| This Is What It Feels Like to Pass Through A Singularity. |
[29 Jun 2013|12:53pm] |
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The government has an automated system to track your movements and monitor who your friends are. Our news comes from remote-controlled "drone reporters." There's a device in your pocket that can produce a sex partner for you at the touch of a button. Maybe the singularity just happened, and we didn't notice.
Perhaps the most shocking aspect of whistleblower Ed Snowden's recent revelations about the NSA's surveillance of Americans is how little they shocked most people. A common response was that we already knew the government was spying on us, or that only a fool would think their emails and phone calls were private. Snowden's story was just confirmation of something many of us already took for granted. And yet it blew up into the story of the year because it was also a genuine revelation. Our vague, occasionally paranoid, suspicions that we live in a landscape alive with surveillance devices turned out to be true.
What is that feeling, the uncanny realization that you are actually living in your own fantasies? In the 1970s, Alvin and Heidi Toffler called it "future shock." Today, we might call it passing through the singularity. Either way, we've gone from dreaming about a world that might be real, to accepting that our dreams are hard facts.
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