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 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.

A Tract Against the Singularity (part 1)

Over the last few months I have been reading about the Singularity Theory, a radical new myth for the near future that is currently energising the digital tech industry based in Silicon Valley.

Depending on your point-of-view the Singularity will be either incredible or terrifying. What is clear though is that the real power and influence to guide and alter society has shifted, from politicians and even from financial institutions to the tech billionaires. The likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Larry Ellison are the new rulers of the world.

This long-form essay, which I will split over the coming days into smaller parts, is my attempt to explain the Singularity, examine its origins and argue my case for why I believe it will ultimately fail to materialise in quite the benevolent revolution the technologists dream.


Part 1

As I sit at the table a waterfall cascades down the side of the kitchen units and onto the surfaces. The foglet swarms amass this projection entirely at the whim of my imagination, I can feel the light spray on my cheeks, hear the churn of the froth, and almost smell the salmon that leap occasionally from the flowing simulation.

The same nanobot entities sluice around my bloodstream, guardians of my biology, monitoring cell and organ performance, teeming along the neural pathways of my brain. These allow me to maintain a conversation with my father seated along the table from me whilst, simultaneously through a separate retinal overlay, teasing my virtualised girlfriend with fingers that spider up the inside of her thigh.

Meanwhile, my personal assistant is busy downloading ‘À la recherche du temps perdu’ by Proust onto the neural net of my consciousness. The waterfall dissipates into a shrink-wrapped shield of advertising and my father disappears from the table. He had always hated these vulgar projections and so in his non-biological form he can avoid them entirely. In many such ways he found his physical death actually very liberating. The year is 2045 and the Singularity is here...


If the above reads as though it’s in danger of breaching the banks of the ridiculous then it would be worth considering that it is merely an imaginative tributary running towards the great delta of possibilities upon the realisation of the Singularity.

The abstract of Vernor Vinge’s seminal 1993 essay ‘The Coming Technological Singularity’ opens with the prophecy that:

‘...within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence...shortly after, the human era will be ended.’

The principles of this new epoch centre around the exponentially quickening pace of evolution, which point to the developments of intelligence itself – from the first emergence of matter and electromagnetic forces, the formation of galaxies, the development of prokaryotes (single-celled creatures), to homo sapiens and the manipulation of technology – occurring at an accelerating rate, with entropy increasing in lockstep.

Following the trend of Moore’s Law (the exponential growth rate of computational power, shrinking unit size and affordability over the last half-century), super-intelligent machines capable of self-replicating, self-updating, and expanding upon our own collective intelligence, will surpass human cognitive abilities within the new few decades.

In the process they will solve insurmountable problems from medicine, to the environment, work, education, and the holy grail of scientific inquiry, mortality. Humans and machines will gradually synergise as we soar toward the event horizon at which the intelligence-saturated universe finally ‘wakes up to itself’.

If this still reads like an L. Ron Hubbard-style fantasy to which only the most willfully deluded could subscribe, then you might wish to take note.

It is now a decade since the American scientist Ray Kurzweil published his epic ‘The Singularity is Near’, popularising the transhumanist movement and identifying the holy trinity of genetics, nanotechnology and robotics that currently ignite the pioneering beacon that is Silicon Valley.

Bizarre though many of his predictions may seem you need only look around at our already digitally-dependent society to see just how far such technology has come in such a brief period. Although Google Glass may have fallen on the sword of consumer vanity, the broadly positive response to Apple’s Smartwatch marks the point at which perhaps ‘wearable tech’ will sink its grappling irons firmly onto our biology.

Major multinationals such as Siemens AG and Cisco Systems are forging ahead in developing smart city capabilities through what has become known as the ‘Internet of Things’, in which everything from your car to your toaster will be interconnected via a Cloud-based interface – a lucrative market they have valued at around $1 trillion.

But it is Google who are at the vanguard of the Singularity, establishing the mysterious Google X in which 100 ‘shoot-for-the-stars’ ideas are being explored, unveiling their $1.2bn extended lifespan research centre Calico, and in 2012 hiring Ray Kurzweil himself as their Director of Engineering.

Google’s co-founder Larry Page, has raised the suggestion that we ‘set aside some small part of the world’ where innovation can proceed free from any regulatory control (to which the alarmist might recall to mind H.G. Wells’ ‘Island of Dr. Moreau’). They are also a major corporate sponsor of the Singularity University, founded in 2008 by Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, with ambassadors in 54 countries posted to attract and train the most innovative young minds to ‘think exponential rather than linear’.

Professor Mike Halsall, the UK ambassador for the Singularity University, is disarming and full of bonhomie when I meet him, apologising for not being “a more wacky transhumanist” and enthusiastically describing his involvement in trying to engage government on grand ‘global challenges’ and how new technology can help to transform them.

He describes himself as being a “Singularity pragmatist” (as opposed to the “rather more optimistic” Kurzweil), who is careful to couch any speculation as to current progress towards 2045 with provisos relating to inevitable regulation and uncertain forecasting structures. Indeed he is emphatic that regulatory measures (anathema for many technologists) will at some point have to materialise.

At times Halsall exercises a surprising note of caution – “ethics is the thing that all those in the tech industry need to be a lot more explicit about... there needs to be an infrastructure of ethics acting almost as a cell wall that ensures we don’t over-progress.”

He acknowledges it as a perplexing balancing act though, with those on the more optimistic end of the Singularity spectrum warning that overly stringent regulation could result in the technology gestating into nefarious forms in the underworld; already a considerable issue with reports of dubious Bitcoin exchanges and the rising threat of the ‘dark net’.

The Singularity then has become the 21st century’s most enigmatic myth, one that has the potential to alter humanity and the world in ways more radical than any previous historical transformation. Yet it is my contention that it will be unable to avoid withering on the ideological vine as so many other progressive dreams for the future of humankind have done before.

(Part 2 coming soon)

The Toxic Veil of Anonymity

Imagine yourself, if you will, several years in the future as a working professional, scaling ladders both in terms of peer admiration and career trajectory. You might be in a position of some authority, a manager of a small team, a representative of certain interests, a mediator between various parties’ means and ends. A promotion might be on the cards, a young family might have been planned or have already arrived and with it a whole life-raft of other duties and responsibilities to keep buoyant.

You wake up and scrape the frost of sleep from the windscreen of your tired eyes; another day beckons and as you traipse to the shower, standing for a micro-sleep whilst the jets heat, you begin to sift through the catalogue of events that will provide its form. You step from the shower and start to dress.

As you proceed through these morning rituals you reach for the digital device to begin your online engagement for the day. A strange message is waiting for you, one that switches on the ice-cold shower-head of surprise and confusion. It says that on this day 8 years ago you sent an anonymous message using an app that was popular at the time.

You vaguely recall using those kinds of apps back when you were in your teens, impressionable and a little disaffected, but their interest soon faded and you forgot all about them. You certainly don’t remember sending the message that is now being presented to you, in all its lurid immaturity, as though the intervening years had been a long and particularly vivid dream from which you’ve only just woken.

It’s only after a few seconds that you realise the message is a threat, promising to send your teenage indiscretion to particular addresses – the boss with whom you have an 11:30 meeting, your still-sleeping partner. Just as the adrenaline begins to joy-ride around the freeways of your nervous system you realise there is an option of escape being offered to you: a fee to pay.

***

Such a scenario may seem blanched with melodrama, but it can surely be taken as the extension of real possibilities from observable contemporary behaviour with social media. One of the weightier trends among consumer applications in 2014 was the rise of ‘anonymous social networking’; apps that allow users to post publically to networks without disclosing their real identities.

Once the foundations had been laid the construction of these apps was formidable with sites such as Ask, Snapchat, Whisper, YikYak, Secret, Afterschool and Formspring leading the way.

In 2014, 9% of American internet users aged 10-18 visited Ask on a daily basis, 5% used YikYak and Whisper, whilst at its height Secret boasted over 15 million users. In February, The Guardian reported that the Tinder ‘dating app’ was generating more than 60mn profile reads and 6mn matches a day.

In a sense, this proliferation of assumed online anonymity was a logical response to the Edward Snowden revelations of mass surveillance of ordinary internet users on the part of NSA and GCHQ. The knowledge that teams at GCHQ had been assigned with analysing the sexual video messages of Yahoo users for instance, was hilarious for its absurdity but also rather perverse for the way in which it cast the security state as voyeurs on a grand and unaccountable scale.

So it is unsurprising to see the growth of these vines of anonymity spreading across youth internet culture and yet, given what we know about the lengths to which the state will go to monitor our digital platform, it doesn’t take the most wilful conspiracy theorist to begin to wonder where all this might lead. It is almost as though the state were now happily distributing tin-hats to everyone, only making sure they have GPS-tracking capabilities built into them.

Of course, with these apps serving as digital confessionals, receptacles for our boundless appetite for salacious gossip and sensation, it should also come as no surprise to note the nature of this ‘anonymous’ content. A brief trawl across Whisper for instance offers these as a routine sample:

‘worried my baby doesn’t belong to my fiancé. What to do?’

‘I was molested by my older cousin when I was a child and I’m still afraid to speak out about it’

‘I can’t stop my evil thoughts’

‘I have 2 kids, my wife has no idea’

‘I’ve slept with 20 guys’

‘I’m a lesbian and madly in love with my best friend who is straight and pregnant’

‘wish I could be single and childless again’

‘I’m an alcoholic and have been since I was 14’

‘I cheated on my boyfriend and loved the thrill of it’

‘I love the taste of blood’

‘I’ve tried killing myself before and no one knows, not even my parents or friends’

‘my personality that they love so much is 60% fake’

‘my aunt and I took a shower together when I was 10’

‘I cut myself too much’

‘I’ve had sex with my friend’s dad more times than with anyone else’

‘my husband loves watching black guys fuck me’

‘I’ve had sex with my older brother. We still do it. I regret nothing’

‘I plan on drinking this bottle of wine tonight. If my mum hears me puking in the middle of the night I’ll just pretend I’m sick...again’

‘I was high when I asked her out, I’m even higher at the wedding’

‘that moment when you buy weed you don’t need because the weed man is the best booty call you ever had’

‘my husband is so quick I hardly even get to start getting excited, don’t know what I’d do without my toy’

‘being gay isn’t a choice - the government injects every 100th baby born with a gay virus to control the population'

'in a perfect world my son will never find out that my boyfriend isn't his real father'

Whilst much of the sleaze reflects the apparent titillation in anonymously sharing, the more disturbing examples emit the nihilistic sentiment of the genuinely troubled. Each one though is a viral wrecking ball poised to smash into the citadel of an individual's reputation at some point in the future.

Of course, it is very probable that a sizeable portion of posts will be mere lies and hyperbole concocted out of boredom or the desire to elicit some small measure of shock or opprobrium from the community who respond. But this argument misses the fundamental point: regardless of the reality behind these meme-masks, once the digital fingerprints are there they cannot be wiped clean and truth or falsity is an irrelevance. Like Josef K's plight in Kafka's 'The Trial', an offence will be registered and doggedly pursued leaving it up to the individual to prove their innocence.

A cursory examination of the Terms and Conditions of these apps is enough to isolate passages from amidst the suffocating legalese that offer sufficient ambiguity to fuel the misanthropic imagination.

In late 2014, The Guardian reported that Whisper was tracking the whereabouts of its users even if they had disabled location services. Their updated T&Cs state that 'we collect very little information that could be used to identify you personally', only information that could be utilised to improve services and overall user experience. However, that collected information amounts to the type of device being used, the operating system, the web browser, the ISP and IP address; all information that could easily lead to an atomised individual being identified.

Snapchat, an app that allows users to send messages that spontaneously combust after a few seconds, state that submission of content grants them an 'irrevocable, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, and transferable licence to use, reproduce, modify, etc...such content'. Similarly, YikYak 'reserve the right to retain your Submissions, even after they have expired from view within the App or even after you have deleted them'. Along with Snapchat they reserve the right to sublicense content to third parties.

Expanding on this point, Whisper state that they may establish business relationships with third parties but only if they 'believe they are trustworthy'. Continuing to ladle ambiguous reassurances, they state 'we may give service providers only the information that's necessary for them to perform services on our behalf', and:

'we may share the information we collect from you with businesses that control, are controlled by, or are under common control with WhisperText. This means that if WT is merged, acquired, sold, or in the event of a transfer of some or all of our assets, we may disclose or transfer such information in connection with that particular transaction.'

Put simply, if at any point in the future the team behind Whisper decide to sell up, the purchasing company will acquire all that juicy gossip; low-hanging fruit to be picked for potentially dubious gain.

Across the internet there is the feeling that the beginning of the end for anonymous apps may be nigh. Each of these apps spurt up like geysers from the Silicon Valley ooze yet their lifespan is predictably brief (earlier this year, Secret announced it was shutting down), in accordance with the fickle whims of their target audience - the digitally-adept teen market searching for distraction and reacting like one of Pavlov's dogs to the bell-ringing of scandal and sleaze.

The obvious reason for this decline, alongside controversies regarding privacy and cyber-bullying claims, is that they have failed to provide a clear path to monetization for their investors. This is a stark problem because the funding behind these apps is substantial; $61mn behind Whisper and $70mn behind YikYak, for example.

Rather more modestly, Secret generated $35mn of funding and in the aftermath of its demise it has been reported that whatever money is left is to be returned to the investors. Without adequate means of marketing and advertising revenue generation, anonymous apps face a steep decline unless they are bought-out by a mega-firm like Facebook (who are also developing their own standalone app 'Rooms').

As the common cliché goes, if the service is free then you are the product. In the absence of any other means of remunerating their investors all of this information is, or will shortly become, incredibly valuable and the reward for those willing to strike the right deal may be too tempting to resist. As the hacker/writer Stewart Brand said, 'information wants to be free', although he followed this with the proviso that 'it also wants to be very expensive.'

One of the finest Monty Python sketches is 'Blackmail', a mock TV show in which the host Michael Palin plays grainy peeping-tom footage of individuals in increasingly compromising situations, with the target urged to call in as the ransom fee inflates.

This could be a prophesy of the extortion propagated by nefarious digital debt-collectors of the near future - not the public shaming via social media such as Jon Ronson has written about recently, rather the undercover private shaming of individuals before those with whom the ramifications will be most severe.

If not shady 'third parties' sublicensed several years down the line when the information asset is ripe for off-loading, then surely mischievous hackers could play havoc with such a trove of dirt - that woman you're about to promote as regional manager or elect to a board, here's an incriminating message she posted as a teenager ... that guy you're about to get engaged to, here's a sample of the chauvinistic comments and nude pictures he used to send to women.

Who knows, perhaps a heroic 'third party' will mysteriously appear from the trees and swing into action, promising that they will wipe clean the dirty fingerprints left smudged along the surface of your web history. Any service for the right price...

‘Smart’ thinking? Future cities and the Internet of Energy

As anyone with the slightest interest in futurology will know, the predictive terrain is rigged with innumerable tripwires waiting to sabotage the deftest projection. Moon colonies and flying cars aside however, one fairly assured certainty is that an ever-increasing number of people are going to be living in ever-expanding cities; rippling out exponentially like the precession principle of a stone dropped in water.

A megacity is commonly defined as an urban area with over 10mn inhabitants. According to a 2014 UN report on urbanisation, the number of global megacities has nearly tripled in the last 24 years, soaring from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014. Rapid urbanisation has consigned over half the world’s population to cities, which ultimately consume 75% of the world’s energy and produce 80% of the emissions.

There is much currently being made of the development of ‘smart cities’. In December 2014, an Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) ‘Future Cities’ conference swept experts together to share ideas and discuss the potential for cities to interweave digital technologies and smart energy systems in a revolutionary new helix of urban living. A means by which the sprawling, polluted and congested cities of the 20th century can be alchemised into the clean, free-flowing, low carbon megacities of the 21st century.

The potential for achieving this is not only possible but increasingly paramount. Research conducted for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate in the lead-up to the recent Lima climate change summit, stated that the adoption of low carbon technologies across 30 megacities ‘could create more than 2mn jobs while avoiding 3bn tonnes of cumulative greenhouse gas emissions’.


Data and the Internet of Energy

One thing that is absolutely clear according to those at the IET conference and the wider community is that the march of cities towards an energy efficient future will be in firm lockstep with the expansion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and ‘Big Data’.

Put simply, IoT is a network of interconnected devices – from your boiler to your fridge, even your toaster – all of which have the sensory capacity to intelligently collect and share data via a ‘cloud-based’ interface. One corporate driver of the IoT movement is Cisco Systems, which has estimated that 50bn machines/devices could be linked by as early as 2020, equating to a market worth $1tn. An equally keen champion is Siemens AG, working towards autonomous systems that will act ‘on perfect knowledge of residents’ habits, behaviours and energy consumption.’

This ‘better living through data’ is touted as a central component in cities being able to achieve energy efficiency goals, encapsulating what has been dubbed the ‘Internet of Energy’ (IoE). The expectation is that IoE devices will be integrated into a sophisticated dynamic ecosystem capable of communicating to ‘smart grids’ which will bind together power generation, supply and consumption. This is already being trialled with smart meters and time-of-use tariffs that, via financial incentives, try to ‘nudge’ consumers towards certain behavioural patterns.

IoT is also leading the way forwards for integrated low carbon transport systems through V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) and V2I (vehicle-to-infrastructure) automation, allowing vehicles to respond and react to data provided by ‘smart’ street furniture (eg traffic lights, lampposts, dustbins), as well as surrounding vehicles, which could render congestion obsolete.

Hybrid and pure electric vehicles (EVs) are being developed at an accelerating rate, with consistent gains made on performance and affordability. Of course, EVs being only as clean as the electricity they use, vast sums are being invested into lithium-based research and nanotechnology to improve power output and charging times, all with an aim of driving gas-guzzling vehicles up the slip road to history.


Early examples

If these ‘intelligent future cities’ seem reminiscent of a fictive Wellsian hinterland, it’s worth considering that prototypes are already flourishing, most notably Songdo in South Korea. Songdo’s buildings have automated climate control whilst road, water, waste and electricity systems are all fertile with electronic sensors that track and respond to residents’ actions. Similarly, the uninspiringly named PlanIT Valley in Portugal is fitted with 100mn sensors to optimise energy efficiency through adjustable flows.

Surprisingly enough, these modern manifestations follow the legacy of the British ‘garden city’. Adopting the aesthetic centrifugal principle of ripples on water, Ebenezer Howard in 1902 published his seminal study, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, in which the optimal elements of city and country life were synergised and promoted as a new form of eco-urbanism; eventually to be implemented across both the UK and the US. Sure enough, in the government’s Autumn Statement, plans for a new garden city Bicester in the Home Counties were announced, and the way paved for more, given the dual political prongs they represent in terms of affordable low carbon housing and environmental targets.

But it is in China, a country that by 2012 estimates had 363 proposed coal-fired power projects waiting on the construction assembly line, that the holistic eco-friendly principle of the garden city has begun to be imported.

As Victorian England’s urban squalor demanded the respite of Howard’s proposals, so China’s rampant industrialisation has given rise to cities like Chengdu. Home to 14mn people, Chengdu is China’s fourth-biggest city and, on the outskirts, has begun applying the low-rise, low-density planning schemes together with zones of green open space, personal allotments and leisure areas that both meet the needs of the community and support the drive for low carbon development; concurrently helping to alleviate traffic congestion and improve air quality.

While the notorious smog of Beijing tends to cloud our impressions of Chinese urbanism, the government has begun investing billions in sustainable developments that aim to serve as global models for the future. One such example is the Tianjin Eco-City Project, a collaboration between China and Singapore that incorporates initiatives such as free electric bus networks, a 60% recycling rate and a minimum of 12 m2 of public green space per capita.

This is apparently far from the limit of China’s green ambitions. In terms of the spectacular, surpassing the proposed designs for ‘Cloud Citizen’ (winner of the Shenzhen Super City Competition) would be a considerable challenge for the imagination, reminiscent as it is of something from a Philip K Dick novel.

Touted as an ‘urban utopia’, the plans depict layers of almost organic cactus-like skyscrapers coagulating into one another, designed so as to ‘give back more to the environment than they cost’. Built-in mechanisms would harvest rain water, luscious gardens would serve as ‘green lungs’, whilst the city infrastructure would be powered with solar, wind and algae-based energy. The self-contained nature of the construction would enable localised food production to exert a much reduced demand on infrastructure; all helping to create what the designers anticipate will be a hyper-dense complex that the inhabitants have no need or desire to ever leave.

The potential of this technological utopia to manifest itself as a human dystopia scarcely demands a potent imagination. Of course, city planning has a rich history of architects from Charles Fourier to Robert Owen to Le Corbusier, designing ‘utopian urbanity’ in which humans will be free to live prosperously, harmoniously and free from strife. Yet for all their vaulting ambition, they remain chiefly that: utopian.


Is technology the solution?

A primary concern for the near future is that tech firms operating principally in accordance with corporate interests will succeed in harnessing the essential utilities on which we all rely to the extent that they cannot subsequently be wrested back; in the process becoming more opaque as the citizenry become more transparent. But it’s worth pondering just how vociferous the complaints may be if the principle agent causing privacy to dissipate is the reduction in the amount we are charged for energy?

What is strikingly clear from attending the Future Cities conference, and reading the vast expanse of available commentary, is that there is an unshakable, zealous faith in technology as a means of solving any conceivable problems that might afflict humankind. This is the prevailing consensus in human thinking, resembling almost a religious faith, that only an ever-increasing dependency on further technological development will ensure positive progress.

Readily available, low technology, green options are within our grasp currently; from retrofitting of buildings; to the digestion of organic materials as a method of biomass energy production; increased investment in urban public transport networks and encouraging incentives like bike schemes; and the recent resurgence in urban agriculture such as community gardens, agroforestry and even beekeeping.

It is interesting to note the profligacy with which developments such as IoE and ‘Big Data’ are labelled ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’. Undoubtedly there is much – if it can be harnessed for societal good rather than corporate insouciance – which we can feasibly benefit from. Yet the fact remains that until we start applying the same demands for ‘smart’ and ‘intelligent’ thinking to impose upon the whole spectrum of energy policy, particularly in the run-up to the Paris climate change summit later this year, the possible ramifications of continued myopia and obfuscation on the part of global powers looks increasingly severe.

Ask yourself; is it ‘smart’ or ‘intelligent’ thinking to divert vital financial, time and intellectual resources away from renewable technologies and into the pursuit of yet more extractive fossil fuel processes in the face of climate change? Is it ‘smart’ for developed nations to fail to engage in negotiations with developing nations such as Ecuador as a means of preventing them from having to exploit their abundant oil resources? Is it ‘smart’ to allow oil companies to sit on vast ‘sunken asset’ reserves, fully intended to be extracted despite the combined total being many times over what the broad consensus of climate scientists have stated can be burned whilst remaining below ‘safe’ levels of warming?

If these are uncomfortable or contentious questions, then that is precisely the intention. Technological development of the kind currently shaping the energy infrastructure of future cities are necessary and welcome, if used positively, but should not be treated as a kind of elixir vitae that, if we bask in the slipstream of its accelerating momentum, will inevitably transform our and future generation’s lives ineluctably for the better. For the energy industry not to question, challenge and hold to account such developments as they continue to achieve prominence would be very far from smart thinking indeed.


Published in Energy World Magazine