Grime, page 16
So everything’s going just great. Time for the next level.
INTERMISSION
While the story of Hannah, Don, Peter, and Karen takes on a new dynamic that consists of packing their bags, the silent departure from their childhood, and a failed trip to London (the bus to Manchester was delayed, there was no connection, the children stayed overnight in Manchester-Salford and continued their escape the next day).
An opportune time to talk about acceleration, something taking place abstractly in the world and which had a paradoxical effect on many people. They felt their lives were stagnating. Or going backwards. Or just stuck in a loop. Or simply couldn’t catch up with the speed around them. You wanted to install a voice-operated computer in your home or a robot hoover to crawl around your ten square meters—but it wasn’t any faster, because the mind’s limits are already set. That nothing in their existence was gliding toward a glittering, luxurious future; instead everything more difficult, more unpleasant, and more hopeless. Was. Only the upper echelon of the populace was entitled to services; the rest toiled with online reservations, used self-check for airplanes on which they squatted in their compression stockings, waited on hold on their devices just to get information from a fucking robot, no longer knew who governed them or why, who ruled the world, didn’t understand Alphabet and the delivery drones, the electronic cars that had increasing numbers of strange accidents, the headaches that disappeared when one took one’s pills, and worried about their jobs, for good reason. The number of people who died of overwork was rising, the number of unemployed was rising, poverty was rising; they became more radical, less human; it was the time of acute housing shortages in big cities around the world, the time when tent camps sprang up in industrial wastelands, the time of total surveillance, of surveying the brain, the watching, recording, evaluating of people, classifying them as valuable and worthless, the flowering of neo-Fascism, because perplexed people wanted clarity, please, clarity. They didn’t understand the developments anymore. Artificial intelligence, that nobody had ever seen but that dictated everyone’s daily life, collected their data, made them transparent. Arrests, being fitted with electronic ankle bracelets, elimination, increased due to errors made by artificial intelligence; cash was phased out, same for animals and insects; floods became more frequent, the climate was irrevocably out of balance; the raw materials needed to manufacture all the wonderful servers and computers and batteries dwindled, no problem. Whatever. As always, it didn’t matter to people. The important thing was what affected them—in their daily lives, their narrow surroundings. The oddly slow-motion way things became ever more unpleasant and harsh while the transformation of the world, in case it hasn’t been said, began to pick up pace.
So, the increase in speed
“The aforementioned concept, discussed by Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann in the 1950s, that the exponentially accelerating progress of technology will converge in a finite amount of time in a technological ‘singularity.’ In 2014, I discovered a beautiful, incredibly precise historic exponential acceleration pattern that wasn’t about technological progress alone but rather reached back all the way to the Big Bang: the history of what are perhaps the most important events from a human perspective seem to suggest that
The part of history dominated by humans
Will ‘converge’ in approximately the year Omega = 2050. (I prefer to call the convergence point Omega, because that’s what Teilhard de Chardin called it a hundred years ago, and because ‘Omega’ sounds better than ‘singularity’—it sounds a bit like ‘Oh my god.’) The error bars on most dates below seem, according to current knowledge, to be less than ten percent. Why the time intervals between decisive historical events are always so perfectly distributed, I do not know.”
Ω = ca. 2050
Ω− 13.8 billion years: Big Bang
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 3.5 billion years: first life on earth
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 0.9 billion years: first animal-like life
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 220 million years: first mammals
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 55 million years: first primates (our ancestors)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 13 million years: first hominids (our ancestors)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 3.5 million years: first stone tools (“technological dawn”)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 800,000 years: first controlled fire (next great technological breakthrough)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 210,000: first anatomically modern humans (our ancestors)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 50,000 years: first behaviorally modern humans colonize the earth
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 13,000 years: Neolithic revolution, farming and animal husbandry
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 3,300 years: beginning of the first population explosion in the Iron Age
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 800 years: fire and iron combined; first firearms and rockets (in China)
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 200 years: start of second population explosion during the Industrial Revolution
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 50 years: Information Revolution, digital nervous system spans the globe, WWW, mobile phones for all
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 12 years: cheap computers more powerful than human brain; artificial intelligence at human level?
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 3 years:??
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 9 months:????
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 2 months:????????
Ω− 1/4 of this time:
Ω− 2 weeks:????????????????
(a simplified treatise based on Prof. J. Schmidhuber, computer scientist, AI developer)
It’s going well
For
HUMANITY
They keep getting older.
People. And why not, since life is getting more enjoyable even in underdeveloped countries, as the Western world calls them. Ever since Western firms started selling clean water there and with the aid of China created blossoming landscapes in Pakistan, Uganda, Somalia, and wherever the hell else. Mechanized agriculture operations as big as countries, battery companies, solar farms brought work, prosperity, development and devices for the natives.
And technology. OMG.
Technology cures cancer, makes disabled people walk, deaf people hear, it provides old people with robot seals to cuddle and nursing staff to love. Ever more exhausting, sickness-inducing occupations disappear into the open arms of artificial intelligence. All the world’s knowledge is available online to everyone, computers have become a foodstuff that’s increasingly available to the entire population. There are so many positive, exhilarating aspects of development that it doesn’t seem improbable that our daily life could soon be like a shining utopia, with laughing people who, well-educated and equipped with wonderful opportunities for self-actualization, stand around green spaces hailing flying taxis.
Abolishment of the monarchy happened as quickly as the opening of the Berlin Wall that had divided East and West Germany. Or the fascist power grab in Europe. The outbreak of encephalitis in Africa that mushroomed into an epidemic in Europe. These moments that fundamentally change some people’s lives, that seem unimaginable but that are completely wiped from the hive mind hardware a day later. Because they don’t affect most of the other eight billion.
The new king appeared in front of the cameras. He announced his resignation, he was the most modern member of the royal family and therefore the least liked. Then. Nothing. Happened. Amazingly. It had always been whispered that the monarchy was a fundamental part of social cohesion. A rock of stability in a burning sea, a foothold amid hopelessness. It had been thought that just the presence of a few anointed ones, in order to bring god into the lives of the subjects, was important in preventing revolution. And there followed—no street battles between royalists and monarchy-haters. Everyone shrugged their shoulders. The royal family packed their bags. The queen had gone to fashion shows before her death. She’d tried desperately to make the monarchy hip again. Which unfortunately didn’t work. Marriages to two commoners were the low point, the marriage to a Black woman the last straw. You know the story. The deep-seated hatred of anything nonpink among the segments of society that supported the royal family could no longer be placated. You could even say a nonpink person sealed the fate of the monarchy. The palace was transformed into a museum of the British Empire. Elements of MI5 were given space there, too. The former royal family moved to Scotland, still in possession of their billions, of course.
Another jittery blink of the eye and the whole thing was forgotten …
The mind of the world population. You know how it is. The people who came of age without the influence of mobile devices
Are dead.
Every child in the Western world spends more than five hours per day on a device. They check their social media accounts, messages, and chat forums in intervals of ten minutes, and that’s a conservative estimate. The addictiveness of an entire generation has gone up by 300 percent, the ratio of gamma-aminobutyric acid to glutamate in the anterior cingulate cortex has risen sharply, if you take the dead as a baseline value. The third generation of addicts, fear-stricken, and depressives are no longer able to concentrate on a topic for more than two minutes.
Or to develop
Creativity
Or
Empathy. They operate with reduced motor skills and exhibit significantly reduced brain power.
What are you going to do?
Later. Which is to say, now.
Everything is quiet. A different kind of quiet from Rochdale.
Thinks
DON
Excitingly quiet, she thinks.
It’s nighttime in the big city, where it doesn’t get dark, there are no stars visible in the sky, a place where you don’t feel alone, where you suspect there are people all around who could become a friend. Or lover. Behind some window or other could be the person who would change your life. Something Don had never thought before. She knew virtually everyone behind every window of her hometown, and didn’t want to be expected by any of them. The air smells like old oil. Of petrol. Of tar, and there are frogs somewhere.
During the night watch Don feels she’s in the right place. At the perfect time. Grown-up and—excited. Their security is up to her. Being responsible for others has a positive effect on the brain’s reward center. A reason people still have children. If they’re even able to, which is ever less frequently the case. Humanity’s sperm seem to know that something’s up.
Quiet. A shimmering quiet is what Don might have thought if she were a fuckwit. If she’d been a person who always walked around barefoot in order to absorb the electrons from the earth, she would say: “I welcome the night because I sense a deep connection with nature only in the absence of light.”
Nature.
Right.
In the—let’s just call it—environs where the children’s—let’s just call it—dwelling is, there isn’t much nature left. A true Anthropocene landscape deep in East London, dotted with enchanted lakes whose surfaces are covered with green sludge through which little gas bubbles pop. Something is happening in there, deep in those lakes that stink of sulfur; they sit among the industrial complexes like pools of blood oozing from dead robots. Nobody comes to this area who doesn’t have to. Except for a few undead and unemployed night watchmen who because of old habits still occasionally check on the empty buildings, a total absence of people prevails in the area. A few years prior this area would have been overrun by the excavators that were digging foundations in even the most unlikely corners of the city for luxury condo towers being built as investments by idiots who wore diapers because they’d lost control of their sphincters as a result of stress. But construction had tapered off. Too many high-rises sitting empty for years on end. Though now it’s so pleasantly quiet. Controlled. Here. What a time it was, when the country was being sold off to dictators, fundamentalists, oligarchs, and whoever the fuck else. What a time, when everyone thought it would go on like that forever. Taller, faster, prettier, more golden. Affluence and exoskeletons for all.
It’s so quiet. A stream gurgles in the distance. A motorway junction where elegant electric cars stand in traffic. A beautiful spot to set up camp. Everything’s good now.
After the first three somewhat problematic weeks.
Don had imagined it more euphorically, this
New start
They’d arrived at the bus station she remembered well, with two drunken parents.
She’d thought this time would be different. They would romp through the streets and things would be offered up to them, she’d thought.
Maybe they would meet interesting kids who had a—let’s say—villa where they could put up the four of them. It wasn’t clear what the others had pictured, what they had dreamed of for that first day in the metropolis. Nobody talked about so-called feelings; that sort of thing wasn’t sufficiently concrete. What were they supposed to talk about? Their troubled childhoods? Their distrust of the world? The horrors of the night? When the ground seemed to open up and they vanished into the abyss. Blaming their childhoods for their fucked-up lives had been a pointless quirk of the disappearing bourgeoisie. The over-fifty set, teachers working on behavior therapy based on trauma inflicted by their mothers, constructing a new family tree with amusing, colorful pictures they’d drawn of their pain. WTF. If there was an upside to the end of the world then it was the collapse of the psych industry. Nobody had money anymore for family constellations and Kleenex boxes. There wasn’t any money for nonfunctional members of society.
Men like
THOME’S FATHER
Had seen to that. Thome’s father looks around. He’s alone in the library. His so-called wife is hanging around with some Russians in Dorchester, which belongs to some Arabs. And Thome’s father scratches his testicles. Well, “scratches.” He checks on the basis of his masculinity. Everything’s present and accounted for. Still alive. He shoves a cigar into his mouth. Things are rolling. Withdrawal from the EU has been forgotten. But not by Thome’s father; he likes to remember it. It was the first step of the reconfiguration, and it still makes him smirk, yes, he thinks “smirk” when he vaguely curls his lips, thinking about the fact that bots took the blame for that. Back then he had no clue about technology, only about psychology. A divided populace is a controllable populace. One that wants an enemy and a leader. Voilà, thought Thome’s father. Here I am. Thome’s father was a rabid supporter of Murray Rothbard’s libertarian manifesto.
Exactly.
Here
SIR ERNEST (EARL)
HEALTH PROFILE: gout, incontinence, pronounced anxiety when he thinks of his own demise
HOBBIES: hunting
FINANCIAL STATUS: unclear, more than a billion
Comes into play.
“Sir, if you were to offer a concise version of your ideas?”
“Yes, very happy to. So. You see. I would regard the privatization of the military and police as a breakthrough. Absurd to think that a fickle state apparatus holds a monopoly on violence in its hands. It belongs under the control of a sovereign, nonpartisan board of people for whom it’s important to maintain order and stability in the country. I’m conservative in a good way.”
Says the earl.
He understands this to mean that he longs for a Great Britain that exists exclusively in BBC series.
“During my childhood,” says the earl, “the contours were relatively clear. There were the Highlands, Cornwall, et cetera—places you went on holiday to your manor and it smelled of hay. The stallion grazed on grass moistened with dew. The English stallion. Life in the cities was orderly and the structures tried-and-true. A calm, friendly atmosphere reigned. Those whom tradition and the labor of their own hands had brought prosperity didn’t mix with the simple, industrious fellow citizens. Typical Englishmen strolled in Hyde Park, kept themselves tidy, and respected government authority. Woman and man knew their places in the bedrock of the body politic. Woman: internal. Man: external. Both important. Both according to their worth. Bearing children, looking after them. Hunting, conquering. Soft and hard. No ambiguities. No misunderstandings. An agreeable sense of organization existed in the country, which precipitated ever-increasing dividends and allowed Great Britain to become one of the most powerful empires ever.”
