Singularitarian Perversity
Machines making Machines. How perverse.
— C-3PO, Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones
It is perhaps no strange coincidence that the very pinnacle of capital’s development should be personified in those so utterly unconcerned with its own sustainment as the modern tech entrepreneur¹: the latest batch of capitalists who have perhaps turned the greatest profit out of public expenditure than anyone in all of history; those agents most implicated in the very shape of public life today at this most precarious juncture, referred to affectionately as late-stage capitalism; in whom capitalism finally approaches the very limits of its logic.
If there is any conceptual consistency which underlies capitalism, it is that of its so-called adherents (ironically so often not themselves capitalists in any substantive or practical sense, self-applying the title only as a ridiculous conceit) who laud its unabashed egoism–its valorisation of the seeking of one’s own advantage. It would seem then, today, that such advantage correlates not with the preservation or vindication of the hitherto dogmatic regard toward some ill-conceived market fundamentalism of yore, so much as merely making hay while the sun shines.
While this tendency is nowhere more bald-faced than in that of the wealthy to horde more prominently than to spend or invest, nowhere more insidious than in their apparent preparations for some impending societal and climatological collapse, and nowhere more hypocritical than their lauding of some vague and sterile post-capitalist society, our contention here would be that the most egregious example of this opportunistic tendency is in the techgnostic faith in some forthcoming singularity.
Has there ever been a better example of a self-fulfilling prophecy than that of the singularity? Its very prophets are those best positioned to not only bring such a thing about, but also to benefit from its disruptive potential. Rather than seeking to subvert the very system and mode of society which may well (however unlikely) bring about such a hypothetically, if not assuredly cataclysmic event, they seek only to be its forebears. This should rightly evoke the suicidal logic which permeated the proliferation of atomic weapons and their retinue of eschatological strategies, exemplified in the extreme of governments knowingly exacerbating the likelihood of nuclear Armageddon in anticipation of their own country’s immanent demise by such means–Armageddon on one’s own terms.²
Would not the most sane and appropriate response to such possibility be to undermine the very terrain of that possibility? In the absence of any such subversive potency within the very correctly situated preoccupation in both cases (rightly contending with matters of emergent technological omnipotence), we see only a perverse and sustaining impotence–a shirking of responsibility coupled with a hubristic marveling at one’s own triumph over nature as such (the hitherto hypothetically immutable background of our activity), and not even one’s own–rather, vicariously, as it were, perhaps the very height of perversity.
So how then does one answer such perversion? By what means might its subversive antipode emerge?
Footnotes:
- As noted by Slavoj Žižek, “… it is almost exclusively the most ‘progressive’ capitalists themselves (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg) who talk about post-capitalism — as if the very concept of the passage from capitalism as we know it to a new post-capitalist order is being appropriated by capitalism itself.” It is perhaps fair to say that such capitalists’ blithe comfort in questioning the basic necessity of capitalism might owe to their rather novel manner of exploitation and its untapped capacity for supplanting older and less sophisticated manner of exploitation.
- Ironically, it was Cuba, whose destruction was not so much mutually assured as merely assured, in the missile crisis who most explicitly exemplified this apocalyptic posture.
