We play a modern game by a modern set of rules, and just found that there is a name for the game–the extreme present–by listening to a few men and women discuss it on a stage in London recently. It is not our main game, but the game we play to enable our main game to succeed. We upload, we post, we tweet, we text and we otherwise try to catch your attention in order to have the chance to convince you that our issues should be your issues, and that you should come to our places to support our issues in those places.

We call our main game entrepreneurial conservation and we use modern communications technology, and its social media tools, and the whole bundle of scary social implications that come with those, to play that game. The scary social implications are not only in the form of people constantly looking and pecking at their smart phones.

Listen to this discussion to get the big picture. It takes a bit of effort to find the podcast of those men and women on the London stage, because as of this moment it is only available on iTunes, but we believe it will be worth the two extra minutes, and then the hour of listening. In iTunes paste this link, and then find the title below as one of the most recent podcasts:

THE EXTREME PRESENT: AN EVENING OF SELF-HELP FOR PLANET EARTH

With Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland and Hans Ulrich Obrist

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’?