Narrative Collapse
What if it’s even worse than if the conspiracies were true?
Comedian Brendon Lemon honored and humbled me by creating a TikTok video about some of the ideas of Present Shock. We’ve been playing email tag for a decade or so, but when he explained and expanded on the idea of Narrative Collapse for his TikTok followers, I felt not only heard but relevant.
There’s nothing better than inspiring a comedian, particularly one who can help us to see past the existential horror of our fractured narrative, to mutual recognition and common ground we discover by laughing at our absurdity, together.
Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with my new friend, Brendon Lemon.
Douglas Rushkoff:
When I grew up, we had narrative to help us make sense of things. John F. Kennedy said “we’re going to land a man on the moon and we’re gonna stick a flag in it.” And we knew what it would look like to have won. We had Martin Luther King saying “we’re gonna to march arm-and-arm down Fifth Ave,” or “I have a dream,” and we knew what it meant to get to that dream.
We had these stories about who we were, how we came to be, and what lay before us. An immigrant family would say we worked hard to get you to school so you could be a doctor (which I didn’t, I broke narrative) but the stories gave us a sense of where we were in the arc. We used it to orient ourselves. It felt less like existential despair when we had a story.
Present shock and digital technology and the eternal “now” is really disorienting and scary. We’re desperate so we try to tie things together, connecting the dots to creating pointillist narratives — what I called “fractalnoia.” People would rather believe there’s a coherent plan by an elite to eliminate three-quarters of the planet with a virus than believe nobody knows what the fuck is going on. That everybody is as honestly clueless as Jimmy Carter was in the third year of his presidency, when he told us to just wear sweaters and be nice to each other. (And I see that as a strength.)
Is the narrative itself, the story — as I’ve believed, as Brecht believed, as I’m sure all those French semiotic guys you’ve read believe — a fake, palliative care for the existential despair and ultimate Ernest Becker denial-of-death that we’re all going to have? Or is the story kind of real? Are narrativity and linearity real, and now we’re simply suffering from a temporary inability to rely on it in order to find it again?
Brendon Lemon:
The fever pitch of your neuroticism around this is so perfectly in tune with how I feel we should be. Somebody once told me when I got off stage, “It’s almost like the entire subtext of your standup comedy set is you asking, what the fuck?!” I’m like, yeah, dude, that’s how I feel a lot of the time.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Right. We don’t even have the space to get George Carlin angry about it or Bill Maher cynical about it. We’re still two steps before.
Brendon Lemon:
You touched on something with Present Shock that I feel many creatives who had our antennas up for a while could feel, but couldn’t really describe, which was a breakdown in the fundamental structure of our interpreted reality that made it unintelligible. It felt like we can’t touch ground anywhere.
It’s almost like we have our five senses, and then we have this sixth sense, which is an assembled narrative that we can put together. The weird thing is, if a technology like glasses came into being, and in these glasses everything was tinted by a corporate structure that attempted to want you to visualize the world in a very particular way, like rose or amber colored, it’s almost as if that has screwed up our ability to make a narrative that sticks and makes sense. I think that inherent fracturing has caused all the symptoms you’ve talked about. It’s really weird to try to exist in this type of reality because there hasn’t been any narrative that does make sense.
There was a legacy programming that came around after World War II that said, hey you were part of this country, your people came here, and now you’re here, and if you work hard, you can succeed, and this is the way we all believe, and everybody’s always done this, and this is the way it’s always gonna be.
The weird thing about that program was starting in 1971 and throughout especially the Reagan era, it has been increasingly fractured through neoliberal policy after policy. You’ve done a very good job outlining it, not just in Present Shock, but also in your most recent book Survival of the Richest, which I feel was an indictment of the environment we’re now living in. It’s a good description of our inability to assemble a narrative in the world, because what it’s done is created a space in which self-interested, powerful, mostly corporate entities have been able to take advantage of the gaps in that space and what’s opened up in that narrative.
Douglas Rushkoff:
And not only have they taken advantage of the gaps, but these dudes are also victims of Present Shock. They are the last chapter of that book, which I called Apocalypto, which is that world-ending obsession. So where does the billionaire go with Apocalypto? Survival of the Richest! You upload your brain and you build a bunker!
Brendon Lemon:
I think that the situation that we live in is really pretty dire, but one of the worst ways is I think a lot of the people who you are talking about in Survival of the Richest — a lot of the billionaire people who are going to the World Economic Forum — are people who truly believe they have figured it out. They’re getting massive amounts of money. They’ve received massive amounts of wealth and tons of attention, the likes of which no pharaoh in ancient Egypt ever experienced. And they can’t help but believe they have the answers to all of these questions, because everything around them is telling them that they do. They really, truly believe in the answer they’re going to give, which is, “hey, we’re going to accelerate ourselves through this process.”
They’re completely numb to the fact that there are massive amounts of externalized costs they produce all the time from the endeavors they undertake. That’s actually worse than if they were the heads of the conspiracies people believe in.
