The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

by Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Shumon Basar

A highly provocative, mindbending, beautifully designed, and visionary look at the landscape of our rapidly evolving digital era.

50 years after Marshall McLuhan's ground breaking book on the influence of technology on culture in The Medium is the Massage, Basar, Coupland and Obrist extend the analysis to today, touring the world that's redefined by the Internet, decoding and explaining what they call the 'extreme present'.

THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES is a quick-fire paperback, harnessing the images, language and perceptions of our unfurling digital lives. The authors offer five characteristics of the Extreme Present (see below); invent a glossary of new words to describe how we are truly feeling today; and 'mindsource' images and illustrations from over 30 contemporary artists. Wayne Daly's striking graphic design imports the surreal, juxtaposed, mashed mannerisms of screen to page. It's like a culturally prescient, all-knowing email to the reader: possibly the best email they will ever read.

Welcome to THE AGE OF EARTHQUAKES, a paper portrait of Now, where the Internet hasn't just changed the structure of our brains these past few years, it's also changing the structure of the planet. This is a new history of the world that fits perfectly in your back pocket.

30+ artists contributions: With contributions from Farah Al Qasimi, Ed Atkins, Alessandro Bavo, Gabriele Basilico, Josh Bitelli, James Bridle, Cao Fei, Alex Mackin Dolan, Thomas Dozol, Constant Dullaart, Cecile B Evans, Rami Farook, Hans-Peter Feldmann, GCC, K-Hole, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Eloise Hawser, Camille Henrot, Hu Fang, K-Hole, Koo Jeong-A, Katja Novitskova, Lara Ogel, Trevor Paglen, Yuri Patterson, Jon Rafman, Bunny Rogers, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Taryn Simon, Hito Steyerl, Michael Stipe, Rosemarie Trockel, Amalia Ulman, David Weir, Trevor Yeung.

• ISBN10: 0399173862
• ISBN13: 9780399173868
• Publish Date: 3 March 2015
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Blue Rider Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780399173868

Reviews

[wcs53]

This was a different, but interesting, little book that I borrowed from the library. It wasn't your normal kind of book, being filled with what at first seemed to be randomly chosen pictures and text. However, there was a point to it all, which was pointing out how much the internet has taken over our lives and the ways in which this could be damaging or helpful. Although I could have read it in one sitting I chose not to, instead just reading a little bit at a time and allowing myself to reflect on it.

Some of the ideas if followed through to their extreme could seem quite scary or destructive. Some of them could also lead to one thinking about some changes that they could make to their reliance of being seemingly constantly online.

It could be a very quotable book and some of the ones I liked were:

'The future loves you, but it doesn't need you.'
'Going to a cubicle every few years or so to put a cross in a box no longer works.'
'Believing in something you know is stupid somehow makes it more believable.'
'But if technology is only a manifestation of our intrinsic humanity, is it possible to make something ultimately smarter than ourselves?'
'Doing nothing has become very hard to do.'

Anyway, it's an interesting little read that, if nothing else, makes you think a little about how much has changed so quickly in so short a time, leaving you wondering if there's much that can be done to change the way things are heading.