1.
In 1967, the editor Jerome Agel described a forthcoming book—entitled The Medium is the Massage (authored by himself, Quentin Fiore and Marshall McLuhan)—by saying “it predicts the present.” This is an uncanny phrase, as one would expect him to say, “it predicts the future.” In the same year, author JG Ballard told an interviewer that he had given up setting his speculative stories in the far future, and instead he was now paying attention to the present, because it could splinter into a thousand different weird, and unpredictable ways. The present was swallowing everything up. And since then, the present has an outsized power in our lives and imaginations. In fact, the present is an operating system of so many of our prevalent hysterias, traumas and anxieties.
2.
Look around. Everywhere are collapsed narratives: is democracy dying? Is it hotter each year? Does technology make us less human? Will genocides last forever? There’s a widespread feeling that things we once held onto as unchangeable, fundamental facts are now ending. Every crisis is, in a sense, a collapsed narrative. I encapsulate this collective sentiment in one of my recent neologisms, “Lorecore,” which is:
“an era, belonging to digital capitalism, characterised by people’s existential need to storify themselves at the very moment global narratives collapse.”
There’s a sister term too, which I call “Endcore,” defined as:
“The era after the end of eras. Marked by a final, historical ending in sight; while simultaneously noting that such an end never actually arrives.”
Endcore, thus, is a verb, a predicament, a texture of the time we call the present. It’s an unnerving, queasy contemplation we have entered an “after” era — but it’s not after one thing (like “modernity”), but it’s after everything. As the meme goes, what if we kissed at the intersection of Lorecore and Endcore? For, that’s where the present is.
3.
When Endcore began, were you reading Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life, where he said, “The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations…”? What if all there is now, is the present? An “Extreme Present”? The future was once hard to predict. That uncertainty now belongs to the present. Every morning, we wake up and the world has changed yet again from when we went to sleep a few hours before in ways we couldn’t have imagined: scientifically, environmentally, psychologically, sexually, politically, mythologically.
4.
During narrative collapse, everyone temporarily abandons attempts to reach narrative consensus. It’s a sensation where change keeps changing. This gives rise to what I call, “Change Vertigo,” the:
“disorientation brought on by change changing faster than one’s ability to comprehend it on a daily basis.”
But are we built for so much change so quickly? Technology has outrun our ability to absorb the present.
5.
Often, it’s not until we see that change translated into culture (a film, a book, a game, a song) that we apprehend the sheer extent of what’s happening. Reality needs this translation function for us to fully perceive reality. Same too, with the present. When I interviewed the science fiction author Ted Chiang, during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and asked him if it is harder to write fiction when the present feels so unreal, he replied, “It’s very difficult to write satire nowadays because reality has become so absurd. It’s hard to write fiction set in the present or near future because of the risk of seeming dated. But… fiction helps us make sense of our lives; it offers a shape to the shapelessness of real events.”
And this has made me think one of the hallmarks of the present is, “Sci-fi Realism,” which I define as:
“when everyday life is sufficiently indistinguishable from science fiction that it becomes the dominant tool to decode and narrativize our disturbing present.”
6.
The present isn’t just the present anymore. The present is a collection of interdependent time-perception packets: the recent present, the extreme present, the near present, the long present. We mostly feel the present, and rarely understand it. It’s a secret known by everyone and comprehended by none. The present works the same way as a joke: the more you try to explain it, the more it falls apart.
7.
When it comes to how the brain processes time, neuroscience has surprisingly few answers, only theories. It is said that you can’t point to a specific part of the brain and say, “this is where time happens.” But there’s more consensus that the brain’s window of perceiving “the present” is between 2.0 and 2.5 seconds. When you hold your thumb at the top of your phone screen and drag it down, to refresh the content and dopamine feed, it sometimes takes between 2.0 and 2.5 seconds to complete. You — and your brain — are suspended between the previous and the forthcoming present. You’re inside a time threshold. You’re nowhere, except in aroused anticipation of the fractionally further present within touchable distance.
8.
What happened to progress, you may ask. I can’t tell whether the present is getting better but feels worse. Or, whether the present is getting worse, but I feel better about it. Progress, like the present, is paradoxical, and anamorphic: it really depends upon where you are looking from and where you are looking towards. However, whilst progress is unevenly distributed across the world, the present is ubiquitously universal.
9.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," wrote Joan Didion, in 1979, a significant year from the 20th century that launched us to where we are today in the 21st. Ask yourself, does your life still feel like a story you can share and expect to be understood? Do the Stories you post (each a few seconds long) to the feed, feel something like a life? The personal and the political, the economy and the nation, memory and expectation — all arrive at us as stories, vying for our attention, and our distraction. Perhaps right now, we live — and listen — in order to tell ourselves stories about the present? What phase of the Self is this? I call it, “EPTSD: Extremely Present Traumatic Stress Disorder.”
10.
You know the present is happening when you start feeling scared.
– Shumon Basar is a writer, thinker and curator. He is author of the books The Extreme Self: Age of You (2021) and The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present (2015), both with Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Together, they co-curated the large-scale exhibition Age of You at MOCA Toronto and Jameel Arts Centre, Dubai. Basar is also Commissioner of the Global Art Forum in Dubai; a member of Fondazione Prada’s “Thought Council”; and has editorial/advisory roles at the magazines TANK, Bidoun, 032c and Flash Art.