…The notion of capacity has been central to the development personal computer since its inception: the hardware must be kept up to date so that it can suffer the intensity of the information flooded by the software. The more capacity, the more intense experience. And as the digital ideal seems to favor visual representation, i.e. iconic and indexical multiplicity to typographical representation, the question becomes one of visual capacity. In this sense the ethical and the esthetic are converging – a hypothesis can be suggested that the more visually-biased our epistemological systems become, the more the ethical and the esthetic begin to resemble each other.
Intensity has its limits, just as everything else. By increasing the intensity of sensory experience out of proportion we soon enough run into pathologies. Any feeling taken out of context and simulated without any possibility of consequence leads us beyond the ethical or the esthetic; experience of inconsequentiality is the end of the will to exist. Visual, non-linear and iconic information, which we are bombarded by in the seemingly ever more faithful and faster digital environments is a very primal sensory experience compared to visual-rational typographical representations, whose meaning in turn relies mostly on conceptual associations and metaphors. Icons do not disperse meaning and shatter into fragments like symbols do; they retain their integrity and uniqueness within each individual. If this development is examined in light of McLuhan’s tetrad (McLuhan 1992), there is a possibility that we will witness the obsolescence of our symbolic systems into a generalized global communitarism with no primary code or representational system to be deciphered, only a stream of iconic likenesses and indexes that perform specific, uniform functions. The faster the flow of information – and the more human social and political systems rely on it for their survival – the more the human “decipherers” must assume the role of the machine or alternately yield before it. Our current communicative existence that is primarily created through symbolic representations will become obsolete in this vision of future. Symbolic systems are by necessity generalizations; they must be enframed within some socio-cultural system in order for them to have an existence. Any natural language is always code not only to be deciphered but interpreted within social configurations that are formed out of the negotiated experiences of its participants. As information systems, they do not possess the speed and efficiency needed for post-singularity.
As to the direction of the current scientific and information technological development, the logical conclusion of any implosive process is singularity, a point that represents the end game of an evolutionary trajectory. At technological singularity any reference to technology as extensions has become moot – singularity signifies a point that cannot be extended any further. The process has become complete: as machines attain consciousness, their capacities to calculate and process information increase so drastically that they can find solutions to practically anything humans can throw at them. The moment of this attainment is sudden and overwrites all previous frameworks of understanding. There will be no bleed-through, only a clean, surgical cut.
