The Singularity is Coming, and So Are We
The Future of Tech Means So Long Everything Else
by Rick Paulas
At its core, Infinite Jest is futurist fiction. Not just because it takes place in the future — the specifics of which aren’t entirely known due to Wallace’s ingenious Subsidized Time device — but because the book accomplishes futurology’s prime directive: Examine current trends, take them to their most logical endpoint, and scare the hell out of us.
The novel focused on the evolving nature of entertainment and its ability to seduce, luring us to spend time in front of whatever device was projecting that entertainment, winning the never-ending zero-sum battles for seconds, minutes, hours, days of our lives. It was a thought that was certainly on Wallace’s mind during his conversations with writer David Lipsky, who interviewed Wallace extensively during the Infinite Jest book tour.
“Entertainment’s chief job is to make you so riveted by it that you can’t tear your eyes away, so the advertisers can advertise,” Wallace told Lipsky. It’s our own “moral” job to pull ourselves away from The Entertainment, or else the ol’ vicious cycle of despair begins to rear its ugly head. “I’ll zone out in front of the TV for five or six hours, and then I feel depressed and empty,” Wallace said, “And I wonder why.”
Of course, there’s a distinct difference between what we normally consider entertainment — movies, TV shows, the various forms of Internet #content that are swift thumb motions away at any given moment of the day — and something we view that significantly stimulates our brains and bodies in drug-like fashion. By which I mean our old friend, porn.
I’ve delved into this before with a grumpy old man “kids have it too easy today” rant over at VICE. Rather than have you read that sucker — but feel free to do so! — simply consider the trajectory of porn’s accessibility over the past century. When your grandparents were first exploring their own bodies using images to assist the proceedings, they had a few dirty mags. When your parents got into it, they had a variety of moving images to assist. When those in Wallace’s generation had to satisfy those first ticklings in the pants, there was home media, but there were barriers in place; protected behind ID checks, swinging saloon-like doors at the video store, or at the very least hidden under piles of forest detritus. If you’re younger than Wallace, you had mailing services that discretely delivered DVDs direct to your home, or the slow-loading single .jpgs of Web 1.0.
But now? All of it’s available instantaneously to everyone at all times.
The projection of where this leads, and the ramifications, are easy to project. Google Glasses may have turfed out, but technology is moving to where virtual reality is almost here. There are already plenty of devices for folks of all genders, races, personalities, and ages to place into/onto their erogenous zones. It takes only some cleverly scripted code and purposefully placed motors to make the whole act feel pretty accurate, at least no worse that than first awkward time. And then, say hello to Alice or Andre, your new AI sex servant that you’ll pay a subscription service to use — and you will at the risk of having an ad interrupt your climax.
The singularity is near, and it’s horny.
Forget about whether or not we should do this. That question is worthless. It’s going to happen. There are boatloads of money to be made, as there is in any entertainment. But the ramifications have yet to be fully dealt with. “Now, if I don’t develop some machinery for being able to turn off pure unalloyed pleasure, and allow myself to go out and, you know, grocery shop and pay the rent?” said Wallace. “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna have to leave the planet.”
Now, I’m not here to say porn is bad, that it leads to morally bankrupt behavior, or that society’s being rotted from the inside-out as everyone’s primal urge to procreate is satisfied by electronics instead of people; hell, maybe there’s a potential cure for overpopulation embedded somewhere in these devices. Rather, I’m saying that it’s a thing that’s a very important thing that everyone’s too scared, too ashamed, or too bashful to debate or discuss. Sex is about to get pretty weird pretty quickly. It’s a smart time to begin considering this out in the open and not simply leaving it to fester, forgotten as soon as your browser history’s been cleared.
Rick Paulas has written plenty of things, some of them were serious, many of them not. He lives in Berkeley and is a fan of the White Sox.
