Not A Blog™

The Singularity is a subject I’ve discussed here before. I keep revisiting it for reasons I’ve never examined. I think, perhaps, that it’s a combination of factors: the idea of the singularity is interesting, important, and plausible, I would say. On the other hand, I don’t really buy into it yet. I’ve seen arguments by other futurist-people who don’t think it’ll happen for a variety of reasons, and these reasons are rather more plausible than those in support of the singularity.

Every time I talk about this, I tend to oversimplify the explanation. This happens because 1) You can travel yourself over to Wikipedia for the straight dope and 2) straw men are easier to lampoon.

For those of you who haven’t read my thoughts on the singularity hypothesis previously: the idea is that eventually we’ll invent artificial intelligences and other sundry gadgets that, combined, will lead the way to more technologies of which we were previously not able to imagine. These postulated AIs will be smarter than all of you, and so any advancements they make to themselves will be smarter yet, and so on, ad [infinity|nauseum], until nobody knows what the Next Big Thing will be. Or to put it another way: technology will advance so fast we won’t be able to predict it.

Well that may or may not happen, but in thinking about this, I’ve come to the realization that we have already passed a bunch of singularities. They may not be technological singularities, but they are meta-concepts, rapidly evolving, and unpredictable, and so I say they fit the definition. The internet has facilitated the unpredictable-ness of these things, and post-modernism has opened the box of Pandora, as ideas ultimately build into multiple layers of action and reaction, creating an infinite meta-narrative.

But that’s complicated and not very funny.

More to the point: we have already passed a number of cultural milestones where contextual foundations disintegrate amidst a sea of non sequiturs. This is easier to demonstrate than it is to discuss. The following are a few “singularities” which have been passed, singularity in this case meaning any prediction of development of these things is impossible and pointless.

DRM

I mentioned in my Security essay that we’ve apparently reached a security singularity. In retrospect, I’m not sure that’s true, because we can easily see what more security is going to get us, and it’s simple to see where it’s going. It is more accurate to refine this and say that we’ve reached a digital rights management singularity.

Arguably, this had already passed the “singularity’ point at its inception, because there never was secure DRM. In fact, there is no such thing as digital rights management. You can’t manage rights digitally. You can’t do it. The term “digital rights management” is the PR label used to discuss the concept of not allowing a remote entity to copy media on their own terms. But accomplishing this—actually managing your rights for your data on your terms—it cannot be done.

Anyway, the point is that we’ve passed the “cracked DRM” singularity. I love reading about how millions of dollars is spent on DRM which gets pwnz0rd by a 17 year old in an afternoon. DRM is the biggest scam in computing ever conceived. CEOs know it won’t help. The programmers coding it know it can’t be done. The salespeople know DRM’s track record of secure-ness. Every single person who works on DRM from the lowliest intern to the CEO knows it’s a joke. But as long as everyone gets paid, that’s all that matters.

The entire DRM industry is built on an idea that violates fundamental laws of mathematics and cryptography. It would be like companies all over the world spending billions on cold fusion machines for their promise of unlimited energy, regardless that every single one EVER broke down within weeks of it being installed. And once it breaks, sometimes someone can get it working again for a few weeks, but as assuredly as the sun rises each day, the machine breaks again. That’s DRM. It is a pre-singularity security technology introduced in a post-security-singularity age, which makes it the biggest and least funny joke of all time.

Internet Memes

The internet meme is the most rapidly evolving idea-unit ever seen by mankind. It’s impossible to predict what bit of weirdness will become the next meme, and it’s not even a straightforward matter to get oneself on another meme’s bandwagon. For example, I was all about All Your Base back in the day, but it took me over a year to stumble across the most excellent Zero Wing Rhapsody after that came out.

Memes are interesting because I think they’re representative—on a small scale—of the sort of cultural explosion we’d witness if copyright power was severely curtailed and copyright shortened. Nobody owns the imagery and verbiage associated with the vast majority of memes. They’re throw-away gags. But look at how fast they morph and meld into each other. Look at the plethora of Star Wars Kid remixes. Or more current to the time of this writing: look at how many people did Chocolate Rain parodies. Even in situations where ownership is clearly defined, this stops no one from borrowing or repurposing work on a whim. Then someone comes along and makes yet another meta-narrative mashup and the cycle renews. (The only question I have pertaining to the Internet People video is: where’s Rejected!?)

Sure, if copyright was curtailed, we’d have a lot of junk produced in the same way there are plenty of terrible memes, but we’d also have gems in there—and there would be a lot more of them if people weren’t worried about being sued every time they mentioned the title of a song off-handedly. Regardless, the evolution of internet memes is a sociological singularity: unpredictable and incredibly rich in scope.

Fetishes

Surely you’ve heard of Rule 34. There is porn of it. No exceptions. But it goes further. It extends into the area of fetish. As the internet brings to everyone’s computer screens a wider and wider range of sexual behavior, so to does the variance of sexual behavior increase. A few months ago there was an article about that guy who has sex with cars. I can’t consider that weird because I’ve fantasized about similar things. (I’ve never actually tried to do that, though. I can’t imagine it would be comfortable in any manner.) More importantly, there’s no way to tell, anymore, whether or not a particular action might turn someone on. Chances are, it does turn someone on. And if turns someone on, there’s porn of it somewhere. No exceptions.

Religious Satire

This is actually a worrisome problem for people such as myself. It has been noted on Digg and elsewhere that Fundamentalist Christians are so strange that if someone trolls posing as a fundamentalist, even if they post the most bigoted, bizarre viewpoint imaginable, nobody’s sure whether it’s a joke or not. A satirist who doesn’t recognize satire? That is what this singularity has wrought.

Joke websites have sprung up claiming to be Christian or based on Biblical principals that are completely insulting—and yet there is some sect of Christianity out there that still believes in these “traditional” values. Perfectly rational people will debate endlessly on whether or not some of these are the real deal, and at least one person will cite a real-life example which lends credence to the idea that the parody is, in fact, real.

Here is a perfect example. Two weeks ago, I was working on another alternate news article about Christian families praying for basic, well-understood problems to be fixed, rather than just taking the initiative and fixing them. One angle was a car that ran out of gas, so these people were praying for more. Ridiculous enough to get the point across, right? No one would ever actually do that. Well, I decided to abandon the effort after I read this rather disturbing article about an airline in Nepal sacrificing goats to keep their planes in the air. Now these were Hindus, not Christians, but you see the similarities, here. This story is no less bizarre than mine (although messier, perhaps), but it’s true, whereas mine was a joke. I can’t even make a joke about the weirdness of religion, because it’s weirder than my imagination.

Another example: I read an article on thisisby.us along these lines. You can read it yourself, but the gist is that a Jewish woman had accidentally locked herself out of the house. But it being the Sabbath, she wasn’t permitted to do any work, so she had the author of the story going through all sorts of hoops to try and get the key from her husband so she and her kids could get in the house. I thought it was mildly amusing and I would have bet actual money that it was a joke—a satire on religious convictions taken to the extreme. But upon reaching the end, there was no hint that it might be fiction. The comments did not indicate it was fiction. Indeed, they seemed to confirm that such Jewish sects exist and problems like the aforementioned happen on a regular basis. But here I am—still not convinced it’s real. Religion has grown so strange that nobody can even tell anymore whether or not some story is a parody, or true religion at work. We have reached a religious satire singularity.

These are the cultural singularities borne of our post-postmodern era. Things in which stability, contextual clues, and recognition go right out the window, and leave us with the inability to distinguish between straight and satire, the inability to predict popularity even one hour ahead, or the inability to enforce laws from an earlier time. The lack of stability here is very reminiscent of what all these People Smarter Than I are saying will happen with technology. Only instead of technology, it has happened with culture first. Maybe civilization must grow that way. We have to pass through a stage of progressive sociological singularities before making the leap to AI.

-Ted