Technocalypse I
Ekow Amoah
‘Technological Singularity’, a term popularized in 1993 by Vernor Vinge describes a hypothetical future wherein AI surpasses human intelligence. It’s an idea to which, potentially purposefully, we’ve been desensitized, owing 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. While 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 today ’ s 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 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 the highly processed and ersatz. It’s not merely that the terms by which people choose to express themse lves 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 cre ation 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. T he longer you’re mesmerized , the worse it gets. Not only does this mean extreme ideas hit the mainstream and reach wider audiences; it also makes these extreme views seem more common in their
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