Shumon Basar, writer, thinker and cultural critic, Douglas Coupland, the renowned author of Generation X, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the world’s best-known curators discuss Extreme Present.

In the space of just 20 years, the internet has transformed us completely. It has changed not just the structure of our brains, but the structure of the planet. Our attention spans have narrowed to the length of a Beatles song. Our lives used to feel like stories; now they’ve collapsed to a perpetually refreshing stream of tweets and posts. We outsource our memory to the ‘Cloud’, and remember nothing we don’t have to. All that exists is immediately in the now. The internet, like all technologies, is not being shaped to resemble humans. Humans are being shaped to resemble the internet. Welcome to the age of the Extreme Present.

Shumon Basar, writer, thinker and cultural critic, Douglas Coupland, the renowned author of Generation X, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of the world’s best-known curators, have joined forces for a special event with Intelligence Squared to explore the challenges that the planet faces in the Extreme Present. Ours is an era so unfamiliar that in their book, The Age of Earthquakes – their 21st-century update of Marshall McLuhan’s seminal 1967 book The Medium Is the Massage – Basar, Coupland and Obrist have developed a new ‘Glossarium’ to describe the unsettling experiences of the always-on, networked age. Do you suffer from ‘monophobia’ (the fear of feeling like an individual) or from ‘connectopathy’ (a range of irregular behaviours triggered by the rewiring of our brains)? Do you spend more and more of your time ‘deselfing’ (willingly diluting your sense of self by plastering the internet with as much information as possible) or, as technology makes you ever smarter yet leaves you feeling ever more stupid, maybe you – along with everyone else on the net – have begun to feel ‘smupid’?

New times require new means of understanding. Come and hear these three commentators on the digital age conduct a rapid-fire event on March 5, together with a panel of eminent experts, as they examine the neurological, social, cultural and geological effects that the Extreme Present is having on our brains, our lives and our planet.

Speakers

Shumon Basar

Writer, thinker, cultural critic. His edited books include Translated By, Cities from Zero and Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews Volume 2. He is Commissioner of the Global Art Forum in Dubai, editor-at-large of Tank magazine and contributing editor of Bidoun magazine, director of Format at the AA School, London, and an adviser to the Fondazione Prada, Milan.

Douglas Coupland

Author of more than 13 novels, including Generation X, Microserfs and Girlfriend In a Coma. He began a visual art practice in 2000, and his first museum retrospective opened in summer 2014 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, moving to Munich’s Villa Stuck for summer 2015. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and is a regular columnist for the Financial Times.

Hans Ulrich Obrist

Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London since 2006. He is widely considered one of the most influential contemporary curators in the world and is the author of many books, including Ai Wei Wei Speaks, written with Ai Wei Wei, and Ways of Curating.

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COMPETITION: Win 1x pair of tickets to attend The Extreme Present at the Emmanuel Centre on Thursday 5 March at 19:00. To enter the competition, send an email to bojana@run-riot.com with the correct answer in the ‘subject’ box. The winner will be randomly selected.

Q: Which term for a low-paying, low-prestige, dead-end job did Generation X make famous?

A: 1) McJob 2) Day Job 3) No Job Job