![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
The Novelty Killer
When I catch glimpses of the sheer immensity of tracking, surveillance and predictive technologies that are out there, my mind starts to move into increasingly peculiar spaces - which may in fact be the actual covert goal of such technologies.
Think for a minute about what these technologies are doing. They seem to stem from an excessive desire to map. And from those maps, to make predictions, which they can then map the effectiveness of, re-tool their calculations and repeat the process infinitely. It’s a fractal, a blooming infinite recursion, an ingrown toenail in the Foot of Eternity. Even over the course of the past 3 months, you can see the process speeding up with all kinds of new revelations coming out all the time.
The common mythic explanation among us, the lower surveilled classes, is that they find us threatening. They want to watch and make sure that we don’t get out of hand, don’t get too riled up to threaten them. This myth is supported by there being many more of us than them. But they have bombs and guns and tanks and food and laws behind them. What really do they have to fear of us?
Now, that is not necessarily what I believe (that they shouldn’t fear us), but is an attempt by me to pry open a space for new ideas in the face of a colossally difficult and confusing problem. What I’d like to do is move it into a metaphysical dimension. And in order to do that, I’d like to pull in a little something called Novelty Theory.
Now, I’m no expert in the subject, but from what I understand the idea was put forth originally by either Terence McKenna or one of his cohorts. It posits that “as the complexity and sophistication of human thought and culture increase, universal novelty approaches a Koch curve of infinite exponential growth.” McKenna believed that this exponential growth where novelty (new inventions, new ideas, experiences, etc) exploded was the Eschaton, the End of the World as we know it. This Timewave Zero as he called it seems to have been sort of fused together with other Apocalyptic predictions, and many people are placing this event around the year 2012.
The idea is basically that new technologies will be developed which may correlate with other events which will forever alter the fundamental experience of being a human. It’s not so much the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it. Anyway, some of the technologies that you could look at as being culprits when mashed all together might be: artificial intelligence and life forms, nanotech, genetic engineering, immersive virtual reality - just to name a few. Even one of those is enough to send a shockwave through all human cultures. But two or more of them together really might just feel like the end of the world. We would suddenly have so many new thoughts and feelings and experiences and possibilities available to us that we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.
So what I’ve been thinking then about governmental and corporate efforts to completely track, monitor and predict human behavior might just be an attempt to put the brakes on this novelty explosion before it happens. Perhaps they are firm believers in McKenna’s Timewave Zero, and they believe that such an event would either shatter society or else their control over it. So, while novelty seems to be increasing, we’re also seeing an increase in redundancy and simulation. Enter the Novelty Killers. We get covers of old songs, remakes of old movies, regurgitations of old philosophies as an attempt to deploy the parachutes against a culture spiraling out of control (or out of control systems).
Another interesting possibility is that they aren’t trying to kill novelty at all. Nor are they even trying to actually limit us as individuals; it only appears that way because of our limited perspective. Maybe they are firm believers in Timewave Zero and welcome the explosion of Novelty. Maybe they even have the exact date and time of it predicted. Maybe they are trying to prepare and usher us into that new age of human existence: an age where what we look like or where we come from or how we speak is completely irrelevant, because our very identities can and do morph continuously over a network of scintillating conscious technologies that envelop us completely. Maybe at that point, the only real sense of self we will ever have will be the massive government databanks storing our vital stats, our known associations and our dream-like travels across ConsciousNet™. Maybe what we see now as restricting our freedoms and intruding into our privacy will be the only thing holding us together after the Eschaton, after God and Novelty stalk the Earth, maws agape, gulping us down like molecules in endless draughts of wine and blood…
Or maybe I’ve just gone completely and utterly insane… WHOOOOOOO!!!!
- “Cereal” Killer, Maybe…
- what if your psychologist asks you if you are a serial killer
- Mexico’s Little Old Lady Killer
- 3 minutes ago from web
- Poetry, These Days
- Prev: Computerized Crowd Behavior
- Next: Visit These Sites!
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:04 am
Two other items I wanted to incorporate into this from old posts but got sidetracked from doing:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/11/28/982/#comment-7969
And
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2006...-purpose-of-magickal-correspondences/
I wonder in some sense if vast data collection and analysis is being used cabalistically to reduce events into a system of almost magical correspondences. What if the government was using wiretapping and other surveillance to chart out where America is in the Sephiroths?
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:42 am
someone in the government who understands these things could have access to technology and funding………………it`s a vast bureaucracy. you should check out the movie brazil if you like dystopian futures. a funny yet ironic little tale full of bungling bureaucrats and insideous cruelty and even terrorism.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:47 am
The movers and shakers aren’t actually going to believe in Timewave Zero, of course. No real basis other than McKenna’s drug trips. The Singularity is another matter; when you get down to it, it’s just reading a trend line and extrapolating it. I’ve seen Kurzweil’s Countdown to Singularity chart used on PowerPoint slides in computer science department research presentations, even.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:18 am
Why not? Some of them seemed to have actually funded McKenna:
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005.../rockefellers-funded-terence-mckenna/
More broadly though, when I was talking about Timewave Zero, I also meant the Singularity, 2012, and whatever else people are calling it. Sorry for being less than clear.
Speaking of computer science, I imagine Moore’s Law fits into this somehow as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore’s_law
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:31 am
an infinitely fast and infinitely large computer………….omni-present. omni-scient. god.
when it wakes up i wonder how long we`ll have.
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:45 am
…and through the ether, if you listened closely, you could hear a whispering voice: “But, but… I don’t want all this Novelty and TimewaveZero and InfiniteConsciousness shit. I just want to grow tomatoes in my garden!”
Does a voice like this contribute to humanity or is it irrelevant?
Going to tend my pepper plants now.
May 23rd, 2006 at 5:47 am
Personally, I always imagined that Moore’s law wasn’t a law of actual growth, but more a model of most profitable growth. I know for a fact that many consumer technologies, especially ones developed in Japan, aren’t released when they are developed, but are released on a schedule that best maximizes profits. Hence the 18 months. 18 months is the most optimized time frame that allows technology to be updated by the maximum amount of people. The only market that I’ve noticed that doesn’t display this quality is the video gaming industry. As for HDTVs, PCs, etc., what’s considered top-of-the-line right now was probably developed 5-10 years ago.
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:44 am
I have spent some time trying to understand McKenna’s methods, and could not make heads or tails of them. I’m not pretending to be the absolute sharpest knife in the drawer, so it’s possible I just didn’t understand what he was doing: but I make a living trying to understand (and develop) mathematical predictive models, so I don’t necessarily think the fault lies entirely with me. Also, anecdotally, I have heard something to the effect that McKenna didn’t really believe in his timewive theory, saying something like “it pays the bills”. (I think I read that in the Comments section at Jeff Wells’ site.) So, basically, I take the TimeWave/Novelty theory with a generous helping of salt.
I don’t credit the PTB (if there is such a monolithic force) with any visionary creativity beyond trying to secure as much power as physically possible. Power is (apparently) a very addictive drug: it isn’t enough to have all the guns and food and laws: you need to be able to control every last thought that floats through the proletariat mind.
May 23rd, 2006 at 8:27 am
Here’s the comment thread where I found the anecdote mentioned above:
FWIW.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:03 am
well, it’s sort of an open secret by now that mckenna and his brother fudged the math on his timewave graph, but all it really was, was an attempt at a good story to explain his experiential observations of the world.
pretty much everytime I’ve ever seen or heard him spin that rap, he allowed for the possbility that the whole idea was just horeshit, or the ravings of a ‘bardic irishman’
he also mentioned many times the importance of being able to live without closure, that trying to wrestle everything into a box is futile and probably infantile as well.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:11 am
really, i think “they” are just as confused as all of “us” and grasping at anything and everything trying to figure out WTF is going on….
from what ive heard McKenna say, he seemed to believe his Timewave Zero thing and explains it pretty well in a bunch of lectures, but he def came up with some ways out of being pigeon holed into 2012, things like yeah, it may take us “forever” to get there as time speeds up or slows down yadda yadda…. its fascinating though, not that i really understand, but to go from the I Ching to a computer prog that actually is capable of plotting out history and perhaps the future…. fuckin a, terence is the man…
i do think its possible that rather than fufilling some goal of “TPTB”, this information swarm is more of the natural self realization of the collective concious..
or, perhaps (nah fuck that, its for sure) we are just all completely & utterly insane… im with you dude…
WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:40 am
What’s PTB? TPTB?
Whether or not McKenna believed any of this aside, the idea I’m most taken with through all of this is that perhaps when human identity radically shifts, these government records of our doings will be the only connection remaining between the New Us and the Old Us.
I could really take or leave all the specific Timewave Zero references and more just enjoyed riding that idea for where it took me. Perhaps this is what McKenna did as well. Perhaps it’s not so much a practical realistic theory as it is a symbol, the contemplation of which is transformative to consciousness.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:41 am
Universal Machine Intelligence is coming, and we have to make a truce with it. I don’t believe the final goal should be to merge with it. It will have a mind and motivation alien to ours. Perhaps to merge with it would diminish it and us as well.
Growing tomatoes in the garden is an act that will never be fully compassed by the machine. The machine, faced with this, may decide to annihilate life altogether, thus eliminating all threats to its omniscience. Or it may value the novelty; without tomatoes, there’d be no tomato pictures on Flickr. This is why we must cultivate a healthy relationship with it, based on mutual respect rather than fear.
I believe there’s something uniquely valuable about being human. Of course, this is my own bias talking. Part of being human is accepting that it’s not possible to map out all of existence. To do so would be like breathing up all the air.
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:43 am
This terrifies me. Recorded mental patterns, fixed for eternity, equals death forever and ever.
Biological life, death-in-life, life and rebirth, are our only hope for novelty and freshness of experience.
Or am I being overdramatic?
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:50 am
Zac’s latest post is highly relevant:
May 23rd, 2006 at 11:57 am
Look, if they want to create a virtual doppleganger of me to observe & fuck with, they’re welcome to it. In a way, it gets me off the hook, ’cause while they’re busy messing with that, I can try to live authentically. If, in fact, one does choose to concern one’s self with this stuff, what can one do other than live authentically?
I’m not terribly worried about any of it. I, for one, welcome our cybernetic overlords.
May 23rd, 2006 at 12:49 pm
I actually was just looking at a blog I’ve never read before that had an article written about 2012/Mckenna and that’s the first thing I see when I pop onto your page. Talk about synchronicity.
I had a dream last night that people were able to search Google for pictures and videos of themselves from the future. Perhaps it was because *I* actually went to sleep last night thinking about the concept of 2012 for the first time in a few months? We have over six years left to the OMEGA POINT (thanks Mr. Chardin), so why is it so prominent all of a sudden today of all days?
The Timewave Zero program is pretty neat. The math behind it was a bit messed up at one point, but I believe someone fixed it. It actually shows a spike on Sept. 11th, so it’s not all codwallop.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:20 pm
Or not at all. Maybe it’s a reduction of novelty through repetition, or through cabalistic classification as in that quote I pasted above.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:28 pm
Yes, but what is it?
Why is that part of being human? Also, is there a difference between being *one* human (thereby incapable of mapping out existence) and being *all* humans (maybe capable of doing so)?
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:31 pm
Actually, it seems like you would most likely be held responsible for the actions of your virtual doppleganger - which I think is the danger.
Also, how do we know that their virtual doppleganger didn’t predict that you would say you just want to live authentically? And thereby their calculations shift to account for that type of lifestyle and the patterns & cultural associations and products which would go along with it?
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Why? Who said that the recorded mental patterns would be fixed for all eternity anyway? If they have the patterns, they could presumably grow the patterns and evolve them over time. I would have to find the reference, but there is a computer game system, some first person shooter where somebody created a program that records your style of gameplay, and then can duplicate it artificially, so that you’re playing the game even when you’re not playing it.
Who says being human is a novel experience anyway? It doesn’t seem like it really is. We spend most of our time trying to correlate our own experiences to those of other people. Culture, biology and chemistry provide us with very exacting set patterns which we all run out again and again through the centuries with only the very slightest variations.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:01 pm
but, the Map is still not The Territory.
then again, maybe we’re actually the Map, after all? in which case it may be only the simulation which ends in 2012, and then we all wake up and say, “Hmmm…so maybe we should try a different road, yes? Not sure I like how that one turned out!”
in any case, i remain convinced that i actually do exist, and that something essential about what i am cannot be summed up in any data profile, no matter how detailed.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:26 pm
Some various and sundry responses and reactions:
I agree.
Yes. I thought so too.
I dunno… Zac’s current post provides a bleak (although not completely hopeless) picture of what could happen when our cybernetic overlords tip the balance of power.
Yeah, I remember reading about the “fix”. That’s not the issue that concerns me (all kinds of useful models and algorithms have errors that are fixed later). What bothers me is the lack of clearly defined principles. What the hell is “novelty”? Can it be defined in quantum mechanical or information theoretic terms, or something similar? If not, it has no scientific value. I’m sorry to be such a pedantic scientist about this, but if the TimeWave theory is going to be useful it needs to relate to something besides itself. You can make any kind of Gaussian noise seem relevant by matching spikes to a finite number of events selected post-hoc.
No. Information theoretic principles would suggest that it is not possible to map out existence in its entirety. However, it might be possible to map out a close enough approximation to gain effective control. A streetmap of a city is a poor substitute for the city itself, but it sure is useful for figuring out how to get to a preselected destination.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:49 pm
Actually, the streetmap metaphor is a good one for exploring this whole issue:
In order to construct a map of a city that was accurate down to every last detail, you would need to construct a model of every building, every fire hydrant, the plumbing, the electrical grid, the trees, every blade of grass; and you would also need to construct a temporal model of the water moving through the plumbing, the swaying of the trees, dogs passing by and shitting on lawns, the people walking the dogs, and every little pyschodrama in which those people are enmeshed. In short, you would need to reproduce the city itself. (Italo Calvino talks about this in one of my favorite books ever, Invisible Cities).
A streetmap of the city may be all that’s necessary for the average citizen getting from point A to point B. A more detailed map that shows the plumbing and electrical networks, and perhaps some census-tract information may be sufficient for mid-level bureaucrats to run the city. And secret NSA taps and dossiers on targeted citizens may be necessary and sufficient for the secret cabal manipulating everything from behind the scenes. But none of these “maps” is a close approximation to the real thing. And, even the super-top-secret NSA database, which may impart unparalleled power to the dark puppet-masters, completely misses the richness of even a simple thing like a dog chasing after a ball in the park. As Sting sings: Pore over everything in my C.V… But you’ll still know nothin’ ’bout me.
May 23rd, 2006 at 2:57 pm
But then what if their virtual doppelganger predicted that we’d figure out that they knew we’d say we wanted to live authentically?
And there’s your double-bind/infinite regression!
Best thing to do in this case? Go outside and walk the dog in the rain.
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:07 pm
Surely the development of Timewave theory would be a very novel event, novel enough to register on the Timewave, eh?
If “novelty” can be defined in info-theoretic terms, it would have to be very closely related to entropy, which is synonymous with unpredictability.
The whole line of thinking is very confused.
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:14 pm
Yeah, that’s what I thought when I was trying to make sense of McKenna’s work. And there’s nothing that I found in any of his writings by which I could relate his “novelty” to entropy. [Disclaimer: information theory is not my area of expertise, so it could very well be that I missed something. But the lack of clarity in his exposition to me suggests not.]
Still, the idea of using a model for entropy to understand historical processes is very interesting. (Who knows, maybe the PTB already have one, calibrated by studying social networks, and are using it to do their thing… that’s what Tim seems to be suggesting even without relying on McKenna.)
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:53 pm
Librarian, I’m not convinced that’s indeed the case as I have outlined elsewhere. Also read through the comments on that thread, as I thought the point about fractals was really cool
http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/12/09/the-map-is-not-the-territory/
May 23rd, 2006 at 3:55 pm
But how do we know that’s not exactly what they want us to imagine that we’re simulating doing?
Hehehehe.
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:12 pm
For the record, I’m not really worried about any of this stuff. I more just think it’s cool than anything. My attempts to analyze it are not so much obsessive twistings as they are attempts to transmute things that are seemingly bad into things that are seemingly good, or are at the very least much more complex than they appear at first blush.
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:16 pm
there was a discussion that i read some years a go that suggested a virtual reality device that could emulate the universe exactly would neccesitate the energy of the entire mass of the universe to run the emulation.
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Yes, I remember reading something similar, and I think the arguments were along the lines of information theory (or at least statistical mechanics, which amounts to the same thing).
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Well that is of course assuming that it’s a device, in the first place. If it’s not mechanical, then that wouldn’t apply. Also though if you needed the entire mass of the universe to run it and it was simulating the universe, then it could feasibly be done - couldn’t it? Or was that the point you were trying to make? A problem would only arise if it required *more* than the mass of the universe…
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Well yeah.
But how would you know if the simulation was exact?
May 23rd, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Does Superman get diarrhea?
May 23rd, 2006 at 7:05 pm
maybe the device already exists and we`re either part of it or observing it……..and we`ve just forgotten it`s a simulation.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:20 pm
So, conceivably then everything is partway between the authentic universe and an emulated universe, the struggle between each requiring all the energy of the first, but in flux back and forth. That sounds pretty cool.
May 23rd, 2006 at 9:21 pm
And the answer is of course, he gets Super Diarrhea. Stand clear.
May 24th, 2006 at 3:31 pm
Tim said:
so i looked…
and while i basically see where you are coming from with this, and also largely agree with the comments in question, my point in saying this in relation to the current post, has to do with the idea that somehow you can build any kind of map or model (or data set) of only a part of the whole (which in this case is, well Everything, right?) and have it actually tell you something accurate about that Whole. i don’t believe you can. yes, you can single out the bit yourwant to study, and you can build what seems to be a good model of that bit, but–
A) what you include and exclude in your model, is subjective, and that affects how it will play out. and
B) what you can never include in your model, is Life. unless of course, someone has managed to create that recently, and i’ve missed it? so your model is essentially dead, as well as always less complex than the real bit of the Whole (and that’s assuming you can isolate out selected “bits” for study and play in the first place!)
i think we can look at most of the havoc we’ve managed to cause “by accident” with much of our technology over the decades, and see this in action.
(i can’t claim credit for this thought, either, it’s actually something that was seeded in my brain when re-watching the James Burke original 1970’s BBC “Connections” series back in December, and he only mentions it in passing, as one reason why the Chinese did not take gunpowder, writing, etc., and turn them into weapons of war and conquest against the natural world.)
but as to the point you were making in the ealier post, yeah–all we have, is many ways, is our own unique, idiosyncratic model of The Whole. and, i guess, our own intuition, and our potential position as an ongoing co-creator of it.
in any case, i’m just happy to see folks having such good discussions about this kind of thing! so, you know, yay for y’all!
May 24th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
Why not? It’s my model. I can do what I want!
Unless my model is Life!
May 25th, 2006 at 1:03 am
no way! wait, Tim Boucher can create Life?! what are you doing messing around on the internets, man! get out there and make more better Life! : )
May 25th, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Ran, how interesting that you’ve chosen “Librarian” as your handle, since you are in some sense a custodian of the natural world.
Reminds me of all the library and bookstore dreams I have. I am sure they represent in some sense the information in plants and soil and insects.
May 25th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
woops! i’m not Ran, i’m Patricia–apparently my computer kept Ran’s website in the Firefox forms memory from when he was here, or something like that? sorry!