We’re Living Through Present Collapse

When the Past Becomes the Present Becomes the Past

In 2013, I read a book by Douglas Rushkoff titled Present Shock, which was a play on futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book Future Shock. The Rushkoff argument was that our society had shifted from a constant focus on the future into a state of perpetual “now.” That all tracked at the start of the social media age. Much of the gist still tracks today. You log on, and everybody is arguing over whatever the topic of the moment is (Enes Kanter?).

Last week I mentioned that my 2021 Nike essay got exhumed on social media, awarding me a burst of retroactive viral focus. In some quarters I was falsely hailed as a prophet for predicting Nike’s downfall, even though I didn’t make that prediction.

Then a stranger occurrence. Certain creators with sizable audiences analyzed the essay like it just happened. Apparently I was being lazy in the piece, neglecting to mention events that happened years after it came out. Because that’s how time feels in this social media age. The past and present are now all part of the same discourse singularity.

Denver Nuggets star Jamal Murray just went viral for saying he sleeps on an air mattress because he doesn’t need money. Except he didn’t just say that. As Murray pointed out, this comment was made 4 years ago. This keeps happening to NBA players, by the way.

Any bizarre past podcast comment they’ve fired off about money got dredged up this summer and presented on X like it was the latest insanity. I heard a lot of prominent content creators ask why the hell NBA players were all suddenly acting out of touch on this topic. The answer is, “They aren’t, but some did over a broader sweep of time, and now every instance is being curated and repackaged to look like an acute trend.”

NBA financial myopia is a low-stakes controversy, but it’s disorienting if not depressing to consider how, in a couple years, we might return to this cycle. NBA players talking about money will have another internet moment, and all these comments will again get recast as part of the newfound trend. People will again wonder, with confusion, why so many NBA players are suddenly acting out of touch on this issue. I believe it will go like this because, every few years, I see my 2016 Nike Steph Curry article get retold to a new mass audience, by some other creator, like it just landed. It’s been only 10 years and I’ve witnessed multiple cycles of telling, forgetting, retelling, forgetting and retelling.

It’s intuitive that the present might eat into our sense of the past. We only have so much attention, and as people age, a collective sense of history is lost. Few if any, though, clocked that the present would eat into our sense that the past is actually the past.

I first noticed this general flattening of time back when public figures were regularly getting cancelled. From about 2013-2022, we witnessed this repeated dynamic of people suffering consequences over comments made in eras that had different social rules. This was crazy to me. Since when did we start treating an old comment like a new one? Since when did we respond with outrage over an offhand joke from 5,10, maybe even 20 years earlier? Why must anyone now suffer over their “worst” public thought from the entirety of their public life?

But it more or less made sense in the Present Shock context. If I toss up a celebrity’s comment on the timeline it looks like it’s happening right now. It sits beside all the other present content flowing past my eyes. If there’s nothing to differentiate the old statement, it will get treated like a new statement. Then it triggers the collective social muscle memory of how we’d respond to a recently fashioned outrage. “Ya, but he said that 15 years ago,” just gets swallowed up in the storm of people rationalizing a Pavlovian-tripped anger.

Thankfully, that cancel culture era ended. You can see evidence of this when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refers to recent hysterias with, “Woke 1.0 was crazy.” She was talking about fashionably extreme political positions of that time, but connected to those stances was a prevalent fear of ostracism. Nearly everyone in public life was under some dangling sword of Damocles over what they said or might say. Some adopted hectoring “dry drunk” personas as transparent attempts at evading retroactive punishment for who they used to be.

At the tail end of those days, other writers would come to me, concerned about a past offhand joke they’d made to a suddenly fanatical media member. A lot of people were gaining attention and power over an ability to settle scores like this. A few years ago, writers stopped coming to me with these “back channel” worries. Media members aren’t sacred about this sort of threat anymore. Nobody cares about some “Words At” guy shrieking at you in 2026 because, in 2010, you wondered aloud if a celebrity is a, “feather or a dot Indian?”

I should probably explain what I mean by Words At Guy. Struggling journalists tend to put “words at” in their Twitter/X biographies because they can no longer hold down a whole job. I say that absent any happiness. Occasionally I want to dunk on some hater because I have survived and they have fallen, but I try to maintain a sense of, “There but for the grace of God go I.” The point is that this moment of retributive influence for a certain type turned out to be the death throes. You can only sustain so much cultural cachet as embittered members of a dying industry. That, or this era simply ended because Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022.

The Elon X Era disoriented the conversation in other ways. Suddenly you weren’t sure, to use a football term, “who’s who in the zoo?” Blue checks were no longer markers of public legitimacy. An attractive blonde lady with a MAGAPatriot handle was probably a guy from Pakistan seeking remunerative engagement. Many journalists kept fleeing to and returning from BlueSky. The “For You” tab caused the standard Present Shock conversation to be more chronologically jumbled. Combine this all with the proliferation of AI-generated fakery. You can’t be sure if a celebrity really said that in the clip. All videos are suspect. If the video is real, the time and location might not be.

Elon’s Twitter purchase arguably made the public discourse less crazy, because it injected some political balance into social media, but it also arguably made, or at least correlated with, that discourse getting more confusing. Today there’s even less of a clear collective sense of what’s happening, who’s saying it and when it’s been said. The public square is a disorganized cacophony. This chaos has filtered out beyond Twitter/X, leading to a general content haze.

We are no longer in Present Shock, but instead a Present Collapse. The now has folded into the past, making it difficult to differentiate one from the other. There’s a “present” in the sense that, there are current events. There’s a present discourse in the sense that, certain topics are dominating the conversation. But that conversation might be driven by cynically excavated clips that just happen to draft off what’s trending.

Here’s one example from this popular YouTube soccer podcast called The Overlap. It’s built around crotchety EPL great Roy Keane, similar to how Inside the NBA is built around Charles Barkley. One of the co-hosts is former Arsenal striker Ian Wright, nicknamed “Wrighty” by his buddies on the program. In November of 2025, Wright drew off his past experience as a Black English footballer to warn current British phenom Jude Bellingham of a coming media criticism storm. I noticed that the clip went viral during the World Cup this summer because it was often presented as though the advice had just been given.

People can agree or disagree with Wrighty’s perspective and tone, but the point is that it went more viral in 2026 than in 2025 due to a temporal misalignment. Wright’s speech read as bizarre in the context of this summer, because Bellingham was crushing the tourney as English fans belted out, “Hey, Jude.” The warning, repackaged as part of the “now,” garnered more of a reaction because it made less sense. There are likely many soccer fans who walk the earth believing that this was Ian Wright’s paranoid reaction to Jude Bellingham’s recent massive surge in popularity.

I dislike that this sort of deranging confound is now part of our culture. I also don’t really know what can be done about it. We’re inundated with too many clips, from too many directions. It’s been a shock to our understanding of the present. That shock has led to a collapse of what the present even means.