Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff

connect while in transit. The plane had some sort of WiFi while we were over land, but someone kept trying to make Skype calls, which crashed all the passengers’ connections. After the flight attendant restarted the system for the third time, I gave up, took a pill, and fell asleep to the movie. I tried again from my iPhone at the airport but couldn’t log on. Now that I was at the hotel with plug-in power, I knew I’d have an easier time catching up with all that was waiting for me.
    The emails with the most little red exclamation points next to them came from an executive in New York desperate to find a speaker for an event about Internet ethics. I knew I had a talk in Missouri on the day following his event but thought that maybe I could do the New York talk in the morning and still make my flight to Missouri that afternoon. I just had to log in to my Google Calendar to make sure. Google said I was using an unfamiliar IP address, so it wanted to ask a few questions to make sure I was really me. My childhood pet, my city of birth . . . that’s when my thirty minutes of connectivity ran out. I went to the front desk for another little slip of paper with a password on it and got back online and back to the place where I needed to prove my identity to Google. Except now Google was really upset with me. It said I appeared to be attempting to access the site from too many locations at once. As a precaution, Google would lock my account until it could verify I was really me. Google wanted to send an automatic text message to my cell phone so I could authenticate my identity—but my cell phone did not work in Germany.
    So in the haze of that rainy German morning, I foolishly decided to keep planning my digital-era schedule without access to my digital-era calendar. I replied that I would accept the morning talk as long as I could manage to leave before noon to make my flight. And as you may have guessed by now, by the time I got back to New York where I could verify my human identity to my Google media extensions, the calendar had a different version of my future than I did. My talk in Missouri was the same morning as the New York talk—not the morning after. Oops. Present-shock nightmare: I was supposed to be in two places at once. No matter how digitally adept I get, there’s still only one me.
    Unlike humans who might treasure their uniqueness, digital media’s most defining quality is its ability to be copied exactly. Digital files, even digital processes, can be multiplied and exist in several instances at once. This is something new. The real-world, analog copies of things we have known up to now are all efforts to remain as true as possible to some original source. Even the movies we watch are struck from an internegative of the movie, which is in turn struck from the original negative. Like successive photocopies, each one contains a bit more noise—but it’s better than playing the original negative repeatedly and wearing out the source. In contrast, digital copies are indistinguishable from the original. They don’t take a toll on the thing being copied, either. In a sense, they are not copies at all. Once created, they
are
the original.
    In the analog world, the original must be preserved, and copying slowly destroys it. Every time the original negative is run through the printing machine, it is further degraded. Flash pictures are prohibited at museums, because each exposure to light slightly dims the brilliance of an original painting. Unlike such photos, digital copies are not impressions made off a master; they are originals themselves—more like clones than children, capable of carrying on new activities as if utterly reborn in every instant.
    People are still analog.
    Leveraged appropriately, the immense distributive power of digital production and networks gives us the ability to spread our ideas and expressions, as well as our power and influence. We can produce effects in more than one place at a