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 Arrival of the Transhumanists

Earlier this year, Michael Cockerell’s documentary series ‘Inside the Commons’ lifted the neo-Gothic lid on Westminster, revealing many of the arcane practices that have settled like a film of dust within. Among many surprises was the fact that the building was still struggling to install a stable Wi-Fi connection.

The notion that in 2015 the seat of representative power isn’t sufficiently cushioned with the kind of technology that has come to be seen as something of a utility is for some a genuine concern.

Dr. Alexander Karran, a cognitive neuroscience expert, asserts that “too few politicians understand the implications, and the potential, of science and technology”. For Karran, his despair at this perceived lack of competence or foresight on the part of the political establishment has led him to co-found the Transhumanist Party. On May 7th, he stood as the first ever transhumanist candidate in a British election, in the Labour safe-seat of Liverpool Walton.

Transhumanism is built around the core principle that ‘technology can and should be used to overcome human limitation in all its forms’. These limitations span psychology, with the increased capacity for engineered intelligence, as well as biology, through the symbiosis between body and machine.

The likes of Stephen Hawking may decry Artificial Intelligence as threatening to “spell the end of the human race” but, as far as advocates are concerned, humans becoming cyborgs is, far from being the end of humanity, just the inevitable next step for the evolution of our species.

Far-fetched though it may seem, transhumanism has bloomed from the fertile ground of the vastly expansive tech industry in Silicon Valley, led by the likes of Google, Facebook and Apple, who in terms of innovation, turnover and social influence are almost unrivalled in stature. Meanwhile firms such as Cisco Systems and IBM have estimated that 50 billion devices (from driverless cars to kitchen appliances) could be interconnected by 2020 as part of what is termed the ‘Internet of Things’, with the intelligent collection and sharing of data as its lifeblood.

In many ways we live in an artificially intelligent transhuman world already; with drones, 3D printing, wearable tech, medical bioengineering, developments into surgical robotics and ectogenesis (artificial wombs), not to mention software predicated on an array of ever more complex algorithms that continue to automate our everyday lives.

It’s nothing new for politicians to face derision for being seen as out-of-touch and sheltered from the lives of ordinary people, but Karran points to the fact that “only 1 MP out of 650 in Westminster has had a career as a software engineer” as evidence for how ill-prepared the political elite is for exploiting the enormous gains, as well as mitigating the risks, that could develop from science and technology.

Across Europe there are several transhumanist groups gaining political momentum and beginning to weave a loose web of shared ideals and principles. But it is in America that the movement has generated the most mainstream attention, with the writer Zoltan Istvan recently announcing his intention to run in the 2016 Presidential election.

Anchored in sci-fi though it may seem, it would be wise not to completely dismiss the movement as another fringe intrigue too soon. For Karran, his electoral candidacy on May 7th was only the first step in what he hopes is the long journey that will carry the Transhumanist Party to the forefront of British politics, the landscape of which is now more fragmentary and uncertain than it has been for decades.

Accordingly, the first and subsequent generations of ‘digital natives’ may well seek representatives who reflect their own experiences and appeal to their concerns, rather than holding tight to fading ideologies of the left and right.

Indeed, from the intensifying sophistication of cybercrime, the pervasive data surveillance of the security state, the uncertain currency of BitCoin, and the ominous underworld of the Dark Net, the technological threats of the present and near future are real and genuine. So much so that British political society could become steadily transformed by an electorate who may prove to be persuaded, less by the merits of Oxbridge PPE graduates, and more by the rising tide of the transhumanists.

Tearing the city at the seams #25 - A walk across London in search of British leftism

Two quotes to begin:

‘The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.’

‘At this point it’s worth noting that the economy is not a real thing, it is a man-made system designed to serve us, an ideological machine.  It has gone wrong and is tyrannising us.  We wouldn’t tolerate that from a literal machine...’

The first is attributable to Karl Marx from 1848; the second, some 166 years hence, to Russell Brand.

This is an essay about a walk across London.  A walk that sought to explore the state of contemporary leftism in Britain, and, as the most unpredictable election in decades draws near, what we can possibly expect and draw from left wing ideologies in the future.

The walk began just south of Covent Garden, in the tempest of tourism, on a sunny Saturday afternoon.  On the corner of Russell Street, in what was formerly the Red Lion pub but has now morphed into a branch of All Bar One, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx were commissioned to write a pamphlet, the aim of which was to formalise in words the burgeoning spectre of disparate revolutionary ideals that at the time was haunting Europe, ‘The Communist Manifesto’.

Some of the Manifesto is now hopelessly archaic, but counterbalancing this is so much that reads as fresh as agit-prop graffiti.  In particular, the revolutionising of production constantly creating an environment of agitation and antagonism for the workers; in its condemning of the global market system that ‘must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’; and in its assertion that the formation of every society has been based on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes, towards which certain conditions must be kept in perpetuity.

Within the generic surroundings of the All Bar One though, the early afternoon clientele armed with their libations certainly looked as though they’d reject any such assertion of their oppression.  One of the bar staff, a tall and raffish Italian man in his late-20s, was unequivocal in his view that Marx’s theories are still relevant to today’s workers.  “The advantage is definitely all on the side of the employer, especially somewhere like London...I mean, if you don’t like your job there’ll be someone else waiting right behind you to take it off you...and they know that.”

Heading north through the West End, the streets thronged with consumerist bustle, arms locked with chain store bags, restaurants engorged with diners, and coffee shops liberally scattered like a sack of beans split open over a map.

The historian Niall Ferguson has written that our infatuation with the humble bean may have helped fuel our once glorious empire – ‘the English were luckier in their drugs; long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the 17^th century by American tobacco, Arabian coffee and Chinese tea.  The Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den.’

If, as is often mooted, we are living in an age that celebrates the individual, with notions of collectivisation increasingly rendered lacklustre and inert, then one has to search for new arena of communality that this secular post-modern society presents.  Undoubtedly, one such place is the coffee shop; a blend of strong Continental European flavour and aesthetic with the American ‘Friends’-style froth of social discourse.  The Costas, Starbucks and Caffe Neros that sprinkle the country’s streets are where we are elevated to the imaginary realm of the petit-bourgeois, exalting in the freedom of the latte, the cappuccino, the varieties of herbal tea.

The internet, with all its transformative zeal of harnessing a new egalitarian realm, can often be seen in its true atomised form through the window of any high street coffee shop – tables of individuals locked into glowing portals to a digital ether.

Hitching east along Theobald’s Road, one passes by the famous Great Ormond Street Hospital, representing as it does the increasingly taut and frayed rope of socialism that binds our society’s conscience, the NHS.  Forever haemorrhaging capital, the NHS, according to experts, requires a steady and prolonged transfusion of government spending, the acceptable public spending vice that must be satiated just as we crave the caffeine stimulus to fortify us for the day ahead.

Still one of the most fraught battlegrounds of political warfare, with the managerial structure of Kafka’s castle, the NHS occupies a curious, almost fundamentalist, place in the British public consciousness.  For the most part, the NHS is relied upon in the final few years and months of one’s life.  Our unshakable totemic faith in the institution reveals the conviction that, whilst we may cleave to the establishment matrix of class structures and hegemonic institutions, we do all deserve equality in death.  For whilst we may not seek provision for people to avoid indignities and suffering in life, we do at least believe that everyone is entitled to the dignity of a good death.

I peeled off into Clerkenwell, a place whose history is synonymous with radicalism, although you wouldn't think it to stroll through now.  Long gone are the headquarters of the Communist Party, the left wing printing presses, and the places where Bolshevik leaders in exile at the start of the 20^th century would flee to in order to escape the secret police of the tsars and plot the revolution.  On Clerkenwell Green though, there is the Marxist Memorial Library bursting with busts and flags, whilst a beard’s tug away on Farringdon Road is where the Labour Party were founded in 1900.

Winding past the once Brutalist ghetto now eminently prime real estate of the Barbican, one gets a feel for how the post-war collectivisation programme manifested itself in the unforgiving architecture of the concrete jungle.  Not to mention how, decades later, when property in central London has become the sturdiest financial asset attainable, it can be re-imagined and re-marketed as a prestigious retro location (much like the Trellick Tower has been in Notting Hill), to be snaffled up by a shrewd Russian, Saudi or Qatari investor.

Approaching Liverpool Street, the revolutionary history almost reaches its arms up from the ground like necrotic zombies.

For it is here, whilst excavating colossal mounds of earth as part of the Crossrail project, that archaeological work has begun to try and disinter the bones of some 3000 people buried at the Bedlam site during the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  The osteological analysts hope to uncover the skeletons of ‘Freeborn’ John Lilburne and Robert Lockyer who, aged just 23, led the Bishopsgate mutiny of 1649 as part of the Levellers movement during the tumult of the English Civil War in which the monarchy was usurped and various rival factions vied to enshrine a parliamentary executive power.

Executed in front of St. Paul’s by a firing squad for refusing the leave the City of London and face being ordered to obey the whims of the New Model Army without pay, Lockyer’s death brought about tremendous discontent amongst the Leveller movement which had pushed against Oliver Cromwell’s aims for a plutocratic form of Parliament and instead championed ideas of popular sovereignty, extended suffrage to all households, and equality before the law.  But they were only one of many dissenting groups that thrived during the period, one of the which was the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley, who advocated a form of agrarian socialism in which small rural communities would gain prevalence in a renewed interrelationship between man and nature.

Could it not be postulated perhaps that by disturbing the resting place of these long-dead radicals it might serve as an omen of sorts for the brewing discontent and disillusionment with the financial epicentre that is the City of London?  The long-entombed spiritual energy might soon undulate through the strata of history to manifest itself in renewed unrest, or at the least, a new found scepticism in the sanctity of its institutions.

As it is, the City of London is the fulcrum around which the entire nation slowly revolves.  Ever since being un-tethered from 1979 onwards by Thatcher’s New Right programme, it has come to float like a financial Hindenburg destined for cyclical inflation and immolation.  The kind of sums are traded on the derivatives, currency and stock exchange markets each and every day that make government budget quibbling look by comparison like rather small change. 

The astonishing failure of Labour in recent years is that it has allowed the Conservatives to tarnish them as economically profligate and untrustworthy, while defining themselves as prudent and trustworthy.  Whereas, it was Thatcher, taking the lead from Reagan’s America and a squadron of technocratic monetarists, who subjected Britain to a prolonged economic experiment that gave the illusion of prosperity with Right to Buy schemes and easy credit. What was enshrined instead was something close to an elected dictatorship whereby short-term investments, a decimated industrial base and a nation with higher levels of personal debt than anywhere else in the world was to become the basis of a new and unquestionable faith in the market system.  On the other hand though, Labour, along with its vestigial hope of socialism, had at the time never looked so spent and out-of-touch; in 1979 any prospect of leftism being electable rolled over and died. 

Herein lies the fundamental paradox of Thatcherism and modern Conservatives.  Those on the Right claim as their ethos and raison d’être the preservation of intrinsic British values – the institution of family, ‘a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’, a small state, hierarchy and order – and yet at the same time push wholeheartedly for the kind of rapacious and unregulated technological progress and economic growth that, as a natural consequence, serve to distort and erode them. 

With free market laissez-faire capitalism, Britain (as with America), was left with a breakdown in family life (higher divorce rates, parents working longer for less pay), high crime and incarceration levels, stagnating and in many cases falling wages, and massive levels of state intervention when inevitably the whole edifice looked set to crumble and fall (the bailing out of the banks, austerity measures and Quantitative Easing).  As one of the leading contemporary left wing voices, Owen Jones, has said, that with their protected interests, propped-up wages and next-to-no threat of unemployment, ‘it seems its socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.’

Make no mistake, the British left is no less confused.  A quick online search dredges up from the ideological swamp innumerable groups, collectives and talking-shops that offer an outlet for left wing politics – Socialist Party, Socialist Workers Party, Left Unity, Solidarity, Respect, Reality, Communist Party of Great Britain....

Socialism, representing as it does a wide plane of moralistic and progressive values, with collectivism and social justice as a fundamental tenet, can only paradoxically splinter into a myriad disparate factions and cliques that cleave to a swathe of idealistic myths about revolution, the working class and Marxist theory, that draw a resilient potency from assuming the perpetual mantle of the embattled underdog.

Britain has not seen the kind of groundswell of public disenchantment that has elevated Syriza to power in Greece or Podemos to the mainstream in Spain; and perhaps that is due to the largely suffocating force of the City of London.  All the same, that no strong coherent voice of the left has emerged to lay a real challenge at the door of economic orthodoxy during the harshest recession in living memory is a damning indictment.

Continuing north through Shoreditch and on through Hoxton, revelers were out on the streets celebrating or lamenting their fortunes in that afternoon’s Grand National race (a sporting event that typifies the entrenched aristocratic conservatism that defines so much of British society and culture).  Perennial events such as this, along with royal family jamborees, all infused with encouraged intoxication serve as both useful distraction agencies and as necessary valves for energy that might otherwise manifest itself in other more deviant and subversive directions.  (I don’t take against them per se, but it’s wise to recognise them for what they are.)

Will Hutton wrote in ‘The State We’re In’, that Conservatism has become anchored into the collective consciousness as the ‘party of instinct’, bestowing a sense of hierarchy, class and ‘born to rule’ politics.  This can be seen from the church, to the legal system, the media (most notably with the monopoly of the Murdoch press), public schools, the Bank of England, and an obsession with property, towards which the ladders of social mobility are poised just within reach.  This was particularly salient when New Labour soared to power and instead of reforming the Westminster system to a more socialist ideal, came to revel in the hegemonic majority-party power structure that Thatcher had enshrined and exploited to great effect.

 Walking through Shoreditch, the hipster central full of Greek philosopher beards, craft beer and fixed-gear bikes, one could be forgiven for forgetting the principal reason why a major political overhaul towards leftism is most unlikely in Britain any time soon – the demographics.  An ageing population looking towards retirement, with property to safeguard and pass on to children, and pension funds woven into the global money markets, has simply too much invested in the economic orthodoxy to challenge it even if they were inspired to do so.

The younger generations are entering adulthood in an era of utmost political confusion, where disillusionment with the contemporary political order – that has itself become more and more toothless – causes people to latch onto the pseudo-anarchic hyperbole of Russell Brand.  

In many ways, Brand’s book ‘Revolution’ is a perfect encapsulation of the confused and fissiparous times in which we live, sliding as it does between hopelessly vague summations, banal presumptions and snatches of refreshingly clear thinking.  It chuffs comfortably along on intellectualisms from the likes of Noam Chomsky, David Graeber, Naomi Klein and Thomas Piketty, but always ends up derailing down the banks of flippancy and spiritual musings of which the following is a choice quote:

‘We human beings are the temporary expression of a greater force that science as yet cannot explain  but is approaching in its fledging understanding of the harmony and translucent principles of the quantum world.’

My walk ended at the recently opened Trew Era Cafe, that Brand has commendably helped finance with the profits from his book, on the New Era Estate that he last year championed in their fight against being eviction by the perfidious Westbrook Partners.

And so, the journey across London returned to its symbolic beginning, immersed within the coffee shop culture that we now invest with such communalism.  One customer there, a girl in her early-20s training to be a primary school teacher said that she “didn’t think much about left or right wing”, that it tended to resort either way to alienating rhetoric.  Instead she said her vote would be going to the Green Party, due to it being the only party seeking to address the environmental calamity that threatens us.

In many ways this is perhaps the most sensible course for British politics to take; surrendering the banjaxed posturing over fatigued policy points, where Labour can’t even raise the issue of basic rent controls without the right opposition accusing them of seeking to emulate Chavez in Venezuela, and focusing instead on installing a green economy that makes some attempt to draw the ever-widening poles of inequality closer together.

As Naomi Klein discusses in ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate’, the main reason those on the right have been so slow-footed in tackling climate change is that they recognise the necessary steps to alleviate long-term global damage happen to be those that lead away from the improvident free markets and rampant consumerist path they would have us all queue along in an orderly line.

Whether Labour succeed at the General Election or not, leftism in Britain is now a confused network of beliefs and ideas in search of an electrode to earth rather than allow them, as ever, to melt into air.