A Name For The Now

December 8, 2023 8:16 PM

In a meta-analysis of Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker essay about “what to call our chaotic era”, MetaFilter / Kuro5hin’s own Rusty Foster goes (slightly) long in his Today In Tabs newsletter about how the right name for the current era is “the Jackpot” -pace William Gibson-, Cormac McCarthy, and keeping going.
posted by Going To Maine (40 comments total)

Nice to see the term without capitalization (other than in the quotation from The New Yorker).
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 8:52 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Amos: Ain’t nothing to do with me: we’re just caught in the Churn, that’s all.

Kenzo: I have no idea what you just said.

Amos: This boss I used to work for in Baltimore, he called it the Churn. When the rules of the game change.

Kenzo: What game?

Amos: The only game. Survival. When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.

That's a quote from Amos Burton, a particularly memorable character from the TV show The Expanse. It runs through my mind a lot these days.
posted by MrVisible at 9:55 PM on December 8, 2023 [28 favorites]

Don’t know Gibson at all beyond the titles of one or two of his books, but I’d make a small bet he's alluding to Heinlein's famous 1952 short story The Year of the Jackpot.
posted by jamjam at 10:24 PM on December 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

The John Herriman essay about smartphones linked in the newsletter is also excellent.
posted by smelendez at 10:55 PM on December 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I call this age "nothing's wild" after a variation of Follow the Queen poker I used to play. When a Queen is dealt, nothing's wild until the next card is dealt. If it's the last card dealt of the round (5th Street in the explainer), there's a betting round but no one knows what the value of their hand will be.

How to work the job, be good & save for retirement when one could end up with Long Covid or be run over while bicycling or (any number of global catastrophes)? Maybe economies won't collapse with bottle caps becoming currency or maybe they will? Who knows? Nothing's wild!
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 11:25 PM on December 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Our near likely futures have been mapped most presciently by William Gibson and KSR.
posted by unearthed at 1:13 AM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can call it what you like, but you won't learn its real name -- the eggbeater? the lying? the close shave? the no can do? the in one ear? the shambles and shakes? the woo? the grapple? -- unless you're here for the all over.
posted by pracowity at 1:29 AM on December 9, 2023 [9 favorites]

I’d make a small bet he's alluding to Heinlein's famous 1952 short story The Year of the Jackpot.

That story has such a raw line of pulp:

"Aside from mathematics, just two things worth doing: kill a man and love a woman. He had done both; he was rich."

That just oozes Dashiell Hammett pulp goodness. I'm giddy.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:25 AM on December 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The short story

I'm not expecting the sun to blow up, so I don't favor Jackpot as a name.

If we're going to do Heinlein, I'd go with the more moderate "crazy years".

I wonder what he'd make of a once and possibly future ex-president who's both right wing and plausibly a supporter of Russia.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:02 AM on December 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

I'm tempted by Cthulhuscene (note spelling)-- the unspeakable is all too close and onstage.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:19 AM on December 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

frankly the spookiest, weirdest part of the current age is the atemporality of it. I dress like I dressed 25 years ago -without flinching or afterthought. Aside from 'smartphones' and the 'internet' which _have_ changed big swathes of things substantially, other equally big swathes have not changed at all. It's... weird, frankly. Walking through a flea market earlier today it occurred to me that we live in a time of surfeit of overflow. that so many things were made to be used and discarded but in fact they have not been discarded, they're still around, and sold as a thing to have and use.
posted by From Bklyn at 4:30 AM on December 9, 2023 [17 favorites]

unearthed: “Our near likely futures have been mapped most presciently by William Gibson and KSR.”

I said the same thing 11 years ago, but I feel compelled to point out that any such discussion is incomplete without mentioning John Brunner and his eerily prescient novels Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. I have said this before too, but if you have not read The Sheep Look Up, you should stop what you are doing and read it right away. While there is still time.

As William Gibson said in 2007, “No one except possibly the late John Brunner, in his brilliant novel The Sheep Look Up, has ever described anything in science fiction that is remotely like the reality of 2007 as we know it.”

Cf., “ The sheep look forward: Counterfactuals, dystopias, and ecological science fiction as a social science enterprise,” Kate O’Neill, Elementa, 15 June 2018
posted by ob1quixote at 6:18 AM on December 9, 2023 [26 favorites]

the shambles

British politics recently threw up the word "omni-shambles" to describe the state of our government.
posted by Paul Slade at 7:11 AM on December 9, 2023 [10 favorites]

I was thinking about this in the recent thread bemoaning the lack of focus kids have in education. Could I look at the world as it is and care about my grades or believe in a future where a degree mattered? It would be difficult.
posted by emjaybee at 8:57 AM on December 9, 2023 [15 favorites]

The John Herriman essay about smartphones linked in the newsletter is also excellent.

I like the point about subscriptions, and it reminds me of what folks have been complaining about in other threads re: digital media; you can't just pay for anything and be done with it anymore. Consumerism was always a shallow pleasure, but it is significantly eroded by the current reality where so much stuff you buy isn't even yours anymore. Or you buy some expensive hardware, but have to maintain and expensive hardware subscription in order to get real use out of your equipment. (And -- considering how often subscription terms are changing these days -- you can't even subscribe to something and stop paying attention to it, which is another source of stress.)

As for sci-fi inspiration: I've read too much Adam Tooze to ever let the Jackpot displace polycrisis as a useful term for intersecting problems, but every new product launch these days makes me think of the twitter joke about tech companies being inspired by sci-fi to create the torment nexus.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:06 AM on December 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Is Gibson writing a novel? I follow him on social media but I spend a lot less time on my phone than I used to.
posted by neuron at 9:49 AM on December 9, 2023

gonna throw out mine, "the Catabolic Dispensation", since "Cthulhucene" has already been offered. --Donna Haraway spells it "Chthulucene" which is charmingly obtuse.
posted by graywyvern at 9:54 AM on December 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've definitely seen "jackpot" used to mean "in trouble" from various serial mystery writers.
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:33 AM on December 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

Pretty sure he is. There are only two books so far in the Jackpot Trilogy.
posted by Windopaene at 11:03 AM on December 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Some time in 2021, as the pandemic (and thusly our pandemic groupchat) stretched on indefinitely, my friends and I took to calling it EGORN, which stands for "everything going on right now." I believe it came from one of us who works in higher education and had run out of mildly-euphemistic-but-not-cutesy-or-patronizing phrases to use in college-wide emails to students.
posted by penduluum at 11:08 AM on December 9, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'm working my way through Kyle's article but I'm having a hard time. I really want to read this but if he doesn't stop displaying his staggeringly flawed understanding of the Medieval European era (not to mention mentioning LOVECRAFT in the same sentence he misappropriates the meaning of Chthulucene). deep breath! deep breath!!
posted by supermedusa at 11:16 AM on December 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Simon Mayo, on the film podcast he does with Mark Kermode, referred to the Covid pandemic as “what with one thing and another” and I’ve often thought that phrase could be expanded to fit everything that was going on right now.
posted by Kattullus at 1:17 PM on December 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

the age of manufactured regret.

the era of wishful thinking.

the epoch of mine/yours.

the time of plasticine dreams.

the waiting years
posted by clavdivs at 1:41 PM on December 9, 2023 [7 favorites]

Agreed on The Sheep Look Up, ob1quixote. I just reread it and the despairing ending hit me as hard as it did the first time.
posted by doctornemo at 1:42 PM on December 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re: that Gramsci quote, it's been in my mind for some time now.

It led me to a couple of similar ones.

It is a time of confrontation, this transition, the time of transition of the old society to a new one that does not exist yet, but it’s being created with the confrontation of the ghosts.
-Paulo Freire in the 1960s

Something… was growing old and weak, dying out; and something new, young, energetic, and still unimaginable was in the offing. We felt it like a frost, like a spring in our limbs, the one with muffled pain, the other with a keen joy.

-Harry Kessler, about the end of pre-WWI Europe
posted by doctornemo at 1:45 PM on December 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

Woims?
But here me out:
"The worms are their money... The bones are their dollars..."
posted by symbioid at 3:03 PM on December 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

It's hardly a moment or a movement is it?

We've been daft enough to consider our tubes "the end of history" and it's plausible this is also "the great filter." The boot stomping my face barely gives me a pause for the leopard to eat my face, so I don't have a name for it.

The people who survive, I can't see them having any of the human qualities acknowledging privilege or being sheer-dumb-lucky to consider themselves the windfall of a jackpot, especially when nature, business and corporations amplified by machine-learning optimisers are trying to convert their atoms and molecules to other uses.
posted by k3ninho at 3:47 PM on December 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”

I can think of nothing more apropos than calling the modern era the Monster Mash, with all of the implied memey, ironic, whistling-past-the-existential-dread terribleness.

Actually I can think of something. The Monster Fuck even more-so.
posted by team lowkey at 6:31 PM on December 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Years of Finding Out (as in "fucking around and").
posted by gentlyepigrams at 7:11 PM on December 9, 2023 [12 favorites]

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born

That's very reminiscent of WB Yeats' The Second Coming:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As for what we're living in right now? It's that poem's Wideneing Gyre.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:51 PM on December 9, 2023 [5 favorites]

The churn is a fantastic concept, and the Gibson’s jackpot is uncomfortably apt (the third book is being written now, the Peripheral was great, Agency less so, but I have hopes that Jackpot will be great). And yes, if anyone was secretly a time traveler, it was Brunner, all of the novels mentioned above are worth tracking down, but they will not make you happy.

For me, though? What to call all of this? Simple.

Interesting times.
posted by Ghidorah at 4:17 AM on December 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

Our near likely futures have been mapped most presciently by William Gibson and KSR.

Sorry, but who/what is KSR?
posted by treepour at 6:49 AM on December 10, 2023

Kim Stanley Robinson
posted by snwod at 6:59 AM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I think we would be hard pressed to do better than Futurama's "the Stupid Ages".
posted by The Manwich Horror at 8:39 AM on December 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Futurama's "the Stupid Ages".

That's also a movie from 2009.
posted by doctornemo at 2:16 PM on December 10, 2023

Damn kuro5hin was not something I’ve thought about for at least 15 years
posted by youthenrage at 5:40 PM on December 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

> The Years of Finding Out

I love this.

I don't know if Gibson or someone else said it, but the Jackpot won't start with the AI singularity & didn't with the A-bomb or integrated circuit, but possibly with the discovery of oil. Maybe even coal and steam engines—human ability to carry vast stores of energy around unlocked the idea of deploying more than man or horse/ox power.

It also seems fair to attribute the beginning of "fucking around" to The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing which described double-entry bookkeeping. Systematizing store of value so some could accumulate wealth from the labor of others seems to have led, eventually, to growth at all costs and HyperNormalization (previously)

The Somebody Else's Problem Field, letting the marvel of steamships and locomotives be enjoyed without worrying about externalities was invented well before harm with global reach was possible, but is also a key ingredient.
posted by ASCII Costanza head at 9:11 PM on December 10, 2023 [5 favorites]

Since I first came across it I've found the "neijuan" (内卷)? , or The Involution to work well for capturing my sentiments for the current milieu . Neijuan, is defined as the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘rolling,’ and represents something that spirals inwards on itself.

Originally, involution was about a high-level equilibrium trap that more labor input was simply eating any additional food that was produced. Xiang Biao defines it as the constant spiraling increases in investment where you don't know where the end is but you know its a process that traps you even though you won’t benefit from the extra work.
posted by zenon at 11:45 AM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

I like 'the Reckoning' for its undertones of 'wreck' and 'wreak', for the overtones of cognizance in that we now know it’s here and cannot be evaded, and for the sense that it’s a form of justice.

And just in case you’re not worried enough about where we’re headed :

A massive new review of ancient atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels and corresponding temperatures lays out a daunting picture of where the Earth’s climate may be headed. The study covers geologic records spanning the past 66 million years, putting present-day concentrations into context with deep time. Among other things, it indicates that the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide consistently reached today’s human-driven levels was 14 million years ago—much longer ago than some existing assessments indicate. It asserts that long-term climate is highly sensitive to greenhouse gas, with cascading effects that may evolve over many millennia.
[…]
Mainstream estimates indicate that on scales of decades to centuries, every doubling of atmospheric CO2 will drive average global temperatures 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) higher. However, at least one recent widely read study argues that the current consensus underestimates planetary sensitivity, putting it at 3.6 to 6 C degrees of warming per doubling. In any case, given current trends, all estimates put the planet perilously close to or beyond the 2 degrees warming that could be reached this century, and which many scientists agree we must avoid if at all possible.

In the late 1700s, the air contained about 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. We are now up to 420 ppm, an increase of about 50%; by the end of the century, we could reach 600 ppm or more. As a result, we are already somewhere along the uncertain warming curve, with a rise of about 1.2 degrees C (2.2 degrees F) since the late 19th century.
[…]

The most distant period, from about 66 million to 56 million years ago, has been something of an enigma, because the Earth was largely ice free, yet some studies had suggested CO2 concentrations were relatively low. This cast some doubt on the relationship between CO2 and temperature. However once the consortium excluded estimates they deemed the least dependable, they determined that CO2 was actually quite high—around 600 to 700 parts per million, comparable to what could be reached by the end of this century.

An ice-free Earth resulting from carbon dioxide levels we'll reach by the end of this century.
posted by jamjam at 12:30 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

just ice-free justice
posted by snuffleupagus at 12:45 PM on December 11, 2023 [1 favorite]