The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

by Douglas Coupland, Shumon Basar, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Planet Earth needs a self-help book, and this is it

The future is happening to us far faster than we thought it would and this book explains why

Fifty years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture, The Medium is the Massage, Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.

The Age of Earthquakes is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.

Welcome to The Age of Earthquakes, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

Genres: Nonfiction, Technology, Philosophy, Art, Design, Essays, Science

256 pages, Paperback

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first story written specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. A TV series (13 one-hour episodes) based on his novel, jPod premieres on the CBC in January, 2008.

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Retrieved 07:55, May 15, 2008, from http://www.coupland.com/coupland_bio....

Reviews

[Caz (littlebookowl) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very, very interesting and thought-provoking!

[Sam Quixote · Rating 2 out of 5]

Want to read something enormously pretentious? Try The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist!

I picked this one up because I’m a Douglas Coupland fan and thought a nonfiction book about the current state of the world sounded interesting. Be warned though: this is a not a real book in the sense that you think. It’s a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as a book, and a really crappy one at that!

Almost every single page is either an image with a superimposed nonsensical phrase or an imageless page with a nonsensical phrase. “A one-way trip to Mars would actually be okay if it had smoking hot wifi”, “There’s no shopping in Star Wars”, “Photographing your salad turns it into a ghost” and “The world is too interesting and too boring at the same time” are just some of the bon mots we’re treated to by these geniuses.

Coupland and co. go on to state the bleeding obvious: climate change is real, internet addiction is on the rise, and time seems to pass more quickly on the internet as we get distracted with one thing after another whenever we’re online. Real insightful, guys, we definitely needed you three to tell us these things!

Like he did in Generation X, Coupland (I’m assuming it’s him anyway) offers up new words and definitions for our times. For example, “Smupid” means that we’ve never been more smart or more stupid because of all of the information available to us online. Except having access to more information doesn’t make us smarter, it just means we have easier access to that information, it doesn’t mean we necessarily understand that information, so that definition doesn’t work.

Of all the useless new words created though, one stood out as pretty good: “Detroitus” which is a conflation of Detroit and detritus to describe the fear of becoming like Michigan. That said I don’t agree with the assessment that everywhere will be like Michigan in the future and the argument for that is, like everything else in this book, shallow and rushed.

I understand why the book is presented in this way given that the authors have convinced themselves that general readers nowadays have lost patience with long-form writing and can only consume information in Tweet-sized pieces with lots of images. Maybe for some but are those people going to pick up a book for information or go looking for it on their phones?

And I still think there’s something to be said about words on a page - and more than one sentence per page too! The best part of this book was the Todd short story at the end which was two pages of regular-sized text but was quite clever and more memorable than the 250 or so pages of preceding pap (there’s a total of six pages of full text in the entire book!).

If you’re a Coupland fan, or are interested in futurist texts, I don’t recommend buying this book but if you find a copy flick to the back and read the Todd short story - that’s the only part of The Age of Earthquakes that’s worth reading. If you’re not a fan of these writers or genre, you were never going to bother with this anyway and you’d be right to do so!

This PowerPoint presentation is condescending, smug, pointlessly pessimistic, and way the hell up its own bumhole - garbage pseudo-intellectual posturing!

[Sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the dumbest "book" in the world. It's like looking at banksy condensed into a book about the internet and the "future"...ooOOOOoohh!!! To be frank I was already concerned while flipping through the pages and seeing quotes like "I'm seven IPHONES old" and "photographing your salad turns it into a ghost". DO NOT READ THIS BOOK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Because it is clearly written by people who don't understand anything about how the future relates to the internet. Pretty much reads like some poorly-constructed, out of touch phrases about the potential harms of using the internet and how it can and WILL cause to your BRAIN to turn to SLIME!!!!!! Only reason I gave it two stars is because I liked the design.

[Sara Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Age of Earthquakes - an extremely thought-provocking little book with both graphics, text and pictures to capture themes such as technology and how the internet is shaping us.
As a whole, the book tries to capture the essense of this new era we are living - with information and where people can be online whoever it is they wish to be. I loved how it is not trying to shove any conclusions down out throats - it is a book, it is presenting something... you have to figure out its message by yourself.
Very interesting.

[Elizabeth A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book blurb: A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era.

Okay, let me try to talk about this one: It is a little book with text and graphics. It can be read in one sitting, but I decided to do it in two. Each double page spread or two could be used to spark very interesting dinner conversations. You could start reading this book at any page, but I'd suggest for the first read through that you read it front to back. There are things in this one that gave me pause, and really made me think. I will be reading this one again.

Honestly people, I not sure how to even describe this book, but I highly recommend you get your hands on a copy pronto.

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was a great fan of Doug Coupland's "Generation X" back in the last century--- a book I read when it first appeared, and one that did articulate so much of what I felt about the world and what it was becoming. Let's say that I liked "The Age of Earthquakes" in the same way. It has the same view of what's happening to us--- some cocktail of wry, fey, elegiac, nostalgic, and mournful.

"Age of Earthquakes" is formatted like Marshall McLuhan's forgotten 1960s classic "The Medium is the Massage"--- collages, photos, small embedded essays, aphorisms and memoranda. That's hardly a coincidence, mind you. "Age" is an overview of a world where knowing everything is possible in theory, and we've come to realise how tedious that can be.

The malaise of the age, Coupland says, is that we can no longer regard our lives as stories rather than a series of tasks. Algorithms complete our narratives and set the terms of what narratives are allowed to count. Life comes to be a series of discrete tasks, and Coupland envisions a global economy where seven billion largely interchangeable units compete to perform increasingly fragmented tasks for an increasingly distant and abstract global upper class. Coupland's world of 2030 would be one without a sense of story arc in our lives--- when at last you die of neglect in a run-down nursing home, he says, you'll have had 17 different, utterly temporary careers, and none of them with a pension or health care. And you'll have no way to think that your life was ever a story you were writing or that it had any conceptual unity.

Wm. Gibson is famous for saying that the future is already here, just not evenly distributed. Insofar as Coupland is right (and I think he is) that'll be remedied soon enough...though we won't like it very much at all. No dramatic dystopia, just...a fragmented kind of greyness.

[Monia De · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a first quick look, this book seam you can just open it and read any page at any time. But instead, I decided to read it from the beginning to the end in one continuous shoot and it was a surprising experience. The book is structured within specific topics, still instead of reading them autonomously, you can read page after page and enjoy the discovery of an overlay of stories. This book is for me almost like a film: I got it, ‘pressed play’ and dived in as if I was at the cinema watching a film.
Reading it was a constant wondering 'what's next ...' and I read it without pausing as an immersion and an experience. And I loved the moving from one page to the next. Sometime you slow down because you are captured by the immediacy of the graphics, or by the definitions of some words such as 'time shrink' or 'crisisis', or by the pages filled with texts asking you to ‘Imagine…’ .
There are not only topics, but also questions that build up subtle stories in between the pages, from 'Have you noticed that… our lives are not longer feeling like stories?' to 'Life may not be a story, but it can definitely be an adventure (true or false)'. We crave stories now more than ever, and this book offers a story and an experience. It is like a movie, or at least it was for me. I suggest to seat back, enter the world the authors are offering, and enjoy it.

[Shelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh man, I have book hangover. This book has beated my brain to a pulp and spat it out. So many questions, not enough answers.
I dare you to read this book...

Video Review: http://youtu.be/09gzCGSGhzo

[n · Rating 4 out of 5]

the future loves you, but it doesn’t need you

*

mortifying as anything that reminds me I’m too dumb for the future; desensitizing as anything that reminds me that suicide is always an option.

[R L · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book sucks. Hot takes include: (quote) “technology cannot be alienating because humans created it”, and: cultural discourse is “hysterical” - leave moderates alone. Both cold and glib, it falls flat from a lack of engagement with the huge questions it skins across, and it’s distant, patronizing, un-empathetic framing. Shout out to it’s ending note that the authors have “permanently gone away to join Earths last uncontacted tribe” securing all previous impression that the authors have little of value to add to this conversation and should be using their respective fame and platforms more responsibly.

[Charles Quinn · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the form of the book. It's alternative literature. Combination pictures and text designed to disrupt the reading experience. It's beautiful in it's own weird way, and well done.

However I struggled to connect to the information.

There was some bits of prose that was genuinely hard to read. I'm not sure if that's because the pictures had my brain searching for more pictures and made it too complacent to focus on the text. Or maybe the random disjointed way of presenting text made it difficult to follow line after line.

The quality of the writing, and how easy it was to slip into, also varied wildly as there were three separate authors, which I'm going to refer to as one "the author" from now on.

I had no cultural context for a lot of what the author took as default. largely that I was too young and too poor to relate.

There were many areas where I wanted to tell the author that their experiences were not universal. That we don't all remember the stock market crash because we were too young and didn't have any hope of ever having money. That we don't all fear falling down the social class system because some of us don't have very far to fall. And that we don't all take holidays swearing to not check our email only to fail two days later because we can't afford holidays and only have uninteresting spam emailed to us.
The author could also not imagine every inviting someone to come over to your house to then each go on separate laptops and internet together. My generation considers this just as normal as visiting someones house to watch tv.

I am much more used to alternative fiction showing someone whose life experiences are not represented in media. The poor and the sick and the young.

This lead me to one lasting question.
Why would a wealthy old guy want to write a book in this form?

[kari trail · Rating 4 out of 5]

what can i say, i will nerd out over editorial diptychs, internet musings, and tactile books on non-tactile subjects any day! thoughts on: desensitized attention spans, tech as ecotourism, accelerationism, offline loneliness, and being present (if possible!) in a digital world. it’s interesting because it doesn’t just rely on the writing or the witty design, but rather the clever exchange and overlap between the two. tongue-in-cheek but not glaringly irreverent. love!

“have you maybe noticed that our lives are no longer feeling like stories? our lives are becoming a lineup of tasks? our sense of time is beginning to shrink? the ultimate sequencing dysfunction is the inability to look at one’s life as a meaningful sequence or story.”
&
“here’s an idea: maybe it’s ok to no longer want to be an individual. and maybe feeling unique is no indication of being unique…yet it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls.”

[Anu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh gosh, I guess I was due for another existential crisis. So, I found this book at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and then flipped through it. It seemed interesting, so I got it from the library.

Anyways, it is a conversation about technology and the internet and how that is affecting the current human existence. What does it mean for us? And, as a conversation, it asked a lot of questions and gave a lot of answers, but no conclusion. It left me to ponder: does the internet really make us more connected? If so, why do so many of us feel isolated? Is going on social media considered connecting with your friends? What if you sit in a room together and all individually go on social media? And why does my life feel shorter, faster, and less exciting? Is the 40hr work-week really my goal in life?

I don't know the answer to all these questions, but it is making me think about how I use technology. Am I even capable of an individual thought? Regardless, I know when I go on long hikes and I'm in a tent with no cellular service or wifi, and with some good pals, I feel happy. I need to remember that I feel happy and connected in nature.

[sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was very delightful, existential questions mixed with dark humour and interesting illustrations in a poetry like way. right up my alley.
i also read this while laying in the first actual warm sun of the year which made it even better.

[Tessa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh.

[Mut]

me interessei por esse livro pela apresentação gráfica, não tinha lido nada nesse formato antes a achei bem interessante. é interessante também como o conteúdo e a forma remetem fortemente ao assunto que o livro se trata. o conteúdo soa muito como um livro de não ficção que serve pra te ensinar algo, mas diria que é mais um livro de poesia/vibes em cima da internet. recomendo se quiser ter uma vibe internetística em forma de livro e ver uns designs visuais massas.

[Konrad Z · Rating 4 out of 5]

reading this in a chat gpt singularity era 11 years later after the book was published feels super dystopian in an almost comical way

[Anthony Sudol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully designed and punchy, this book is as much a piece of art as a text. It suggests that our digital and physical lives are steadily ceasing to be separate entities, yet it asks more questions of the reader than it answers. The focus often deals with extreme hypotheticals and can jarringly switch tracks, but this lends itself to the fact that there is a great deal of unknown when discussing topics of mass communication, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality.
Well worth the read, and easy to get through despite having a lasting effect.

[Léo · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the scattered thoughts, facts and observations.
Throw them in a bucket, shake, and administer with a syringe...
Stay connected, disconnect,
keep it social in isolation.
whats next?

Insightful, disturbing, provocative...
open your mind.

[MORBUS UNTERMOND · Rating 5 out of 5]

many thanks to Patrick for recommending me this. it was amazing.

[verbena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is this a book? I’m not sure
Did it blow my mind? Yes

Please read (?) if you are alive in the modern age and use the Internet

[Reid · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was not impressed at all with this book. I think this is an interesting topic, and I’ve often enjoyed books in this type of format, so neither of those were the problem here. Here are a few things that particularly stuck out to me in the first few pages:

“Twenty years ago the Internet used zero per cent of human energy consumption”
My first thought here was Wow, this book is only 3 years old and already sounds outdated. My second thought was Wait, that’s probably just not true at all, even at the date of publication. I can’t find any statistics on how much energy was being consumed by the Internet in 1995, but it wasn’t 0. Maybe it was under 1%, (round to 0) but even if that was the case, this seems like an intentionally misleading statement.

“Have you maybe noticed that… … our lives are no longer feelings like stories?”
Honestly no, I don’t feel that way at all.

“… our lives are becoming a lineup of tasks?”
Did earlier generations not complete tasks?

“Fact: The Internet makes you smarter and more impatient. It makes you reject slower processes invented in times of less technology: travel agencies; phone calls; reference libraries; nightclubs.”
a) Pretty sure slowness has very little to do with why fewer people are using travel agencies. Maybe it’s more to do with things like cost, lack of control, etc. b) This one seems relatively true. c) Reference libraries are slower, true, but they can also become quickly outdated which can be a major issue depending what kind of research you’re doing. d) What?! How do nightclubs fit into this? First of all, I’ve never heard anyone describe a nightclub as “slow”, and secondly, are people rejecting them now more than before? As far as I can tell, nightlife is alive and well- and even if I’m mistaken about that, I sincerely doubt that slowness has anything to do with it.

“My mother knows what an algorithm is. She’s 77. That’s just weird.”
How exactly is that weird? Your mother is a real person. 77 year olds can learn things too. 77 year olds are living on the same planet that you are. Computers are a big part of that planet. Would you still think it was weird if it was your 77 year old father? (Maybe you would, I’m not jumping to conclusions- I just can’t help wondering.)

“Proceleration (n.) The acceleration of acceleration.”
This already has a name- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(p...

That last item was on page 51 and in my opinion it’s just downhill from there. Lots of provocative pseudo-scientific and/or pseudo-psychological and/or pseudo-political and/or pseudo-philosophical statements presented as facts without ever any evidence or even arguments to back them up. Lots of broad, sweeping statements. To the authors: no, your experiences are not at all universal. I have rarely read anything that came off as so incredibly out-of-touch. People from different social classes, different age groups, different areas of the world, etc. all have differing experiences and perspectives. One example that kept coming up: 7 billion people are NOT on the internet. In 2015, the year this book was published, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that less than half that number has access to the internet. 7 billion people are not constantly bored. 7 billion people are not able to relate to this book at all. If anyone who hasn’t read the book already is reading this, know that I’m using the example of 7 billion because the book literally references “7 billion people” over and over again throughout. Am I at peace with the statistical inevitability that I am most likely downwardly mobile? Just about anyone born after around 1990 has known this to be that case for basically their entire lives, so yeah, I guess so. You miss doing nothing because you spend to much time on your “devices”? Must be nice being so rich that these are the kinds of problems you have. If you want to put your phone down for a minute then put it down. The rest of us miss doing nothing because we have to spend all our time working to pay our rent. (Not sure about Basar or Obrist, but Coupland’s net worth is estimated to be between 175-208 million dollars- just saying. I hate economic equality too, but hearing a person who has a net worth (using the lower estimate of 175mil here) approximately 20x higher [in the USA which seems to be the focus of the book, more than 25x higher in Canada where he lives, and over 225x higher worldwide] than the cutoff for being in the top 1% complain about the 1% feels pretty insincere.)

I *would* love to connect with the person on Earth most identical to me, though. And I liked the Jenny Holzer reference. There were a couple other things here and there that I found interesting, but overall this book was an enormous let-down.

[Tod Wodicka · Rating 5 out of 5]

(My review published originally in The National, March 12th 2015)

If you’ve spent time with a 2-year-old these days, perhaps you’ve seen this: handed a storybook or a magazine, the child, after tiring of a picture, will swipe her finger over the page, and often keep swiping with mounting frustration. The technology of turning a page is somehow more cognitively advanced than the touchscreen world that so many are now born into. This is adorable, obviously, but also kind of ­terrifying.

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present is a book-shaped security blanket for that child’s parents.

Shumon Basar, one of the book’s three authors – the others being famed novelist and artist Douglas Coupland (Generation X) and Hans Ulrich Obrist, widely considered the most influential contemporary art curator in the world – has described the book as being like “a paperback that’s swallowed a smartphone. Or a book for swiping fingers. Maybe even, a new history of how we feel in the world today?”

Not only does The Age of Earthquakes have three authors, but it has a designer, Wayne Daly, and the contributions of more than 30 artists, including the UAE’s Farah Al Qasimi and Rami Farook, and even former REM frontman Michael Stipe. Despite this, the book feels singular, cohesive and familiar, its voice like the internet’s voice wiped clean of stupidity and horror. It is not a book with a plot, necessarily, or a book with chapters. There are not a tremendous number of words in The Age of Earthquakes. Each page you turn is like a link you have clicked, thematically related to the last page, but often in surprising ways. It is like a grown-up picture book, written in the internet’s language of memes – those internet catchphrases or pieces of media that spread from person to person: instant messages, kitten photographs, anxiety-inducing security questions and definitions for words everyone seems to know but you. (“Deselfing (n.) Willingly diluting one’s sense of self and ego by plastering the internet with as much information as possible.”) It is a book not only inspired by the internet, but seemingly written by the internet. It is as if the internet gained not only artificial self-consciousness but wisdom – and then became your pal.

Like the internet, it is also addictive. There is the double page spread of two Sims-like people sitting on a bench, with the words: “On the internet, until proven otherwise, always assume the person on the other end is a 40-year-old pony-tailed guy wearing a diaper.” One page simply says: “I miss getting emails from Nigerian princes.” Another explains the Singularity: “You either know what the Singularity is or you have no idea whatsoever. Knowing about the Singularity is one of the new class demarcations of the 21st century.” The next page says: “Waiting for the Singularity is getting dull.” Another asks: “Where does personality end and brain damage begin?” Things get dark, as the book begins to pick at the slow death of the middle class. “Welcome to Detroit,” one page says, over a photograph of burnt-out buildings and uncompleted high rises. “In the future everywhere will be Detroit.”

The Age of Earthquakes could nearly fit in the pocket of your trousers. That “nearly” feels important. Despite its design and theme, it is not electronic, and takes advantage of the stability of print and matter to give weight to otherwise ephemeral modes of themes. It is self-consciously a paperback, or “relentlessly paper”, as Obrist has said. The dissonance between the object and its content draws attention to itself, and, in doing so, makes it feel more like a book than most books. This is similar to the way that reading a book on an e-reader draws attention to the traditional ways books are supposed to look and feel: so much technology devoted to making a screen reflect light like actual paper. Needless to say, your 2-year-old will find this all amusingly quaint in 10 years.

Like so many versions of our present future, The Age of Earthquakes began in Dubai.

Shumon Basar has a long, fruitful history with the UAE. He first arrived in 2005, drawn by the rumours of visionary urban growth that included vast islands in the shape of palm leaves or even The World itself. He co-edited two books, Cities from Zero and With/Without, that attempted to capture the frenetic transformation from pre- to post-industrial state, from West to post-western world. And he’s been back and forth ever since.

Fittingly, I spoke with him over the internet, shortly after he, Coupland and Obrist returned from having their entire bodies scanned into a 3-D printer and made into full-colour six-inch figurines. The idea of creating an action-figure voodoo doll of yourself feels like something out of The Age of Earthquakes. “None of us remember the first time we saw a photograph of ourselves,” Basar says, “but we will all remember the first time we encounter ourselves in 3-D miniature form. It’s a spooky, future-now, feeling.”

I asked Basar about the origin of The Age of Earthquakes.

“In 2012, I gave the Global Art Forum, in Dubai, a theme of ‘The Medium of Media’. This was an explicit reference to the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan, who coined the term ‘the medium is the message’ in 1964. Arguably, McLuhan invented media studies, and gave it the same importance as literature or anthropology. At the time, Douglas Coupland had recently written a fascinating biography on McLuhan. So, I invited Doug and Obrist to the forum. The three of us probed the prophetic relevance of McLuhan’s ideas for the 21st century. We imagined what he’d make of the internet-addled world today.”

How did Dubai colour their relationship? “The three of us share an interest in what makes the current historical moment the way it is. We always find that when we’re in Dubai, our thinking goes all High Definition, and our senses feel more vivid. One of our new words is ‘Proceleration’. It means ‘the acceleration of acceleration’. That’s what Dubai and parts of the UAE have been for the last few decades.’

The Age of Earthquakes feels like something you want to share. Both in the old-fashioned way – while reading, I called my girlfriend over and showed her particular pages – and in the modern way: it was hard not to want to copy-and-paste pages, link them, post them to social media, email them to others. Which is to say, it is a fun read. But one that makes you question how you read, why you read and just how much the internet has restructured our brains.

Putting the book down, my overwhelming emotion was sadness, as if I had just finished a very sad novel where none of the characters die at the end, but things aren’t necessarily going to go their way either. Things are out of their control. Things could turn on them at any second. I remember thinking: I never want to see another screen again. I want to log off now and forever and roam the hills, live in a cave, have happy little butterflies land on my fingers.

I asked Basar about this. Is this creeping sense of unease something the book is going for or does it say more about my personal relationship with technology? “Well, the Extreme Present we define as the current historical moment when the future seems to be happening much faster than we ever thought it would. Symptoms include your life not feeling like a story any­more; you not feeling like an individual any longer; seismic shifts in the structure of your brain and of the planet caused by the internet; waiting for something smarter than us – and dreading what that might be.

“This has led to enormous changes in the texture of life. These changes include shortened attention spans, an intense dislike of inactivity, new ways of consuming old and new forms of culture, new relationships with history, an addiction to speed and memory, the expectation of all needs being met on-demand, and new ways of perceiving both the near future and the distant future.”

So it’s not just me?

“The stuff about the butterflies,” he said, “is probably just you.”


[William Stanger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a different, but interesting, little book that I borrowed from the library. It wasn't your normal kind of book, being filled with what at first seemed to be randomly chosen pictures and text. However, there was a point to it all, which was pointing out how much the internet has taken over our lives and the ways in which this could be damaging or helpful. Although I could have read it in one sitting I chose not to, instead just reading a little bit at a time and allowing myself to reflect on it.

Some of the ideas if followed through to their extreme could seem quite scary or destructive. Some of them could also lead to one thinking about some changes that they could make to their reliance of being seemingly constantly online.

It could be a very quotable book and some of the ones I liked were:

'The future loves you, but it doesn't need you.'
'Going to a cubicle every few years or so to put a cross in a box no longer works.'
'Believing in something you know is stupid somehow makes it more believable.'
'But if technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, is it possible to make something ultimately smarter than ourselves?'
'Doing nothing has become very hard to do.'

Anyway, it's an interesting little read that, if nothing else, makes you think a little about how much has changed so quickly in so short a time, leaving you wondering if there's much that can be done to change the way things are heading.

[Jon Zellweger · Rating 3 out of 5]

“A Guide to the Extreme Present” gives this art book a short half-life. An additional 7 years of rotating around the sun has served an useful purpose of being able to see much of the content/claims materialize or at least feel more feasible. Mind you, this was written in a pre-Trump/pre-MAGA and pre-QAnon era. The Guardian had not broken the Cambridge Analytica story. Ultimately, this is a thought starter about the (potential) future arrival of the Singularity. Our authors begin with some startling statistics like that the energy used to power the internet in 2015 was the same amount of energy used to light the entire planet in 1985. The remainder of the book contains a series of pseudo-definitons and aphrorisms about how we interact with the internet and those objects and phenomenons generated in that interaction: how we feel offline vs. online; how our personalities shift; how loneliness and a sense of community paradoxically exist simultaneously; how AI will eventually record so much data about you that your essence is, in effect, online —possibly moreso than IRL; what makes us unique, or human, or where does our soul reside (I did enjoy the inserted quote from G.K. Chesterton, “You don’t have a soul. You *are* a soul. You *have* a body.”) Not essential reading, by far. If one sauntered through it, its still only 90 minutes of your time…if your attention span can handle that anymore.

[Viktoriya Kokareva · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you made it to the Extreme Present and Extreme Self series, you highly likely already went through McLuhan and Zuboff and Doctorow and etc. and etc. Thus you probably came here not for the new information but for the points that can push the talk on the topic further.

Basar-Coupland-Obrist creations in general feel more like small portable exhibitions on the state of the modern world and less like books or just graphic works. They are also pretty anxiety-inducing so don't let the thin volumes trick you as one might need to take all the information in portions.

Considering it a 2015 work many of the themes have been seen through and through by 2022 (hey, let's come back to the point of how the concept of time is suppressed into short iterations that follow each other way faster than before). However, there are still some interesting thoughts that have not become yet too researched by this time: how the energy we consume while using the Internet influences our ecology, the made-up terms of "deselfing" and "undeselfing", how we have to relearn to be bored in order to take care of our mental state.

All in all, I'd advise reading this to anyone who is interested in the data culture, researching it or working with interactive arts.

[Natalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoy books that challenge exactly what a book can be. This little number here looks at our generations love affair with the internet and what that means. I liked the part where it discussed how knowing everything is boring. We have the chance to access unlimited amounts of information about almost anything and rather than inspiring us and making us more clever we're left feeling apathetic and bored, a sensory overload. This book only took an hour or so to read and made many interesting points but didn't fully indulge them as much as I personally would have liked, however can also see the irony of that and that probably was intentional. It is definitely very clever, witty and thought provoking. A good start to anyone wanting to explore their relationship with the modern world, but not meaty enough to answer all your questions but rather a base point for questioning and rethinking just exactly how much the world has changed and how quickly and what effect that has on humanity,

[Athena Pournara · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is okay and you can easily do it in one sitting since it’s not text-heavy. You do get a couple of pages that give you scenarios/food for thought.

I see some people complain about the structure of the book, as it does not resonate with other pieces of informative texts or stories, but rather displayed through images in combination with text. I actually like it.

I do believe the design of the book is in-fact on purpose. it’s structured like this because it highlights that we humans are so detached from reality and that reading a physical copy of a book, has been overruled by us being so digitally involved. It’s a book designed to mimics scrolling, you’re not staying on one page for more than 1 minute (exceptional for some pages) since the text is very minimal so you just go onto the next page. It’s accustomed to our “attention span” that pre-occupies the reader to keep them reading. Very clever.

[h9nniie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Super interesting read however I felt like it switched between topics too quickly for me to get fully immersed (besides the Imagine… pages, those were fun).
I wish it delved more into individualism in tandem with social media addiction and considering this book cane out in 2015…I wonder what it would consist of in a new edition pertaining to Tiktok.
After Tiktok’s ban and subsequent un-ban, I have a hard time returning to a platform that a) seems on very shaky ground and b) was making me pretty unproductive in the first place. I’m trying not to go back but in doing so I feel a twinge of negative self-righteousness. Am I better than others for not engaging in social media or worse and a pretentious fuck? This book makes me think both. More at 6.

[Thomas Hunt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoughtful and quick read that describes how technology has had an effect on our human lives and will affect our future. The combination of images and words, obviously reminds me of Marshall McLuhan's the medium is the massage, also an excellent book and incredibly thoughtful. Though you might just flip through this book there is a narrative and it is worth reading it from cover to cover. Like most Douglas Copeland's large graphic books, there's an occasional page or two, where he takes off a moment and tells a complete story. Definitely one of the best parts of this strange, thoughtful little book

Transcribed by https://otter.ai