Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (34 page)

In the apocalyptic scenario, we are either to hope for benevolence when our creation overtakes us or to negotiate with technology now in order to get some of what
we
want along with what
it
wants. As I have come to understand technology, however, it wants only whatever we program into it. I am much less concerned with whatever it is technology may be doing to people than what people are choosing to do to one another
through
technology. Facebook’s reduction of people to predictively modeled profiles and investment banking’s convolution of the marketplace into an algorithmic battleground were not the choices of machines but of humans.

Those who choose to see technology as equal to life end up adopting a “let it rip” approach to its development that ignores the biases of the many systems with which technology has become intertwined. The answer to the problems of technology is always just more technology, a pedal-to-the-metal ethos that is entirely consonant with laissez-faire capitalism. Ever since the invention of central currency, remember, the requirement of capitalism is to grow. It should not surprise us that in a capitalist society we would conclude that technology also
wants
to grow and that this growth supports the universe in its inexorable climb toward greater states of complexity.

However, I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something too quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life. Indeed, in spite of widespread confidence that we will crack the human code and replicate cognition within just a couple of decades, biology has a way of foiling even its most committed pursuers. The more we learn about DNA and the closer we come to mapping the entire genome, for example, the more we learn how small a part of the total picture it composes. We are no more determined by the neatly identifiable codons of the double helix than we are by the confused protein soup in which it actually operates. Put the same codons in a different person or species, and you’ll get very different results. Our picture of human cognition is even hazier, with current psychopharmacology taking a shotgun approach to regulating neurotransmitters whose actual functioning we have only begun to understand. At our current level of technological sophistication, to argue that a virtual Second Life
*
simulation will soon become indistinguishable from real life smacks of fantasy and hubris.

Yet we are supposed to believe. Resistance to the logic and inevitability of the singularity is cast as quasi-religious. Nonbelievers are thought to be succumbing to a romantic notion of humanity that is both steeped in morality and also in conflict with the scientific atheism we should have accepted by now. “What lies at the heart of every living thing is not a fire, not warm breath, not a ‘spark of life,’” evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins wrote in 1986, “it is information, words, instructions.”
⁸
Evolution itself is to be viewed as an exchange of information between organism and environment. Or as science writer James Gleick chronicles in his book
The Information
, the universe itself is merely information reaching toward greater states of complexity. Atoms, matter, life, and technology are all just media for this information to evolve.

It seems to me this perspective has the medium and the message reversed. We humans are not the medium for information; information is a medium for humans. We are the content—the message.

It’s an easy mistake to make, especially when we no longer have secure grounding in our past or a stable relationship to the future. Present shock is temporally destabilizing. It leads us to devalue the unbounded, ill-defined time of
kairos
for the neat, informational packets of
chronos
. We think of time as the numbers on the clock, rather than the moments they are meant to represent. We have nothing to reassure ourselves. Without a compelling story to justify a sustainable steady state for our circumstances, we jump to conclusions—quite literally—and begin scenario planning for the endgame.

In light of our rapid technological progress, this is not an altogether unexpected response. Thanks to self-replicating technologies such as computers, nanomachines, robots, and genomics, the future does seem to be upon us. It feels as if we can see the writing on the wall as it rapidly approaches from the distance. What is too easy to forget is that
we
are the ones simultaneously scrawling that very writing. We are the ones now writing the programs that will execute at some point in the future. We are the ones embedding our future reality with the values we want reaching back to us from there.
⁹
Truly living in this present becomes a form of time travel, in which everything we do actually matters to both our memory of the liquid past and, more important, the character of the unformed future.

Apocalypto relieves us of this responsibility by granting not only aspiration to technology but also superiority. We are freed of morality—that uniquely human trait—as well as the way it hampers our decision making and limits our choices. Technology will just go ahead and do it for us or, better, to us. Get it
over
with already. Like parents consoling themselves about their own imminent demise, we look to technology not merely as our replacement but as our heir.

But the reports of our death may be greatly exaggerated.

EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN

Like followers of a new religion, devotees of the singularity have come to believe that their version of the apocalypse bears no resemblance to the many that have come before, that it is scientifically justified, and that the only choice that’s left for us to make is to barrel ahead.

They may be right.

But this urgency to envision an imminent endgame is more characteristic of the religious tradition than the scientific one. And the extent to which we believe the harbingers of doom and rebirth has generally depended on the extent to which we feel dislocated from meaning and context. When persecution, torture, and killing in the Jewish ghettos reached their peak in medieval Europe, the Jews alleviated their despair with a form of messianism called the Kabbalah. In seventeenth-century England, the Puritans, their faith challenged by a political conflict between the king and the Roman Church, arose to realize the Revelations and bring about the “true kingdom of Christ.” They colonized America with the express intent of bringing on the eschaton. In the 1820s, the terror and uncertainty of life on the frontier led many Americans to join a Christian revival movement called the Second Great Awakening, which included the Mormons, the Baptists, and the Shakers, and meant to prepare people for the imminent Second Coming. In just one of many examples, over one hundred thousand members of the Millerite movement prepared themselves for Christ’s return—scheduled to happen by March 21, 1844—by selling their earthly goods and waiting in their attics. On March 22 the movement became known as the Great Disappointment and, later, the Seventh-Day Adventists.

Present shock provides the perfect cultural and emotional pretexts for apocalyptic thinking. It is destabilizing; it deconstructs the narratives we use to make meaning; it leads us to compulsively overwind, magnifying the stakes of any given moment; it leads us to draw paranoid connections where there are none; and, finally, its lack of regard for beginnings and endings—its focus on the perpetual now—drives us to impose order on chaos. We invent origins and endpoints as a way of bounding our experience and limiting the sense of limbo. We end up with no space—no time—between the concept of choosing to wear contact lenses and that of replacing our brains with nanobots. There is no continuum. Every tiny alpha must imply a terminal omega.

So which is more probable: That today’s atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations.

In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist?

If one’s god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there’s no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god
alone
? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering?

They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing
time
into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There’s only one true god, but he’s not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was now a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end.
¹⁰

Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It’s all good.

This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how do we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can’t help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin.

In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens.

Materialists argue that it’s all just code. Each of the cells in an organism or the termites in a colony is following a set of very simple rules. When enough members are following that rule set, a bigger phenomenon becomes apparent—like the kaleidoscopic patterns in a Busby Berkeley dance routine, the coordination of a bee hive, or even the patterns in a sand dune created by regular ocean waves. That’s why emergence enthusiasts believe computers should be able to take a set of simple rules and reconstruct the universe, humans and all.

But the moment when a system shifts from one level of organization to another—the moment when emergent behavior develops—is still very poorly understood, and almost as slippery a concept as biblical creation. This is not to say emergence is not a real and observable phenomenon, but only that we are still grappling with just when, why, and how it happens, as well as how much of a role our own subjectivity plays in judging a system to be complex or random. For humans, order usually means something that looks like ourselves.

So, the new myth goes—driven by technology and information’s
need
to find ever-more complex expressions—our microchips get faster and more interconnected until they emerge as an independently complex system, one level higher than our own. All they needed were their simple, binary commands and a whole lot of feedback and iteration. They may or may not re-create humanity as a running virtual program, but they will have the codes to do so if they choose. If we are good, or prepare properly, we get a Second Life. In any case, what we think of as biological time will be over.

The singularity realizes the second coming of the Big Bang—the Omega point that completes human existence and ends the illusion of linear time. It may be upon us, or, as the illusory nature of time suggests, it may have already happened and we’re just catching up with it. Imminent or not, it shares more characteristics with religion than its advocates like to admit, complete with an Omega point, a second life, an act of creation, a new calendar, and the dogged determination to represent itself as a total departure from all that came before.

This response is a bit more like that of the impatient, reactive Tea Partier than that of the consensus-building Occupier. More like the “inbox zero” compulsive than the person who answers email if and when he feels like it. More the hedge fund trader looking to see how many algorithms can dance on the head of a temporal pin than the investor looking for a business to capitalize over time. More the fractalnoid conspiracy theorist than the pattern recognizer.

The more appropriate approach to the pressures of apocalypto may be to let up on the pedal just a bit. This doesn’t mean stopping altogether or stepping on the brakes. It could mean making sure we understand the difference between a marketplace that has been designed to accelerate no matter what and a reality that may or may not share this embedded agenda. It could mean beginning to envision slow paths to sustainability that don’t require zombies or the demise of a majority of the world’s population.

Most of all, as when confronting any of the many faces of present shock, it means accepting responsibility and dominion over the moment in which we are living right now. This has proved the hardest part for me and, I imagine, for you. I understand that just reading this book required you to carve out a big chunk of time, and to withhold this time from the many people, tasks, and Tweets vying for your immediate attention. I imagine it took more effort than reading a book of this length and depth would have required, say, ten years ago.