New series: Infinite Lock-In

A multipart series tackling key themes in Quibble.

Oct 26, 2024

In the reflection series “Infinite Lock-In,” I critique “blithe” transhumanist thought, as typified by — but not limited to — what Ray Kurzweil writes in The Singularity Is Near. My critique leans on arguments made by Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in the field of virtual reality, but a lot of original thinking went into this series, too.

What Lanier calls “lock-in” is a key concept in my novel, Quibble. The questions I’m raising in this series are significant to the book’s thematic core. It’s not all there is to Quibble, not by a long shot. It’s one piece of the puzzle, but a big piece.

The series has scope. It explores technological hubris, the human propensity for self-immolation in our tech, and Lanier’s warning about cybernetic totalism, the risky reduction of people to information. The reflections build to dystopian, species-wide existential crisis. But there’s more nuanced stuff on the way: what a typewriter does for a writer that a laptop doesn’t, why most cars run on gas instead of diesel fuel, how MIDI limits musical expression, what The Matrix gets wrong about the Singularity and what the real worry is, and how apples will taste when we all live in digital heaven.

No paywalls for some parts! Some parts of the series will be available in full for free subscribers. I think a few are just really entertaining. Others explain vital concerns that motivated me to write a dystopian novel about the Singularity. In the next series, “Social Media Made Me an Asshole,” I’ll go deeper into related concerns.

Since “Infinite Lock-In” is a long series, I think it’s a good idea to collect all its parts in an overview. Here’s a guide to what’s coming, with links and descriptions:

Part 1

Cybernetic Totalism

October 26, free. What does it mean to reduce human beings to information?

Part 2

Spiritual Suicide

November 2, paid. Why is the belief that people can be reduced to information, in essence, religious? Whether or not we believe people have souls, why is this belief dangerous?

Part 3

Ones and Zeros

November 9, paid. How widespread is the belief in cybernetic totalism? How is it entering mainstream discourse? What are some objections to it?

Part 4

Digital Heaven

November 16, free. Who takes “mind-uploading” seriously? (Surprise, influential people do!) What schemes are cybernetic totalists like Ray Kurzweil proposing for the Singularity?

Part 5

Personhood and Digital Finitude

November 30, paid. So what? What’s wrong with mind-uploading? Wouldn’t that be cool? It depends on what makes up a person. Let’s play around with thought experiments!

Singular Dream

November 30, paid. Can there be a representational model for the human mind?

Part 6

Triumph of Paradigms

December 7, paid. What do Microsoft Windows, traffic lights, and the ubiquity of gasoline-powered cars tell us about how technological paradigms come into being?

Part 7

The Luddite’s Tale

December 14, free. The longer you resist a new paradigm, the harder your life gets. How did I manage life without a smartphone? What are the benefits of typewriters?

Part 8

Lock-In

December 21, paid. What is technological lock-in? How does MIDI epitomize it? What does lock-in mean for human existence itself?

Conflation of Paradigms

December 21, paid. Why must a technological singularity conflate technological paradigms with paradigms of the human mind?

Part 9

Infinite Lock-In

December 28, paid. Another thought experiment… What’s essential to a worthwhile life? What makes a thing real? Why will digital representations never fully capture reality? What does lock-in mean for the people in Quibble? And why is The Matrix a lousy dystopia?

Part 10

The Brittle Now

January 4, paid. Why should we be concerned about lock-in here and now, not sometime in the future? How is lock-in already affecting our relationships and our politics?

The Lover’s Tale

January 4, paid. A personal story about the effects of lock-in.

Part 11

Aphantasia and Apples

January 18, free. Are we facing a death of subjectivity? Supposing we could mind-upload to digital heaven, what would the apples there taste like?

Retiring Early

January 18, free. The icky specter of eugenics. With a digital heaven at hand, could certain groups of people be forced out of biological existence?