Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (33 page)

In
28 Weeks Later
, well-meaning American troops work to rebuild England by putting survivors in a protected green zone and even firebombing the innocent in a desperate attempt to quash a zombie insurgency. The movie’s undead ruthlessly attack anyone for flesh, and its weaker characters choose to save their own skins instead of protecting their wives and children. The film’s heroes distinguish themselves and redeem our view of humanity through acts of self-sacrifice. It turns out, however, that they’ve sacrificed themselves on behalf of a child who carries the virus and goes on to infect the rest of the world. Humanity, like civil liberty, is no longer a strength but a liability.

In the TV series
The Walking Dead
, as well, we are to question who truly are the ones who have lost their humanity—whatever that may have been. In the season three finale (the most-watched basic-cable hour ever) the protagonist murders his best friend and squad car partner—who just so happens to be in love with his wife. The writers are at pains to cast the humans as not simply responding as necessary to apocalyptic circumstances, but using these circumstances as an excuse to act upon long-repressed impulses. The zombie apocalypse not only relieves us of our highly stressed, overcivilized, and technologically determined lives, it reveals the savagery and selfishness innate to our species. We have no morality separating us from brute nature or even lifeless matter, so we humans may as well be walking dead.

TRANSCENDING HUMANITY

For all the flesh eating going on in the zombie genre, there’s something positively flesh loathing about the psychology underlying it. People are the bad guys. Apocalypto seems less about transforming the human species than transcending it altogether. In neither the hallucinations of psychedelic 2012 end-of-worlders nor the scenarios forecast by techno-enthusiast extropians do we humans make it through the chaos attractor at the end of time—at least not in our current form. And why should we want to, when human beings are so loathsome, smelly, and inefficient to begin with? The postnarrative future belongs to the godhead, machines, cockroaches, planetary intelligence, complexity, or information itself.

Of course, it’s not really the future, since—according to a good many of these apocalyptans—time will have stopped entirely. To them, present shock is not a metaphor at all—not a state of confusion or a dynamic between people and their increasingly presentist society—but rather an existence outside time. That’s part of what makes it so fantastic to think about, but also so inhospitable to cellular organisms such as you and me.

To understand this strain of present shock, we have to go back to the fractal and the way it inspires people to look for patterns. My first exposure to the logic of apocalypto came through an old friend of mine, a shamanic explorer with a penchant for Irish folklore named Terence McKenna. Terence, one of the most articulate stoned heroes of the psychedelics underground, saw in fractals a way to pattern time itself. Back in the 1970s, he and his brother Dennis spent several months in the Amazonian rainforest, ingesting native mushrooms and other potent psychedelics. During these vision quests, the brothers experienced themselves traveling out of body, inside the body, and through the core of human DNA. After a particularly harrowing excursion in which one of the brothers got “lost” between dimensions, Terence became obsessed with navigating this timeless terrain. He wanted to make sense of the infinity of the fractal.

He emerged with a new understanding of time as having an endpoint—a “teleological attractor,” as Terence put it—drawing us toward greater interconnectedness and complexity. The increasing intensity of our era can be attributed to our nearing the event horizon of this attractor. It’s basically like a waterfall or black hole in the time-space continuum that we are drawn toward, fall through, and are then utterly changed—if we make it out the other end at all. According to McKenna’s schema, things keep getting more and more complex, interconnected, and unbearably strange, like a really weird and scary acid trip, where everything becomes part of the same pattern. Once everything ends up connected to everything else, reality itself reaches a singularity—a moment of infinite complexity in which everything occurs simultaneously. It’s a moment of absolute present shock, in which history and the future and present fold into one another, ending time altogether.

Terence immediately set upon figuring out just when this might happen and ended up using the sequence of the
I Ching
—the Taoist Book of Changes and divination system—as the basis for a numerical formula that maps the rise and fall of novelty over any period of time. McKenna’s Timewave Zero, as he calls it, is a shape—a linear graph—that is to be overlaid on the time line of history in order to figure out when things get weirder or less so. With a little bit of rejiggering, McKenna was able to lay out his zigzaggy repeating fractal pattern in such a way that the biggest period of the graph ended right on December 21, 2012—the same day purported to be indicated by the Mayan calendar as the end of time.

For McKenna, who ended up dying before the prophesied end date, the increasing “novelty” in the world—from war and market crashes to disease and environmental disaster—are not signs of death but of birth. He often remarked that were a person who knew nothing of human biology to come upon a woman giving birth, he would think something terribly wrong was going on. She would appear to be dying, when she was actually giving life to a new human being. Such is the state of a civilization on the precipice of the singularity.

The problem is, not everyone makes it through the attractor at the end of time. According to McKenna, only those who can successfully navigate the all-at-onceness of a posthistorical reality will be able to make sense of existence there. By inference, the object of the game is to do enough strong psychedelics now so that you’ll know how to navigate a landscape as precarious as the one a person visits while hallucinating on the rainforest psychedelic DMT (dimethyltryptamine).

One person who surely qualifies is author and spiritual teacher Daniel Pinchbeck, whose own interactions with the Amazonian vision plants convinced him that he could hear the voice of the Mayan god Quetzalcoatl. The plumed serpent warned Pinchbeck of humanity’s abuse of the planet, while also confirming the imminent shift beyond time, scheduled for 2012. The signs of the next age are everywhere: crop circles, ESP experiments, particle physics, UFOs, time travelers, and so on. While Pinchbeck’s global transformation may also be an exclusive event, limited to those who “get it,” at least he has dedicated himself and his network of followers to mitigating the impact of this shift on the rest of us. Pinchbeck is an advocate of permaculture farming, local currencies, and other techniques through which we may combat the materialism currently guiding human activity.

Again, though, making it through the attractor at the end of time requires more than mere compassion or a willingness to work together. We must abandon individuality altogether and accept our place in the new cosmic order. We surrender our illusion of distinctness and admit that we are part of nature. We sacrifice Father Time to return to Mother Earth. Human progress has been a sham—a painful, costly, and destructive detour, or, at best, a necessary stage in our release from the shackles of matter altogether.

Such narratives find their origins in the writings of theologians such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the early-twentieth-century French Jesuit priest and paleontologist who saw human beings evolving toward an Omega Point of supreme consciousness. Just as cells joined up and evolved into organisms, we humans will evolve together into a greater single being. It’s a nice image, and one I’ve contemplated on numerous occasions, but not a stage of evolution that feels particularly imminent—no matter how many Facebook friends I happen to accumulate or how overwhelmed I become by the virtual connections.

IT’S THE INFORMATION, STUPID

None of this increasing complexity would be a problem if it weren’t for our darned human limits. That’s why the latest breed of apocalyptans—an increasingly influential branch of the digerati who see technology as the true harbinger of the singularity—mean to help us accept our imminent obsolescence. Echoing the sentiments of the ancient ascetic, they tend to regard the human physical form with disregard or even disdain. At best, the human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.

The notion of a technologically precipitated singularity was popularized by futurist and electronic music engineer Ray Kurzweil. In his book
The Age of Spiritual Machines
, Kurzweil argues that human beings are just one stage in the evolution of matter toward higher levels of complexity. Yes, cells and organisms are more complex than mere atoms and molecules, but the human capacity for continuing development pales in the face of that of our machines. The very best thing we have to offer, in fact, is to continue to service and develop computers until the point—very soon—when they are better at improving themselves than we are. From then on, technological evolution will outpace biological evolution. Whatever it is that makes us uniquely human, such as our genome or cognitive functioning, will have been mapped and virtualized by computers in around 2050, anyway. We may as well stand aside and let it rip.

Thanks to Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, technology develops exponentially and has been doing so since time began. But it is only getting really interesting now that we have rounded the bend of the exponential curve to a nearly vertical and infinite shot upward. The antithesis of the Law of Diminishing Returns, the Law of Accelerating Returns holds that technology will overtake humanity and nature, no matter what. In his numerous books, talks, and television appearances, Kurzweil remains unswerving in his conviction that humanity was just a temporary step in technology’s inevitable development.

It’s not all bad. According to Kurzweil, by 2029 artificial intelligences will pass the Turing test and be able to fool us into thinking they are real people. By the 2030s, virtual-reality simulations will be “as real and compelling as ‘real’ reality, and we’ll be doing it from within the nervous system. So the nanobots in your brain—which will get to your brain through the bloodstream, noninvasively and without surgery—will shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with senses that your brain will be receiving from the virtual environment.”
²
Just be sure to read the fine print in the iTunes agreement before clicking “I agree” and hope that the terms don’t change while you’re in there.

Slowly but surely, the distinction between our real memory or experiences and our virtual ones ceases to have any meaning. Eventually, our nonbiological mechanisms take over where our biological ones leave off. Consciousness, such as it is, is better performed by some combination of microchips and nanobots than our old carbon sacks, and what we think of as people are discontinued.

Kurzweil may push the envelope on this line of thought, but a growing cadre of scientists and commentators have both wittingly and unwittingly gotten on his singularity bandwagon. Their credentials, intelligence, and persuasiveness make their arguments difficult to refute.

Kevin Kelly, for instance, convincingly portrays technology as a partner in human evolution. In his book
What Technology Wants
, he makes the case that technology is emerging as the “seventh kingdom of life on Earth”—along with plants, insects, fungi, and so on. Although he expresses himself with greater humility and admirable self-doubt than Kurzweil, Kelly also holds that technology’s growth and development is inevitable, even desirable. Yes, certain technologies create problems, but that just opens the opportunity for yet another technology to mitigate the bad. Isn’t that just an endless loop of negative and positive outcomes, in which humanity is eventually frayed beyond repair? Kelly disagrees:

I don’t think technology is neutral or a wash of good and bad effects. To be sure it does produce both problems and solutions, but the chief effect of technology is that it produces more possibilities. More options. More freedom, essentially. That’s really good. That is the reason why people move to cities—for more choices.
³

So, those of us who think the answer to the technological onslaught is to slow things down might want to think again. In
What Technology Wants
, Kelly makes quick work of both the Unabomber and the Amish, whose resistance to the growth of technology is futile, or even illusory. The Unabomber depended on bombs and the US mail system to attack technology; the Amish depend on hand tools that are, in turn, produced in high-tech factories.

Where it gets discomfiting, however, is when Kelly insists on technology’s all-consuming nature. “It is an ever-elaborate tool that we wield and continually update to improve our world; and it is an ever-ripening superorganism, of which we are but a part, that is following a direction beyond our own making. Humans are both master and slave to the technium [his word for the technological universe], and our fate is to remain in this uncomfortable dual role.”
⁴

There is no way back, only through. Kelly admonishes us to “align ourselves with the imperative of the technium” because to do otherwise would be to “resist our second self.”
⁵
Humanity and technology—like humanity and the zombies—are ultimately indistinguishable. “The conflict that the technium triggers in our hearts is due to our refusal to accept our nature—the truth is that we are continuous with the machines we create. . . . When we reject technology as a whole, it is a brand of self-hatred.”
⁶

But isn’t the acceptance of humanity as a component part of technology also a form of self-hatred? Kelly sees a single thread of self-generation tying together the cosmos, the bios, and the technos into one act of creation. “Humans are not the culmination of this trajectory but an intermediary, smack in the middle between the born and the made.”
⁷
We must either accept technology as our inevitable offspring and successor, or “reject technology as a whole.” In Kelly’s schema, there is no sustainable happy medium. Isn’t there the possibility of a less dramatic, less apocalyptic middle ground?