The greatest challenge to human life today is "will the individual triumph? Or will the mob impose itself onto everyone else?" says Douglas Coupland.
"I'd prefer individuals to win but they may well not. It's easy to trick people into believing the strangest things - and a lot of people really don't like being individuals," says the Canadian author and artist, a cutting-edge social critic since his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture defined an era.
Asked how much life has accelerated since then, he says, "That was 24 years ago. Things have changed by roughly 78 per cent." Could he be mocking the question, as that other Douglas (Adams) did when he said the meaning of life and the universe was "42"?
Coupland will speak at the Sydney Writers' Festival in May about the rapid changes in the world and our brains caused by the internet, which he describes in a new co-authored book, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present.
Speed is inevitable and slowing down is impossible, he says via email from an airport lounge in Paris. He used to miss his "pre-internet brain" but has forgotten what it felt like.
"Many people are underestimating the scope of change we are currently undergoing - treating it like it's only here for a visit ... but it's not leaving. So we may as well try to develop new language for describing what it feels like to be in this new world."
He coins words such as deselfing, monophobia, smupid, and Zwischsendingen, which describes the present as between "two events that demarcate turning points ... the 9/11 attack was the first big thing, but we don't know what the second is yet."
As Google's artist in residence in Paris, Coupland is depicting those ideas and a "portrait" of the internet. He has a survey show in Canada of artworks that use Lego, chewing gum, found objects and smartphones, and is preparing other shows in Europe and Shanghai.
Coupland sees Canada as different from the United States in significant ways: Canadians often put the group ahead of the individual and wilderness ahead of people. Australia, he says, is far more like Canada than like the US.
"Australia lacks population pressure, mass political corruption and environmental degradation, so you're lucky. Things could get bad there and you'd still be ahead of most of the planet."
The way for individuals to survive, he says, "is to figure out what it is you actually like doing - and then do it. That way you'll always be up to date because you'll always be interested and engaged. Many people go to the grave without ever figuring out what they enjoy doing."
Even Coupland can be defeated. Our interview ends when he writes, "My laptop battery is at 23 per cent and I don't have my French power adapter with me. That reminds me, the last time I was in Sydney the transformer I needed in my hotel room weighed 20 pounds and was larger than a breadbox. That tells you how long ago it was."
The Sydney Writers' Festival program is in Spectrum in Saturday's Sydney Morning Herald.
