It wasn't until the end of the book when Reynolds mentioned William Gibson (to refute him) and his idea of "atemporality" that my imagination was fired up. Reynolds is baffled by Gibson, but I realized that I am totally aligned with what Gibson is talking about.
Gibson: "If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture."
There's also a great speech by Bruce Sterling called "Atemporality for the Creative Artist." He talks about "Futurity Now!" Which totally hits home for me. My sense too has been that the future has been discarded, it doesn't exist anymore as a thing out there before us, no it's here right now in our present. There is only the wildly-expanding NOW which encompasses the paper-thin present time and the enormous pool of information we call the past.
And Sterling puts his finger on the disorienting state we all live in now. The grand narrative thread has exploded. And history and the past is a chimerical beast, many-headed, and constantly morphing and expanding. We are all a little light-headed and swimming in information! The past is the future. The present is the future. The future is a mash up of the past and the present. Freaky cool!
Sterling: "There are new asynchronous communication forms that are globalized and offshored, and there is the loss of a canon and a record. There is no single authoritative voice of history. Instead we get wildly empowered cranks, lunatics, and every kind of long-tail intellectual market appearing in network culture. Everything from brilliant insight to scurillous rumor.
This really changes the narrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way that history cannot recover from. This is the source of our gnawing discontent.
It means the end of post-modernism. It means the end of the New World Order, which is about civilizing the entire planet, stopping all the land wars, repressing the terrorism. It means the end of the Washington Consensus of the nineteen nineties. It means the end of the WTO. It means the end of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’; it ended. And it’s moving in a completely different and unexpected direction.
The idea that history ended, and that the market sorts that out, and that the Pentagon bombs it if that doesn’t work – it’s gone. The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset."