Technocalypse I.

‘Technological Singularity’, a term popularised in 1993 by Vernor Vinge which describes a

hypothetical future wherein AI surpasses human intelligence. It’s an idea which, potentially
purposefully, we’ve been desensitised to due to over-exposure till it’s nothing more than science
fiction. We take the oxymoron of sci-fi for granted much in the same way we overlook how
technology taints thought as we once knew it. Whilst we focus on a terminator-esque tangible
dystopia three other horsemen appear on the horizon: two-dimensional thought due to the fixation
on categories in search engines; algorithmic echo chambers and the subsequent calcification of
ideas; the catatonic state of counter-culture in the Big Brother age. These three horsemen of our
tech-apocalypse are most visible on some of todays most popular social media platforms, Snapchat,
Instagram but most notably on Tik Tok – a platform which as of February 2021 boasted 1.1 billion
active monthly users. Futurist Ray Kurzweil, Google’s head Director of Engineering, predicts
singularity to happen by 2045, yet arguably the cyber-social poses a threat which we may fall prey to
far before the 2045 forecast.

Language amongst humans is necessarily malleable but algorithms treat it as something more static
which when played into regresses social dialogue. With everyone on social media being their own
brand, a representative of an image that they have no clue who it could reach, users try to typecast
and categorize themselves in the most palatable way possible. An Instagram post can have 30 tags
and a Tik Tok post can have 33 which means 33 opportunities to hit an audience; by recreating the
static nature of language many manipulate the search engine to achieve virality. The brevity of
attention spans on social media often means more needs to be said with less which then can also
cause nuance to be skipped for the sake of a rudimentary recount of our modern affairs. The cyber
means potentially, there are no closed doors, no academic disciplines immune to the sacrilegious
truncation our attention spans require; calling an end to the age of rumination and epiphanies in
exchange for highly processed and ersatz. It’s not merely that the terms by which people choose to
express themselves are two-dimensional, once the status-quo is set at that level there becomes a
feedback loop between wanting to be palatable and consuming non-nuanced palatable information
as your source of information from which you’ll seek to educate others. The creation of the cyber-
library of social media might be as great a tragedy as the burning of The Library of Alexandria, as the
fire burns, we lose more and more of the progress we’d worked for.

Tik Tok grooms its users into developing masochistic tendencies which calcify the mind. The videos
that appear on the ‘for you page’ - a magician’s hat of content from around the world tailored for
you – are based on interaction like comments, likes and duration of the video watched. This data is
used to calculate what videos you’d find the most interesting and to keep you entertained for as
long as you have thumbs to flick through each video. The masochistic part is that the ‘inability’ of the
AI to determine whether your interaction with a video was pleasant or not means that often the
most incendiary and vitriolic content gets the most traction as it is often the most mesmerizingly
grotesque, the longer you’re mesmerized the worse it gets. Not only does this mean extreme ideas
hit the mainstream and reach wider audiences, but it also makes these extreme views seem more
common in their ubiquity. This puts the users at a crossroads where they can either: inoculate
themselves from the vitriolic mainstream by blocking users and notifying Tik Tok as to what content
troubles them, or, in an attempt to stay in tune with the times, they can subject themselves to the
torment of the mainstream. Both situations are unwinnable. In the first scenario, users flag content
which they don’t like as ‘not interested’, gradually guiding the algorithm into pushing forward videos
you’d have engaged with due to affinity rather than out of the grotesque. Henceforth, these users
exist only in an echo chamber of things they are affinitive with – the nature of content and discourse
would only serve as confirmation bias which they’d be more likely to interact with in a self-
perpetuating cycle as the more they find content which they like, enjoy and finding resonant, the
more they will see. This cycle of confirmation bias works to calcify peoples’ beliefs. In the other
instance, the user makes-do with the incendiary till it becomes their norm from which point only
videos orders of magnitudes more grotesque can keep them mesmerized. Not only are these users
stuck in an echo chamber that becomes more cacophonous in extremity, they’re more likely to have
these ideas stick due to negative bias which means that negative stimuli are not only more readily
accepted but longer dwelt upon. The misrepresentation of these extreme thoughts as mainstream in
tandem with negative bias calcifies peoples’ beliefs on the norm - what occupies mainstream
political and social discourse. A calcification which could be fatalistic in the attempt to further human
social understanding.

Technology’s Eye of Providence has maimed counter-culture. The revolution counter-culture pines
for often has a pivotal event, however, the instantaneity of information and response can often
mean events are reduced to fleeting moments, an effect which is compounded by the near infinite
amount of new information to consume which buries other events. Resultantly, counter-culture
groups struggle to find a turning point, an event to rally behind and remains on the starting blocks.
Yet, when an event does occur and stays in the fray long enough to be rallied behind, technology
elevates near inefficacious symbolic acts into counter-productive symbolic posts. This was most
blatant during the ‘post a black square’ campaign on Instagram which was supposed to show the size
of the allyship of BLM. According to Forbes, 28 million squares were posted and yet, it could be
argued that this show of ‘allyship’ did more harm then good. As Alex Turner says ‘life became a
spectator sport,’ the effect of which being people posting squares not to show solidarity but evade
the scathing eyes of their peers – when a group is only as strong as its weakest members - people
with no passion for your cause joining your ranks becomes a detriment. This takes the form of
people who go to protests in hopes of escalating them, or people who claim to champion the cause
whilst unable to educate their community on how to help their cause; these same people would
likely have discordant views with the more aware of the pack which leads to the sort of counter-
productive cacophonous discourse typical of counterculture. Bizarrely, counter-productive posts
aren’t just Dadaist black squares but also dense infographics. Virtue signalling often takes two forms,
the laconic in an attempt to be pithy, or the magniloquent in attempt to be meticulous, the latter
being its most common form. Users on Tik Tok and Instagram subject unwitting followers to a deluge
of data with no respect to the medium they’re posted on, for example: an infographic post to an
Instagram story could take 2 minutes to read yet will only stay on the screen for 15 seconds; Tik Tok
users will attempt to condense decades of critical theory into a one-minute video. Tik Tok’s ability to
duet a video (attaching a video in response to someone else’s) means that there is no court for
discourse but rather there’s an ever-growing range of meta-narratives which only work to disjoint a
movement. If counterculture never pierces the mainstream, then there’s only a fortifying and
inbreeding of hegemonic ideas which puts a halt on human social development.

Ultimately, the inhumanity of the process by which media is selected seems to hold huge capability
for harm. When you appeal to an audience of 1.1 billion on a service that aging law makers struggle
to regulate, the limits to which capital incentive can justify disregard for the consumers is
unfathomable. The surrealism of the cyber social world threatens to over-power the physical and so
rather than watching out for the growth of humanoid AI, we should keep an eye on the technology
that estranges us from our humanity, from the level of self-checkout tills which disassociate us form
one-another, to social media which indiscriminately hosts voices for the sake of fixating its audience,
either through the grotesque or the affinitive.