Ring Roads, After the Crash and The Age of Earthquakes: Guide to the Extreme Present

The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present

This book has been written by a triumvirate of whom I had only heard of Douglas Coupland before. He of idiosyncratic and rather spurious texts such as Generation X – books full of interesting concepts pushed beyond the bounds of credibility.

Of the other two, Hans Ulrich Obrist is Serpentine gallery director and Shumon Basar is a writer with a passion for Jean-Luc Godard, which kind of figures when you look at the layout of this book, for it is a collection of graphics and text – part manifesto, part new-age grimoire, part resigned ode to we slaves of the digital age.

This book is like a series of screen grabs from an Adam Curtis documentary, only less coherent. There is plenty of cod psychology, plenty of jargon and plenty of bullshit.

The book opens by telling the reader they have mail, before being informed that their internet obsession is destroying the planet. Cue statistics, jargon, disaster porn: “Welcome to the world of earthquakes”.

This is supposed to be a book about futureshock: these guys are the inheritors of Marshall McLuhan, with their mediums, messages and global ghettoes. Unfortunately the authors have cut-and-paste intellects and slogans for theories: “Have you ever noticed that... our lives are no longer feeling like stories”.

Nope. Same old soap opera going on around here. You get the impression that the authors live rather sheltered lives. Perhaps like a latter-day Morecambe and Wise, they sleep together with their gadgets?

“I’ve just lost two hours inside a YouTube kitten warp.”

Really? I read books to get away from shit like that.

“The natural human attention span is the length of one Beatles song.” And Revolution Nine is more structured than this pile of piffle, this snake oil, this balderdash.

“Rodney King was the YouTube of 1993.”

Coupland is the Von Daniken, Basar the Velikovsky, Obrist the David Icke of 2015. Futurism, Technofear, call it what you will, this stuff is done better elsewhere by countless sci-fi nutters, Dadaists, Surrealists, Situationists and their ilk.

It comes across like a cross between Kurt Schwitters and Banksy with all the humour and brains sucked out of it. A post-modern Winston Smith or Gee Vaucher totally depoliticised. It is banal, stupid, a wank mag, I guess for Generation X. It is Nostradamus on twitter. Perfect for the followers of Steve Bong.

If, like myself, you have a low opinion of the species, you will find your prejudices confirmed and then some until you revolt. You know someone out there will swallow this tosh, but hopefully not too many, we’re surely not that far gone?

Part propaganda, part arty comic, the overall look is faux Neville Brody, but again devoid of the grey matter. I prefer my charlatans to be more entertaining, less pseudo-intellectual. Less graphic and more content driven. I like my crackpot theories to be a little less half arsed.

“The future is a practical joke, that you have yet to acknowledge as such...” So maybe this is a jokebook for the apocalypse, the ravings of the mentally impaired or just a crap cyberpoem for the digitally challenged, about as extreme as Nick Clegg’s toenail clippings. The genre is immaterial, as it fails to interest on any level.

And don’t even attempt reading this on an e-ink reader, it becomes a total mess but then again how dada is that? Perhaps this will find a natural home on a Hoxton hotdesk or to languish in the loo of a student household, but as a giftThe Extreme Present it certainly isn’t. ®

Author Douglas Coupland, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Shumon Basar
Title The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present
Publisher Penguin
Price £14.99 (Hardback), £7.99 (eBook)
More info Publication web site