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Douglas Rushkoff Time Ain T Money Analysis

Decent Essays

Throughout the manifesto, “Time Ain’t Money”, by Douglas Rushkoff, deliberately creates a persona that is straightforward to address the views of CEO’s, and how they run their companies. Rushkoff designed this essay with specific sections intentional written in a certain order to communicate his message clearly. Throughout these ideas Rushkoff creates a key term to further express his idea. In the essay, Rushkoff uses a word, “presentism”, which he made up to describe the process of how, “society is focused on the now over the past, and even the future” (Rushkoff 114). In the essay, “Time Ain’t Money”, Rushkoff uses examples to show presentisms authority on culture change. Rushkoff uses examples of presentism to show authority on culture change. …show more content…

Rushkoff talks about how society is living in the now “presentism”. This is important to Rushkoff because he wants CEO’s of businesses to strive to catch up with society and stop running their businesses like it was the Industrial age. This analogy Rushkoff uses helps understand and further explain how presentism has become the social norm, while pushing out the past and future. Rushkoff states, “On the analog clock, each second is a portion of a minute, and each minute a portion of the day. Time is in motion. On the digital clock, time is static. A number. A now” (Rushkoff 114). Rushkoff uses two different types of clocks to represent how we have gone from having time in motion, moving forward to the new digital clocks, which does not show active motion all the time the only motion we see is when the numbers change over. This is an interesting analogy because it really gives us a plain and simple way to understand his key term presentism. The clocks also tie into culture as well. Our culture has changed from the industrial era where we were looking to the future, to the modern era where we are focused on what is happening right now, and not thinking of what is going to happen later or what has already happened. Since we now are only concerned with the present it has begun to shape the way we see history. “Consumers care less about the story….” (118). Rushkoff really brings us into society and how history has fallen to the …show more content…

Stocks and trades also come into play with the idea of presentism, in how the investors in society are focused on the quick and fast trades versus investments and waiting for a profit. “They whined when a purchase of Facebook share in the first few minutes if the company’s IPO didn’t return a profit over the next hour” (Rushkoff 115). Rushkoff has noticed how our society has become increasingly impatient which is a drastic change from 10 or 20 years ago. Customers want their packages as soon as possible, it’s no longer acceptable to wait it has to be done now. Again Rushkoff talks about time in our culture, Rushkoff claims, “Without time, without any history, how do you tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end?” (Rushkoff 115). Without time stories don’t exist, there is no past or future, just right now. In today’s culture presentism dictates how we do anything, we can personalized everything. You can get a specific thing without having to buy other things to get what you want. We can buy a single song without buying the whole album. We are no longer hindered with having to buy everything in order to get the one

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