Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century by Joshua Raulerson (review)
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Joshua Raulerson takes a cultural studies approach to understanding the dialogue between various fictional and factual representations of humanity in anticipation of what some call the Singularity—the acceleration of technological developments leading to the potential augmentation, replacement, or destruction of the human race. This enjoyable, admirable, and topical study elucidates that dialogue.
The discursive intersection between fiction and science has a long history. Many label Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as the prototypical sci-fi novel because of its focus on electricity, life, and transformation. The question persists: with “human” no longer a static category, in what form does the future intelligent being appear? Modern technology makes the question even more acute. Mathematician John von Neumann invented the Singularity concept in 1958. Mathematician and sci-fi author Vernor Vinge and inventor Ray Kurzweil garner most of the credit for postulating, through fictional and factual accounts starting in the 1980s, that the human race has, at most, fifty years before it reaches a point beyond which even fiction cannot predict: i.e., the Singularity.
In part I, Raulerson addresses this crisis in imagination by dissolving the boundary between science and science fiction, à la Jean Baudrillard, and through examples of dialogue between both. He surveys optimistic and pessimistic, utopian and dystopian, humanistic and self/subject-less flavors of texts of an imagined post-Singularity world. Kurzweil, who extends Moore’s law to “encompass the entire pre-electronic era,” represents the “Extropian.” This approach would purposely hasten (“simply evolution by other means”) the post-human Singularity most often seen in cyberpunk fiction, a “Rapture-of-the-Nerds” where humans escape corporality with “uploaded minds.” Raulerson notes that mostly white male scientists and “hard” sci-fi authors (those attempting veracity versus fantasy) are the ones who principally speculate on the topic. He relates that the “Singularity thesis presents an appearance of almost mechanical predictability” (p. 5).
In part II, Raulerson contrasts the dialogue of cyberpunk authors and transhumanist scientists—such as Rudy Rucker, Marvin Minsky, and Hans Moravec—that dismisses both the emphasis on the body (“mere jelly” or “meat”) and the Gaia hypothesis (the “sacred cow of the fundamentalist environmental movement”) (p. 43) with post-cyberpunk writers who imagine a more corporeally anchored Singularity still mediated by information. Meanwhile, the green-leaning post-cyberpunk writers question the libertarian-oriented Extropians, whom they see as unreflectively channeling the [End Page 285] technophilic optimism of golden age sci-fi and creating an unresolved tension between individualism and the elimination of the body. Raulerson extends this critique by noting how literally the Extropians channel Baudrillardian simulacra in their visions of disembodied consciousness.
In part III, Economics 2.0, Raulerson illuminates possible future economic systems in the wake of the Singularity, by bringing together readings of a variety of relevant sources: Georges Bataille’s “general economy”; Jean Baudrillard’s “symbolic social relation”; open-source, free software, and status-oriented or gift-oriented exchanges and their proponents; virtual game economies; and books akin to Charles Stross’s 2005 Accelerando. Capitalism sits uncomfortably in the face of free information and almost zero-cost production (“the death of scarcity”). For example, in the 1998 story “Maneki Neko,” Bruce Sterling contrasts an AI-managed reciprocity economy with traditional commodity value, property rights, and state power.
Raulerson concludes in part IV by recognizing the prevalent theme of entropy in sci-fi, and the eventual “heat death” of the universe, manifested amusingly/depressingly in Philip K. Dick and Cory Doctorow as, respectively, ever-gathering “kipple” (junk) and spam. He also notes the recurring theme of seeing entropy as justifying the purposeful exhaustion of our current planet’s resources in Extropian and Christian eschatology.
Like almost all science fiction, that of current Singularity imagines an alternative future while having its sensibilities grounded firmly in the present, both through the author’s perspective and need for narrative, and by reflecting current “aspirations and anxieties.” Indeed, many of Raulerson’s subjects seem...
