The Vortex or authoritarian Singularity

Sorry there have been some tech glitches precluding me from posting more lately. But also a lot of neat things in the works :-)

---

In response to The Agonist thread on 8 Thoughts on 2040:

Among the Kurzweil set there is a lot of happy talk about a Singularity describing a point where the rate of change itself accelerates to an asymptote, i.e. reaches infinity as technical advances multiply upon one another, and this is characterized as a radical shift in subjective consciousness that's a clean break from the past way of experiencing time. This is usually lauded as a benign experience because it's assumed it would solve material scarcity.

However there is also the 'rise of the machines' scenario as the Terminator movies visualize, where autonomous networks overtake all human decisionmaking ability and take over the nukes.

The level of corruption and the way it all works and what it's really all about becomes unbelievable to most people. It's about the Great Abyss. Picture a canyon, a deep abyss, surrounded by high walls. And in that Abyss whirls a continuous maelstrom of fraud and corruption. At the very bottom is the Great Vortex, known as the Vortex of the Way Everything Works and What It's Really All About.
You don't want to look too deep into the Vortex. It's dangerous. Look at all the people who have looked too deeply and the consequences. The only way you survive the Vortex is to become part of it. Everyone who has attempted to expose the Vortex hasn't fared very well. But conversely, that's The Way It's Supposed To Be. That's the way everything works. It is an interlocking system of corruption and fraud that transcends and goes through all governments. It is in fact a common link that all governments share."

--Al Martin, "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran Contra Insider"

If you show up sometimes you can perceive the Vortex pretty directly, or at least the outlying psychological principles bringing into view. Wherever you see the Constitution displaced by power spectacles in this country, the emotional grid of the Vortex is pretty obvious -- the G20 and the RNC like this.

Today at the city courthouse I saw a huge rush of people for the Public Defender income qualification forms. Those offices have already been slashed, while the federal government prints off money to buy LRAD sonic weapons and tattoo shop FBI notices.

When the complete system to 'estimate pre-crime' through pervasive data collection, social network and behavioral modeling, is completed, or approaches completion, the nature of decisionmaking would change but only in an authoritarian direction, as control over the future sinks into the control of the Vortex. That is not a required outcome, but its current incarnation (or meme cloud) claims to be the inevitable one.

AS James Bamford alludes to with the NSA's exhaustive interest in collecting all dimensions of material reality (and reshaping its future) they are building a tower of Babel - a big one outside San Antonio by all accounts. But they can't read it, it is all a mess. The control grid's clarity fails because it can't really understand the ontology. These killer databases don't understand Iraqi nationalism -- so on its own premise it has already lost.