Life today is live, real-time, and always on. It's not a mere speeding up, however much technology accelerated the rate at which we attempt to do things. It’s the shift to a persistent, perpetual presentism: everything pinging everything at once, all the time.

Living in the eternal present has affected our biology, behavior, politics, and culture: Zombie apocalypse fantasies signal our yearning for an ending; the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street form two sides of the same post-narrative coin; investing in the future has been replaced by a futile effort to extract value off the trade itself; the tragedy of 9/11 disconnected an entire generation from a sense of history, while conspiracy theories actually comfort us when linear stories no longer have time to play out.

This talk is about the new "now," how to develop for it, create content for it, do business in it and, most of all, live in it.

Followed by signing of exclusive SXSW-only advance copies of 'Present Shock.'