today on social media and the Internet. Images come with captions, and texts are illustrated with images. Our artists are the experts but increasingly so is everyone on the planet.

“Every day is just another unit of the ‘extreme present’ that may have nothing to do with either yesterday or tomorrow. Discontinuity is the new continuity”

What’s your favourite new word from the glossary – or Glossarium? Why?

‘Denarration (n.)

The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story.’

This is very real. It speaks about how, once upon a time, we were plugged into universal narratives (which may have been tribal, or religious), sharing what Jung called ‘collective archetypes.’ We’ve been on a hurtling journey ever since. And now, thanks to a corrosive cocktail of globalisation, neoliberal capitalism that feeds off precariousness, and tyrannical email inboxes that ping at us like seething jailors, our lives become a line-up of tasks where the safety of the middle classes can no longer be assured. Life doesn’t have a narrative arc under these conditions. Every day is just another unit of the ‘extreme present’ that may have nothing to do with either yesterday or tomorrow. Discontinuity is the new continuity.

Mike Pinnington

The Age of Earthquakes is available in paperback from Penguin now

Images from top: The Age of Earthquakes, Email for you: p2-3. Illustration by Wayne Daly
Splatter heads: p14-15.  LEFT: Douglas Coupland, Sexy Marshmallow Foamy Pop Head, 2008; RIGHT:  Douglas Coupland, Big Oil No.001, 2014
Portrait L-R: Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist. The three authors were 3D printed into miniature faux-marble busts. Photograph by Marc Falk
Cancellig all political parties. Illustration by Wayne Daly

Posted on 13/03/2015 by thedoublenegative