Culture - September

Books read:

Simon Rich - 'The Last Girlfriend on Earth and other Love Stories' (short stories)
Thomas de Quincey - 'On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts' (essay)
B.F. Skinner - 'Beyond Freedom and Dignity' (non-fiction)
Gustave Flaubert - 'Sentimental Education'


Films watched:

'Dead Ringers' (David Cronenberg)
'The Brood' (David Cronenberg)
'Death Line' (Gary Sherman)
'Nightcrawler' (Dan Gilroy)


Albums played:

Lana Del Rey - 'Honeymoon'

Tearing the city at the seams #26 - A rediscovery of London by night

Earlier this year I relocated, slipping down the oleaginous Northern Line from Elephant and Castle all the way to Morden, a place I had previously thought was populated exclusively by drunks held in an enclosure to sober up having slept through their tube stop. Since the move into London’s southern fringes, my fondness and enthusiasm for the city has decidedly waned, although I’d be reluctant to conflate this entirely with my move to Morden.

Whereas in Elephant & Castle I would be confronted with the hubbub and bustle of London on a daily basis, barely a 15-minute walk to the river, now on my cycle to and from work at Twickenham I catch a glimpse of the distant Shard, a thorn twisting in my side as a reminder of how divorced from me the city now seems.

Recent excursions have failed to reignite any affection. An attempt to walk the route of the Westway in search of the site of J.G. Ballard’s ‘concrete island’ proved so frustratingly futile that I couldn’t even summon the enthusiasm to write about it. So there was considerable pressure loaded on to a walk across London that I embarked upon one recent Saturday night.

I set off from Morden at just before half-midnight, the early September chill undergoing its autumnal rehearsals, with the aim of walking across London to Hampstead Heath in time for dawn easing itself into Sunday. Not only did the walk surpass expectations but was so suffused with minor revelations as to London’s dynamism and imaginative potency that I would encourage everyone to do the same.

I set out from the slumbering Morden, heading through the equally docile Wimbledon, only encountering the first signs of Saturday nightlife upon reaching Tooting High Street, with the influx of artisan chicken shops and cocktail bars all well attended. Only past Clapham Common and on up the High Street did the night seem to be in full ebullience; perhaps, being 1.30am, just beginning to sink back from its peak, with people spilling from the Infernos club on a high-heeled stagger to KFC. Leaving them behind I passed through the quieter province of Stockwell which appeared to be mostly populated by men loitering in doorways blowing plumes of smoke from spliffs across the pavement.

At Vauxhall, I took to the Embankment, pausing a while on the benches opposite the orange-lit Houses of Parliament glowing like burning wax. It was at this point that I began to remember the depths of thought that can be abseiled down on such travails. By this time I felt I had solved the Syrian refugee crisis, the London housing crisis, and the dilemma of which was the superior Radiohead album, ‘OK Computer’ or ‘Kid A’. (Each solution or answer though was swiftly blown away like psychic cobwebs by the arrival of yet more thought-strands to be woven, the trivial as well as the serious.)

I began to take note of all the different people that I saw and wonder at the disparate stories attached to them. The guy strolling along the Embankment singing along to a song off his iPod; the two French girls arm-in-arm laughing at some event from earlier in the night.

Across the river, I made my way up Whitehall pausing to speak with a lone man encamped opposite Downing Street busy adding to his collection of placards denigrating the government’s efforts at investigating the sexual abuse scandals. Initially a little wary, he soon began talking about how long he had been there (50 days), about how much online attention the protest had received, and how he wouldn’t give up until the “paedo-sadists” were held accountable.

Forging a path through the West End, I became surrounded by the drunken diaspora trying to get home. Smashed young men in blazers clutching a Subway sandwich and blearily trying to interpret the night bus maps as though they were ancient codes to be deciphered. Small groups of girls being hassled by a cavalry of rickshaws plying for trade up and down Charing Cross Road. An abysmally drunk middle-aged couple lodged in a doorway engaged in an amorous embrace oblivious to the less romantic mountain of bin bags right alongside them.

Soho seemed strangely subdued by comparison, with just a couple of wine bars still uncorked for a table or two of smartly-dressed conversations. Although my conscience did give me cause to stop at the edge of Soho Square where a young girl was slumped against some railings. At first I thought she was unconscious but on hearing my “hello?”, it appeared she was only crying, trains of mascara running down her face.

“I thought I’d better check you were okay”, I said. “Do you want me a call a taxi for you?”

“It’s alright, I think one is coming.”

“Shit night huh?”

“Yeah, pretty shit” she said, wiping her eyes on her forearms. She started talking about a guy who had messed her about and made her look stupid, as she did so nodding over the road at an imposing hotel. I sensed there was quite a lot more to the story than she let on but didn’t ask, instead just felt sorry for this girl who could only have been 16 or 17.

“What are you doing?” she asked, and when I explained my walk through London until dawn her reaction was one of mild disbelief. “Why would you want to do that?”

“Dunno, keeps me busy.”

She laughed and said, “You should get a girlfriend instead.”

“Well, I had one until recently. Hence the need to keep busy.”

“That’s a shame”, she said with a sympathetic expression that coming from someone with mascara streaked down their face seemed a little hard to take seriously.

And with that her taxi pulled up and I headed on my way, thinking about this random encounter. This late at night, everyone you pass feels like they are imbued with a different sense of purpose or reason for being out than during the day, each person with their own imaginative sliproad that peels away from the highway of the superficial. No wonder Dickens was so fond of taking his night walks across the city, clearly he became inspired by the interesting, nocturnal characters, each primed with their own unique story to be built around them.

There is a frisson of energy that is transmitted at night, charging places and people with all kinds of possibilities and potential. It is an energy that ripples with the telepathic awareness that things are taking place, things are happening, and though you may not be part of it, you are, in just by sharing the geography, riding the same wave.

This feeling sustains on through Camden, where muffled music seeps from second and third floor windows where people drain the dregs of the night. There is a vague exclusivity about Camden, a sense that it is assessing and judging you on your conformist credentials as a hedonistic ambassador worthy of being inducted into the secretive citadel of the unofficial gathering.

There is a lull that sets in as I reach Belsize Park, the streets deserted, the sound of the slumbering city has a kind of polyphony with the rustling of leaves and the whisper of distant traffic. There is no one around now, the city feels like it has been laid out and arranged purely for me to traverse it, the paving stones ushering my weary feet along on the approach to the Heath.

The night’s deep purple tourniquet loosens to let the dawn bleed across the morning sky, and I trudge through the dew-tipped grass to reach Parliament Hill and the end of my journey. I feel a sense of real achievement, a rejuvenated appreciation for London that is so striking that I remain convinced that everyone should undertake a similar walk at least once. I sit transfixed by the cityscape, a million windows ablaze as the sun hits the glass, construction cranes poised in the air like batons ready to conduct an orchestra through the symphony of a new day.

Culture - August

Books read:

Tom McCarthy - 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature' (non-fiction)
Mark Twain - 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
Richard Whittle - 'Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution' (non-fiction)
Sigmund Freud - 'The Unconscious' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (non-fiction)


Films watched:

'I Stand Alone' (Gaspar Noe)
'Eyes Without A Face' (Georges Franju)
'Throne of Blood' (Akira Kurosawa)
'Dead Ringers' (David Cronenberg)


Albums played:

Loscil - 'Plume'
Loscil - 'Endless Falls'
Loscil - 'Submers'
Carbon Based Lifeforms - 'Hydroponic Garden'
Burial - 'Burial'
Burial - 'Untrue'
Rodriguez - 'Coming from Reality'
Burial - 'Rival Dealer EP'
Bob Dylan - 'Blood on the Tracks'
Bill Hicks - 'Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks'

Views on love

Perhaps the most intoxicating and complex mystery of human experience, love as a concept is one verdant with possible interpretation. In the arts and literature certainly no other emotion has been explored and examined with such forensic scrutiny or poetic beauty.

You might agree with the bleak assessment of Charles Bukowski that 'love is like a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality'; or with Noam Chomsky who once said that 'I don't know what love is, but life is empty without it'; or with Milan Kundera's interpretation of Plato that 'love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost'.

I have found myself wooed by the embrace of cynicism towards the concept of love in recent months. No matter love's conviction or perceived strength, the fact that it might buckle under circumstantial or superficial pressures is a reality that neither logic nor rationality can seem to explain away.

There is of course the political science 'horseshoe theory' that holds extremes to be closer connected than is commonly accepted.

I think this can be borrowed in application to the emotions of love and hate - almost within touching distance, the intensity of the emotions provoking easy oscillation between them. The interpreter of Freud might seek to rationalise this as being due to the paradoxical idea that we develop in childhood from the objects of our (at that time passive) love - parents - being figures we frequently hate or even feel afraid of.

It's equally easy to be cynical about love when surveying the technological landscape. The recent Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales 'Tinder and the dawn of the 'Dating Apocalypse'' depicts a deranging and decadent zeitgeist of frivolous sexual encounters and physical intimacy being reduced into the fast-food mentality of commoditisation and the satiation of endless greed. Not to mention the Ashley Madison data hacking which has lifted the stone of real-life relationships to reveal the digital insects of adulterous intent, insecurity and unhappiness lurking beneath.

Yet there have been convincing cases made that monogamy as a state of being is antithetical to our human nature, engineered over centuries as a moral virtue as a means of enshrining stability and loyalty within society, as evidence perhaps of our species gradually civilising itself.

Very recently though I have had something of a change of heart on the subject. It is my contention that in modern culture and society we fail to adequately celebrate real love. We celebrate and promote narcissistic vanities and shallow conceits to emotional potency, but not real love that exists and has existed between people regardless of whether or not it has since faded. Too often, animosity, bitterness and recrimination stain the portrait of prior contentment, leaving regrets stacked up like dirty dishes to drip dry over time.

Simply put, if it is possible to say from an experience of love - whether lasting one day or 10,000 days - that you have been enriched and vitalised on an imaginative, philosophical and human level, then it can only be something to be celebrated and not unduly mourned for being no more.

The continual layering and compaction of experience's sediment through which the self grows, that for me is love. In my case, this is manifest in countless things, from the trivial (a taste for sushi) to the revelatory (a new-found appreciation for the wonders of nature).

Two lines run in parallel for a while, held in delicate equilibrium by the strength of magnetic forces that often defy easy definition, and either they continue or divert away. But in either case, if the forces that bound them were strong enough they can equally be so once the direction of each becomes altered.

But enough of the theorising. The best definition of love I have come across is that provided by the genius of Woody Allen...

'To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer, not to love is to suffer, to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.'

'Ultradistancia' - Federico Winer

http://www.ultradistancia.com

Jorge Luis Borges’ fragment ‘On Exactitude in Science’ describes a map that has been created by perfectionist geographers to cover the entire territory, a piece that seems strangely prophetic in the age of Google Maps.

With the Googlisation of the world proceeding at an exponential rate, from the mapping of metropolises, deserts and even coral reefs, the formal space of the art exhibition has also been colonised by the digital. Google Art Project aims to virtualise the world’s art galleries, allowing anyone to wander the wings of the Louvre or Prado without leaving the frame of their own home.

With this in mind, it was inevitable that artists would respond to developments such as these by using Google itself as a means of crafting new art.

A compatriot of Borges, the Argentine photographic-artist Federico Winer’s latest series ‘Ultradistancia’ seeks to transcend the way we look at the world by taking elaborate ‘trips’ across Google Maps and capturing some truly arresting and hypnotic images.

By manipulating colour contrast and saturation, the pieces cannot fail but have an immediate impact on the viewer; psychedelic, and at once disorientating yet strangely familiar from our own personal brushstrokes across the same digital canvas.

Exposed to this satellite perception, the built and natural environments collide in a revelation of patterns and forms that are each weighted with their own imaginative potency.

A car park is revealed as an intricate micro-circuitry board, each tiny vehicle charged with the movement of data between unknown destinations. A hypodermic pier punctures the tissue of the shoreline. The impossibly blue Miami sea is scattered by small boats that float like fallen leaves. Vast highways become reams of fibre-optic cables just as spiralling motorway junctions become rhizomes shooting and twisting from out of the ground.

Planes are lined up in neat rows on an airport concourse like butterflies under the careful hands of a lepidopterist. The modernist architecture of a rail terminus unfolds like a lotus flower, while the graticule choreography of the urban cityscape is juxtaposed with the lysergic lily pads of circle-irrigated fields.

Each image is also freighted with the obliteration of scale, forcing the viewer to call into question their own impressions of micro and macro, frustrated by the stricture of the perspective prohibiting the customary zoom in or out.

The more they are observed, the more artistic movements seem to be subliminally embedded within each of the images.

From the luminous and brooding tones of a Rothko canvas; to the desiccated deserts of Max Ernst; the tessellations of M.C. Escher; the intensity of Jackson Pollock’s ‘Alchemy’, and the bold lines of Vorticism. Intentionally or not, several of the pieces seem to imply the grid-shaped tableaus of Piet Mondrian, equally illustrating the inexplicable spiritual structures thought to underpin the world of experience.

Being a political philosopher as well as an artist, it is hard not to ruminate on the wider connotations of Winer’s work.

So redolent of the contemporary is ‘Ultradistancia’ – satellites, drones and virtual mapping – that it’s tempting to pinpoint the series as a pioneering example of what could become an entirely new artistic movement, ‘dronism’ perhaps.

Art that encompasses the perspective of the ‘artificial eye’ roving at a remove from human influence, at the same time exploiting the new technologies of the masses to present a new and sublime interpretation of the world.

Indeed, what becomes quite striking about the 40 images is the lack of any captured human agency. Instead, human infrastructure and architecture are frozen in isolation as though they were ancient hieroglyphs left on cave walls for future observers, who may in their own way try and decode the true meanings and relevance of arterial slip roads and the uniformity of suburban street design.

In a shrinking 21st century world of ubiquitous surveillance and digital coverage, the omniscient vantage points of Winer’s online ‘trips’ provide a unique glimpse of a planet increasingly shorn of its secrets, only to reveal geometries that hold a mysterious ambiguity all of their own.

Why London should mourn the imminent loss of its ugliest building

There is something stirring in the Nine Elms region of South London. A great rupture of steel and glass is in the process of splitting open the ground like some dormant kraken waking from subterranean sleep.

Battersea Power Station is in the process of being interred in a tomb of reflective cladding; the iconic chimneys being replaced with replicas like a magician’s sleight-of-hand trick being drawn out over several months.

It is here more than anywhere that London’s structural obeisance to obscene capital flows is at its most striking. All of these storage vaults for the wealth of Gulf states that masquerade as luxury apartments can be characterised by their generic blandness. If they appear to be sprouting up unnoticed then it's perhaps because they are so defined by their innocuous visual impact, scarcely more real than the CAD representations displayed on the site hoardings that enclose their construction.

Yet there is one building now facing imminent demolition that surely deserves some kind of lamentation, seen as how it can, in my view, make a strong contention for the dubious honour of being the ugliest building in London.

On South Lambeth Road, lurching over Vauxhall Bus Station, Keybridge House is an uncompromising masterpiece of the Brutalist form. In a city strewn with carbuncles, this steals the crown principally because it stands as a sneering riposte to accepted aesthetic conventions. It is like a terminally-grey castle built on a beach of ash by an architect who must have been suffering a severe depressive episode.

Built for the Post Office in 1975 and later bought by BT for use as a telephone exchange, there are all kinds of rumours of it being used as a base for MI6’s network of ‘spooks’, in between their liaisons in the surrounding cafes and bars of ‘Little Portugal’.

There are theories of tunnels extending out like tentacles from the depths of its vast basement, heightened microwave activity being detectable, and mysterious black vehicles that are seen entering but never leaving, like a Willy Wonka’s factory for which no amount of free chocolate would entice anyone inside.

With its harsh concrete facade, steel bracketing, windows enmired with the grime from exhaust fumes and bird shit, the opprobrium levelled against it is understandable. And yet the sensible response should be to celebrate the diversity of the built environment, looking to such structures as a means of reference for the different phases and periods of recent social history.

There is something quite grand about Keybridge’s unsightliness, something formidable and strangely impressive about a building designed with such scant aesthetical consideration.

With its severe geometrics and spindly pipes supporting one flank, it could almost be seen as a grim prototype for the modern ‘Bowellism’ style that became associated with the likes of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in such buildings as the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s (see above). And what is the purpose of the vast basement if not a pre-empting of the ‘iceberg’ extensions currently being scooped out in Chelsea and Kensington?

If nothing else, it can certainly be relied upon to provoke a reaction in those who observe it; a very physical riposte to buildings like the Shard whose mirage-like form reveals the invisible currents of capital that propelled them into being.

Whilst the locals will shed few tears at the sight of Keybridge House crumbling into dust, the arrival of yet another banal monument to capital, whilst being visually more delicate, must surely erect psychological scaffolds of doubt and insecurity for the long-term viability of being able to call the area home.

Culture - July

Books Read:

Honore de Balzac - 'The Atheist's Mass' (short story)
Philip Merilees - 'Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' (essay)
Dilip Hiro - 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (non-fiction)
Ayn Rand - 'Atlas Shrugged'
Will Self - 'Psychogeography' (non-fiction)
James Lovelock - 'Gaia: A new look at life on Earth' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Every day is like Sunday' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'The Innocents' (Jack Clayton)
'Magnolia' (Paul Thomas Anderson)
'50 First Dates' (Peter Segal)
'Breaking the Waves' (Lars Von Trier)
'Ran' (Akira Kurosawa)


Albums Played:

Tame Impala - 'Currents'

In the Shadow of the Mushroom Cloud - The Singularity of the past and near future

In physics terms, a Singularity is constituted at the point after a supernova explosion when all remnants collapse to a black hole of zero volume and infinite density; a tear at the seams of space and time from which no light can escape.

Today, this term has been adopted by contemporary webarchs, roiling in the Silicon Valley hive, to prophesise a notional eruption of intelligence that will release humankind from the grounded harness of our mortal biology and allow us to float freely into an ether bristling with its own immortal sentience.

To use the lexicon of the modern Singularity movement, the ‘global grand challenges’ that continue to scourge civilisation such as hunger, disease and environmental catastrophe will finally be overcome by an artificial intelligence that we are steadfastly helping to evolve, nurture and depend upon.

Our relationships, education, sexuality and free will are all purported to be revolutionised by such developments, as we allow our animal biology, governed by genes, entropy and random events, to be transcended by computer intelligence, ruled by information and data algorithms.

Ray Kurzweil, the evangelist of this Singularitarian renaissance (and, as of 2012, Director of Engineering at Google), has calculated the point at which computational power, nanotechnology and AI will coalesce to shed humanistic chains, as the year 2045.

The law of accelerating returns in terms of technological evolution allows for the realisation of ‘Singularity events’ at an exponentially quickening pace, to the point where expansion could appear to occur at an infinite speed. Indeed, we only have to look back one-hundred years to the last of such transformative events, one that provides some indication of the adverse ramifications that may be poised ready to manifest themselves in ways that are as inevitable as they are unpredictable.

In 1945, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented a point at which humanity transcended its natural constraints on an apocalyptic level.

For the first time in our history, human intelligence had arrived at the point of Promethean self-destruction. The dots in our evolution had been joined all the way along from the homo erectus discovery of fire to this awesome totalisation of power that threatened to annihilate the species that had managed to conjure and command it.

The midway point between these two poles of Singularity is the year 1995, one striated with significance in terms of the legacy and evolution of each. This was the year in which Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 1, the prototypical launch pad for the worldwide web as we know it today.

As the mushroom cloud faded, and the ‘just war’ that the bomb had helped curtail yielded to a semblance of peace, the psycho-technological terrain was set in place for the development of the internet.

By the time the Cold War had descended, with its dry-ice machines of Mutually Assured Destruction pumping out paranoia across the world stage, the missiles were primed to such hair-trigger alert that those with their fingers poised over the button were faced with negligible time to reflect on the implications of their actions at the critical moment of crisis.

A research engineer for the RAND Corporation, Paul Baran, was tasked with masterminding a communications system that would be capable of surviving an all-out nuclear war.

The new faith in scientific rationalism in the form of cybernetics and ‘game theory’ was seen as the optimal coping mechanism to ensure survival. Yet the military insisted that a method was required for them to maintain contact with their nuclear strike force regardless of how geographically dispersed, and that this could be the key to averting a future war.

Baran’s solution was ‘packet networking’ whereby communications would be divided into atomised pieces and passed around via distributed network ‘nodes’. By supplanting established hierarchies by placing power at the nodal level, and removing an easily targetable core, the network could hold firm regardless of any breach at an individual point; following much the same fundamental principles as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes.

This centrifugal characteristic developed into ARPAnet, the research network that would eventually, over the latter-half of the 20th century, morph into the modern internet.

Just as the very finest scientific minds laboured at the atomic particle level as part of the Manhattan Project, so today the new technocracy in Silicon Valley seek to pioneer nanotechnology, reverse brain engineering and explore life extension capabilities.

Accordingly, by shaping creative young minds to ‘think exponential rather than linear’, and investing billions in mining the commercialised mother lode of the ‘Internet of Things’, our everyday lives are given the implicit promise of being transformed inexorably for the good through the alchemy of technological progress.

So it follows that heretics from this secular faith are given short-shrift. Yet the events and repercussions of 1945 should serve as fertile ground for scepticism to bloom.

The anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing ruminated on the theory of the ‘double-bind’ that took hold post-Hiroshima, as the masses across western cultures were (and still are to this day) encouraged to stockpile their credulity and trust in governments who, often with full electoral blessing, funneled their investiture towards a gluttony of total destruction in the name of deterrence.

This is a theme that the novelist Will Self has explored in his most recent book ‘Shark’; the artificial progression of this technological superpower proceeded in lockstep with the organic regression into a catalogue of psychopathologies that would flourish, from schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, to a far-reaching neurotic malaise that couldn’t be palliated no matter how fervently we were encouraged to go shopping.

Self takes as his imaginative focal point the deadly shark attack that beset the crew of the USS Indianapolis on their return from delivering the ‘Fat Boy’ bomb as a symbolic revenge on the part of nature for the horrors that man was shortly to unleash upon the world.

Should Kurzweil and the Singularitarians’ hopes for 2045 be borne out, and judging by current socio-technological trends there seems to be no sensible reasons why or means for how such progression could be abated, there is no knowing quite what negative tremors might manifest themselves in the collective unconscious.

Nature (together with humanity) is marked by its irrationality, by the entropy and disorder flowing ceaselessly like a torrential subterranean river that, regardless of the sophisticated means of intelligent control put in place, can only ever succeed in percolating to the surface.

Could the 2045 ‘Singularity event’ occur once the self-replication capabilities of artificial intelligence develop to the point at which human capacity for intervention is virtually null and void?

What if AI were to be able to harness the inchoate developments in quantum computing, or feasibly from nanotechnology progress to picoengineering (robotics developed on the scale of a trillionth of a metre), and from there to even femtoengineering (one-thousandth of a trillionth of a metre)?

Or could it indeed take the form of a literal immolation should AI become immersed and relied upon as part of a colossal project such as CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, which could culminate in our unbound intelligence stumbling across a new and cataclysmic realm of physics?

As Seneca said, ‘to be everywhere is to be nowhere’, and there is every chance that the subliminal appreciation of this truth will resonate and carve deep fissures of psychological trauma should our technological lives progress exponentially, as ideologues with their sights set firmly on a post-human future would have it.

Might the pendulum abruptly and without precedent fall back into a reverse swing as the masses reject wholesale the pacifying web in which they’ve been caught and strike to reassert the primitivism of their nature, in a kind of bizarre neo-Luddite uprising? Looking around at train carriages full of passengers, head bowed in deference to rectangles of enlightenment, and new generations proving far more digitally adept and immersed than their parents, it is hard to see this as being a realistic exit to which we will flee en masse of our own accord.

It is rather more convincing, albeit alarming, to follow Ray Kurzweil’s prognosis that we will increasingly synergise non-biological intelligence into our own selves until, slowly but surely, no distinction will remain between human and machine but only one and the same entity. Whether or not 2045 will be the year in which the next Singularity event occurs, the territory has already been mapped in advance, with the legacy of Hiroshima a century earlier laying out the deeply sublimated coordinates for us to navigate however we can.

We can perhaps see the Singularity as being represented by long strands woven into colossal helixes, the intersections of immense intellectual force having been reached, whether it be the utilisation of our opposable thumbs, the discovery of fire, of tools, the invention of the wheel, the plough, the steam engine, mechanical time-keeping, the printing press.

Once bound they can only split off again into alternate directions that take us into vast emotional deserts made up of insurmountable dunes and mirages that offer only confusion. With technology as our centre of gravity we could condition ourselves to spin through ever faster revolutions, yet this will only come at the price of losing the ability to simply stand still.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part four)

Read Part 3 here:


It is the crystallisation of ‘happiness’ in the wake of age-old problems being alchemised into solutions that truly marks the Singularity as delusion. The following questions must be considered...

If blind optimism triumphs over, if not pessimism then certainly criticality or scepticism, are we inspired in a creative sense at all?

Progress is predicated on pioneers questioning and interrogating the quotidian, and if our neurological processes become less equipped to do this effectively, how will anything fill that role?

If we all have in our prefrontal cortex the sum total of all experiences and intelligence, then this at the very least represents the obliteration of art.

If, as Jean Baudrillard said, we live in a hyper-real world where there is more and more information but less and less meaning, and all problems are solved by intelligence, then the fields of doubt, introspection, cynicism and nihilism on which so much art throughout history has been cultivated will be rendered forever infertile under the beating sun of perpetual optimism.

What of avarice or spite, corruption or religiosity, humility or absurdity, the lust for power or independence, altruism or irrational love, the impulse to genocide or the strange irruptions of mass hysteria?

Is it to be the case that these intrinsic faculties of our nature become mere bytes of information uploaded as virtual simulations, or are they more likely to evolve in an essentially unchanged form as they have done with each and every technological development in our history?

Regardless of the progress that the Singularity may or may not give rise to, humanity with all its simplistic desires and complex emotions must remain very much the same.

Abstract principles unanswerable to science, such as nostalgia or melancholia, will re-emerge in unpredictable guises; and historical precedents teach us that failing to temper a faith in scientific progress by discounting the irrationality of human nature can lead to devastating consequences.

None of the Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ could have foreseen the horrors of the gulag or the terrible atrocities committed by Leninist and Stalinist regimes in their quest for science to transform society. Just as neither Nietzsche in his writings on the ubermensch, or the eugenicists of the early 20th century could reasonably have foreseen the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust.

Who could have foreseen that the 1980/90s, a belle époque in terms of Western well-being and stability, and a period of rampant consumerism, would coincide with the proliferation of depression and anxiety disorders that led to many millions being prescribed Prozac?

Who might have been prepared to speculate that after Sputnik’s orbit fired the starting gun on the Space Race, the giant leap for mankind might not ignite the collective imagination in quite so transformative a way as had been foreseen, and that the dream of transcendence via mass space travel would prove short-lived?

Some might see it as a conceptual pole vault over the bar of plausibility, but it could be argued that the ‘Singularity event’ of the 20th century was the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This was a moment of colossal progress in self-destructive power which it was thought would, from the dissipating mushroom cloud, leave the clear air of deterrence from any future conflict.

In reality, as the anti-psychiatrist R.D. Laing wrote, the progress of humankind to the point where it held the awesome power of total annihilation placed the whole world in a ‘double-bind’, the pathologies of anxiety and schizophrenia became more pronounced, and the pervading screen of paranoia descended with the Cold War and continues to distort our collective vision to this day.

But in the final analysis, it is the eschatological view of human progress that really informs the Singularity. The millenarian lifeblood that gave hope to Christianity, Jacobinism and Bolshevism, has settled into the myths of Silicon Valley, exposing it as a hyper-modern religious faith.

In the same vein, the adherents of Gnosticism believed that salvation would come to the possessors of a certain spiritual insight which would manifest itself in liberation from the confines of human physicality and the material world. The Gnostics are now the technocrats waiting on the Rapture in which biological intelligence ascends into the ether and we finally transcend ourselves, consigning the horrors of our human history to the dustbowl of the past.

It is axiomatic that scientific advances make incremental progress, but nonetheless we remain the same human beings. The Singularity seeks to justify itself, in its remodelling of the mind and promise of a post-human hinterland, by pointing to the overwhelming possibilities for good to which it could lead – eradication of disease and famine, meeting and even reversing the resource needs of our societies, alleviating the perpetual push-and-pull of economic forces on our lives, even solving the inescapable problem of ageing and mortality itself.

By justifying itself through these intractable ideals, promoted in a vacuum without consideration of any consequence or side effect, it reveals itself to be just another in a long line of technological utopia which promise so much but in terms of registering the complexities of the human as animal, foresee so little.

Just as achieving a state of permanent happiness is an El Dorado of the mind, and Thomas More’s utopia is a place no one would want to live, so too the progress in technology to a point at which all problems will be eradicated is equally unattainable.

The existential troubles humanity has combated for millennia will persist, and while some may fade in their significance or mutate into other forms, new problems that technology cannot solve will penetrate through the fissures like knotweed through the concrete of our engineered well-being.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 3)

Read Part 2 here


The steadfast conviction that science can enable us to transcend ourselves can be traced back to the reaction against the man who so firmly asserted the fundamentals of our nature, Charles Darwin.

Faced with Darwin’s theory of the ‘universal death’ and the unpalatable notion that life might in fact be meaningless, the Enlightenment society of the day cleaved to alternative naturalists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who offered the hope that human progress could be planned through careful and precise modelling. As the philosopher John Gray has written, the search for the existence of survival ‘...was the quest for immortality adapted to the conditions of a scientific age.’

If this is perhaps a predictable response to Darwinism, given humankind’s predilection for ascribing meaning, then it offers a means by which we can view the inherent unpredictability and randomness of our lives in the face of change and the ways in which the Singularity movement has so far failed to acknowledge it.

One classic but increasingly marked implication of these developments is that of technological unemployment.

By those such as Ray Kurzweil seeking to explain away this viral spectre by saying that our pressurised working lives will be alleviated by ever more powerful and efficient automation, leaving us all free to roam in the Eden of creative endeavour, is to fall into the same obscure thinking as the socialist left – that only when we are unshackled from the chains of labour will we be free to fulfil our true potential.

Leon Trotsky’s vision that ‘such is the power of science that the average man will become an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx...beyond this new peaks will rise’ is recycled into the Singularity with its fantasies of ‘brain expansion’ and nanobots that fuel the scaling of ever higher heights of intelligence, almost like a tech version of tribal head binding.

Frequently, Kurzweil adopts a condescending attitude with regard to what he terms ‘fundamentalist Ludditism’ that will stand in fervent opposition to the natural forces of technological evolution, and yet he fails to see his own position as fundamentalist itself.

If, as Darwin postulated, humans are mere animals governed by blind selection, then how can we hope to control the process of evolution? For the Singularity would surely not be such an inevitability were the market forces, vast reserves of creative energy and deregulated development not zeroed-in on its accomplishment.

In this way we can see the Silicon Valley movement as another means – whose paradigms lie in religious institutions, the military, the sciences, and free market economists – by which very intelligent people seek to redistribute vast investment wealth towards their own interests, all the while promoting their strong claims to be acting in ours.

Singularitarians point to the potential of nanotechnology and AI to enhance physical health, claiming, perhaps quite correctly, that the inherent ‘good’ in combating cancer and other diseases will triumph over any ethical or financial obstacles in the way of such progress. However, nowhere in the writings of Kurzweil are there discussed the possible impacts, positive or negative, on mental health.

Already we can see worrying signs as to what the future may hold for our collective psychological well-being; from Richard Louv’s ‘nature deficit disorder’, to a prevalence in conditions such as ADHD and autism, to ‘the Google effect’ (brains retaining less information), and programmes being set up to help those suffering from ‘internet addiction’.

But collectively these are perhaps merely the tugboat leading the way for the colossal ocean liner of psychopathologies that may soon come steaming out of the harbour.

Singularitarians hold that not long after the ‘Turing test’ is successfully passed (at which point computers are able to imitate a human), we will be able to enlist the services of HAL-like virtual entities to act as our personal assistants who will display the intelligence and emotionally-rich interactive capabilities of humans.

Is it not a possibility that biological humans may react in subtle, but not inconsiderable, psychological ways to these developments? Could we not grow to find these entities an infringement to our sense of dignity, our sense of pride, even our sense of self? And is it not beyond comprehension that a virtual entity endowed with humanistic emotions might exhibit adverse pathologies all of its own?

If this sounds overtly pessimistic, it’s worth considering the negative implications of internet technologies manifest today. In Japan, a generation of young people began withdrawing from society and living hermitical existences (as documented in the book ‘Shutting out the Sun’); not to mention the strange sociopathic tendencies the internet gives rise to with regard to ‘trolling’ and ‘grooming’, the encouraging of suicidal acts, and even the committing of suicide online.

In terms of sexuality, Kurzweil crassly exemplifies the ‘amazing’ revolutions in sex – virtualised projections of any desired partner with your actual lover perhaps reciprocating in kind, heightened sense stimulation, and so on.

In reality, we see trends such as the ‘blue screen effect’ wilting amorous interaction; the troubling rise in rape, revenge and other extreme forms of pornography gaining ground; Japanese anime porn flirting on the paedophilic; and children becoming sexualised at an ever earlier age with surveys revealing preteens to be regularly engaging in ‘sexting’.

(As a side note worth considering, not only are women under-represented and under-paid in Silicon Valley, but there have been a long string of lawsuits alleging sexual harassment in tech companies.)

Reverse brain engineering, Kurzweil claims, will by the late-2030s allow ‘brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots [to] greatly expand our memories and otherwise vastly improve our sensory, pattern-recognition and cognitive abilities’.

And yet recent studies have shown the adverse effects digital technologies are having on these cognitive abilities already; the interruptive and compulsive nature of the internet leading to a rerouting of conventional neurotransmitters with side effects on educative processes and retentive capacities.

Whilst it is true that our brains may become more nimble, skating with less required exertion across the ice of information, it is also the case that the sheet over which we skate continues to melt ever thinner.

In our quest for knowledge and information we cleave to conventional ideas and solutions rather than deliberating on alternative lines of thought. As Nicholas Carr concludes in ‘The Shallows’:

‘the more we allow machines to mediate our understanding of the world, the more our intelligence becomes artificial...we are already artificial intelligence.’

If everyone is able to download intelligence at will (why bother reading Dostoyevsky's epic ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ for instance when it can be installed into your brain like a simple app?), it raises the question of whether we become more intelligent beings at all or whether it is merely a simulation.

Without having gone through the laborious process of reading a text or interrogating a theory, we are unable to think about it in a critical, incisive or questioning manner, in the same way as we can never have as rich or nuanced an understanding of a city having visited for only a weekend as opposed to living there for a long period of time.

Kurzweil writes, ‘I have come to appreciate an important meta-idea: that the power of ideas to transform the world is itself accelerating’. Although, whilst technology may adhere to the Law of Accelerating Returns who is to say that ingenuity and creativity will keep pace rather than veering off onto a slip road to stagnation?

Already we see, in the reductive affirmation culture of social media and ‘clicktivism’, a shift towards the forced optimism that Dave Eggers pre-empts in his chilling novel ‘The Circle’; a presumed by-product of the idealistic self-organising network that the internet was supposed to represent, usurping hierarchy in favour of egalitarianism. The grins remain fixed in full knowledge of the mass infringement of civil liberties that the web has enshrined. We have each become Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, mass transparency for forces that to us at least remain opaque and in which we are compelled to invest our unquestioning trust as part of the unswerving optimism of the age.

Part 4 coming soon

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 2)

Read Part One here:

Contrary to widely-publicised concerns raised recently by the likes of Stephen Hawking, the godfather of the Singularity, Ray Kurzweil’s grand vision stipulates that the current developments towards Artificial Intelligence (AI) are simply the next logical stage in our evolution.

Despite them not being biological the machines of the future will be deemed human. Indeed before long, the distinction between ‘us’ as humans and ‘them’ as machines will have been rendered obsolete. This concept of man-as-machine has its roots in the nascent belly of the 20th century, with the cybernetics movement as its most obvious precursor.

Popularised by scientists such as John von Neumann and Norbert Weiner, cybernetics grew out of the scientific rationalism of the American post-WWII era.

The principle of cybernetics held that underlying everything, from computing to ecology to human behaviour, exists a specific system regulated by feedback loops that can be reduced down to very simple components and examined in much the same way as a machine.

Harnessing these methods, the RAND Corporation exerted tremendous power and influence over Silicon Valley as well as the financial industry that led America’s globalisation project.

Ever since the 1980s, when the free market system began to disentangle itself from the thorns of elected powers, we have looked to the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit of its practitioners to reform society for the better by lifting all boats on a surface of unregulated riches. The global recession and innumerable banking scandals that have gurgled forth from the murky depths have drained that illusion of its lustre.

It is this sense of disenchantment in the most recent of our ‘old faiths’ that the digital revolution and the Singularity movement are now drawing sustenance from. Google, Facebook, Apple , et al are the new bankers, Silicon Valley the new Wall Street, encapsulating the zeitgeist ‘spirit of the age’, shaping behaviours and engineering a modern way of living.

On Mountain View, the epicentre of this tech revolution, Google have recently unveiled plans for their new HQ – a translucent, almost organic, climate-responsive shell that perhaps could be seen as an architectural rendering of the web itself.

Things in Silicon Valley though were never quite so spectacular or as far removed from the nurturing breast of the state. In 1958, Fairchild Semiconductor moved into an unremarkable ‘shell without plumbing or electrical service’, but as the only company in the world capable of manufacturing transistors they were soon selling huge quantities to IBM and NASA.

One of the 8 founders of Fairchild was Gordon Moore, who would go on to found Intel and revolutionise the microchip technology that along with his famous Moore’s Law would become the bedrock of all Singularity thinking.

A principal reason that Fairchild had been able to achieve such prominence was due to huge investiture from President Eisenhower’s administration. This was meant to be the fiscal Viagra for America’s perceived technological impotence sparked the previous year by the successful launch of Sputnik 1 into orbit.

A few decades before the mass production of transistors, Lenin was prophesising that the power of electricity was to become the lifeblood of the Russian nation, helping to enshrine an unswerving faith in science to transform society for the good. Accordingly, the Singularitarians of Silicon Valley today can trace their ideological heritage back to the Bolshevik ‘god-builders’ of the early 20th century.

Leaders like Lenin, Trotsky, as well as the writer Maxim Gorky (who wrote of his conviction that humans would evolve to become ‘pure thought’), believed that discontentment with humanity could be solved by secular rationalism, transforming men into ‘scientific beings’ and ultimately conquering death. If, as they and the later cybernetics movement planned, science could control society in a rational way, then it could be viewed as a highly efficient machine with information as the energising force.

Google then, with its secrecy, ubiquity and unaccountability, is a State Planning Committee for the digital age. Ray Kurzweil, who has submitted himself as guinea pig for the life extension treatments that seek to slow down ageing along with his 250 supplements per day, is the Lenin of the Singularity.

If he succeeds in uploading his mind to a virtual platform (or indeed, even if he doesn’t), his acolytes will venerate him as the spiritual leader of their cause; his ‘consciousness’ preserved with the same dutiful reverence as Lenin’s mummified cadaver on its mausoleum plinth.