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Friday, September 26, 2008, 07:00 PM: Truthiness and Agnotology
Does the massive increase in communications technology -- the internet, cell phones, satellite and cable television, internet video like youtube, and so on -- make us more informed? Or does it do the opposite -- spead doubt, confusion, lies, mythology, crackpot conspiracy theories, and the like? Bandwidth will keep increasing and increasing, so what should we expect for the future?
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Singularity
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Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many's the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions. Even when the fictional future isn't a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day.
Science fiction writers aren't the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we'll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy. There's a lovely neologism to describe these visions: "futurismic."
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 William Gibson, the 'Godfather of Cyberpunk', is midway through a gruelling, continent-hopping promotional tour and apologises for his exhaustion with an apt digital age metaphor: "The buffer's still loading extra memory," he quips.
His latest novel, however, the political thriller Spook Country, sees Gibson abandoning dystopian tomorrows for an all too recognisable here and now. And while some have registered surprise at Gibson's decision to forsake the future, he seems genuinely bemused by the fuss as he explains his stance matter of factly: "For at least a decade prior to writing Pattern Recognition, my previous novel, I think I've said at least once in every interview that I thought it would be possible to write a novel set in the present with relatively little imaginary technology, and have it feel very much like these 21st-century imaginary futures I'd created."
Meanwhile, the idea that human progress might be leading to a glorious technological apex futurists call 'The Singularity' is one he approaches with jocular suspicion. Likening that belief with the more outré ideas of Christian End Timers, he calls it "The Geek Rapture".
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