THE YTIRALUGNIS

I'm kind of clever, kind of. I read about stuff that matters and I ponder it and comment about it, online usually as I find the interface of face to face a muddled and confusing place.

I'm currently worried about artificial intelligence and the impending Singularity. When it comes to artificial intelligence, the Singularity is the point when computers become more like humans only superior. It's quite concerning. Although, maybe, maybe, yeah maybe, I was thinking, we should be talking about things happening the other way around. We should be talking about the impending Ytiralugnis. That's what's really going to happen. The Ytiralugnis is the Singularity backwards, the point when humans become more like computers only inferior. When we all become the nodes of one great algorithmic consciousness. Led by the #s and validated by the 'likes'. 101001000011010001ing our nodey little heads off. All as one. Unified at last. A singular thing but in a perverse kind of reverse. All with opinions on opinions we are destined to have opinions on. Each of us will be a 'unique' series of takes on whatever is trending.

This is Lord Shiva as a search engine and us as anonymous voices emitting from the Cloud. We'll no longer be people but blogs and Twitter accounts and Facebook walls and apps and regular forum posters and viral uploads. We'll be multi-platform experiences. We'll all be part of one great family. Our surname will Dotcom. Our new family may be slightly dysfunctional, somewhat divided. The upper caste will be those with high hit counts. The lower caste the least hit. And newborns will be called noobs and the elderly will be sneeringly referred to as Commodore 64s. And when we die we'll be shipped off to a landfill in Ghana and stripped down for reusable parts and then incinerated on pyres by kids with emphysema, wearing homemade pollution filters, that never logged on in their lives.

The #Ytiralugnis – it's going to happen. It has happened. It's happening right now. Artificial Intelligence, it's making us kind of clever, kind of; reading about stuff that matters and pondering it and commenting about it online, finding the faceless interface a muddled and confusing place.

#

I read an op-ed about a breaking international incident and agreed with it at once. With great haste, I found myself in total and utter concurrence. I instantly tweeted as much. I rapidly put a link on Facebook. There was no time to lose. Things were happening fast and I didn't want to get left behind. 'This fucker's trending like a boss', I said to myself.

I made up my mind before my mind even had a chance to make itself up. My parietal and frontal lobes hadn't even talked things over before I'd adopted an opinion. There was no time for deliberation. I wasn't about to miss out on this potentially historic multi-platform event. Things were rolling live. Click farms would be going into overdrive. Retweets would be ricocheting throughout the net for the entire afternoon and maybe into the early evening. The game was afoot and I'd picked my side. You have to be on one side or another side otherwise you're in no man's land and getting shot at by both sides. I fought bravely and amassed a few favourites and got a lot of 'likes' from people who agreed with me or thought they should agree with me or were worried they'd stand out if they didn't agree with me. I paraphrased Graham Linehan and tweeted it @stephenfry. I didn't get a 'reply'. Then the season premier of a new HBO show came on so I hashtagged the fuck out of that baby instead.

I'm a foodie. I'm an atheist. I'm a Dylanologist. In the future, when our descendants look in their history books for the typical person who bore witness to the end of civilisation, they'll see my selfie. Me in my beanie, a beardy, wearing a Livestrong wristband and swearing to #GetKony.

PINGBACK IN THE AFTERLIFE

Remember when the internet died? Remember that? The day it all went down and never got back up. You lot didn't know what to do with yourselves. You were all addicted to the internet. All of you. (I wasn't, I just liked it so much I used it all the time.) You lot didn't know what to do without your Facebook updates. You couldn't imagine how you'd get by with no one Twittering your hashtags or admiring your selfies.

Some of you started improvising, shouting out your Tweets to passersby. You opened the windows of your homes and roared out things like 'I watched the new Marvel comics movie last night and it sucked!' The nasty anonymous trolls amongst you improvised too, popping out from behind corners, wearing balaclavas and shouting things like 'I'm glad your family died in a fire'. The end of Chatroulette also meant the return of flashers to our public parks. Those guys didn't get many 'likes' I'll tell you that. Likes were now conveyed when somebody passed you on the street and roared something at you and you gave them a thumbs up before rapidly moving on without really engaging. When someone did force others to 'engage' they were usually met with the acronym TLDL (too long, didn't listen) but when someone was brief and to the point, saying something that didn't really have a point because what's the point in that, they got the post-internet version of a retweet - as in they'd roar something and cause a person who heard them to roar out exactly the same thing whilst pointing a finger at the person who roared it in the first place. A couple of long held Facebook traditions were also maintained with people saying they'd attend events they were invited to and then not attending them and people allowing others insight into their private lives in the post-Facebook way of leaving their keys out for others to gain access to their homes and have a look around - once the home had been specifically altered so all the right things were left lying about to make the home owner look tasteful, sophisticated, well-adjusted and all that kind of shit.

Oh, what a superficial bunch of sorry cun... Jesus, I almost typed that out loud?

Anyway, this continued for a while until everyone started to feel a bit silly and strangely empty. Remember that, when you started feeling a bit daft and redundant? Remember how it got to the stage where you lot didn't know what to say to each other or how to act around each other? Problem was that everyone eventually realised there was nothing to share or react to. You had to start instigating and you'd forgotten how to do that without the use of a modem. It was impossible to make things go viral. Al Qaeda and affiliates even stopped beheading infidels. There didn't seem to be a point if they couldn't upload it. People wandered the streets forlorn. It seemed a cold world without all the liking and sharing. The internet was gone and in its place was nothing. Nothing at all. There was just the sound of the wind and that's a scary distant sound that reminds you that the world keeps doing its own thing and you don't matter all that much. I find that notion comforting myself but I suppose that's just me.

So, that's it. Our over reliance on the web made culture tabula rasa. I suppose our generation will die out. We'll exit this life like socially awkward guests leaving a crap party. The future generations will have to create the cultural content of the future anew. I wonder what they'll come up with. I wonder will it just be the same kind of thing all over again. Is all the need for attention in our DNA? Anonymous internet trolling, is there a gene for that? We'll have to wait and see. Not that we'll be around to see it. I don't know though, maybe we'll get some kind of pingback in the afterlife.