The Phony Eschaton

How time is misrepresented to us, at the cost of our own relevance, and perhaps our own lives

The point?

One quiet February evening, I sat across a cluttered desk from my accountant to see what I’d made and what I owed. We’ve known each other for close to 20 years, and I consider him a friend. Chatting, he asked me what was new, and I mentioned a novel I was working on. He asked what it was about. I’d told a few other people, and so had a short description ready to verbally copy and paste into the conversation - just the premise, setting and what the main characters go through.

After I finished, he asked, “What’s the point of that?” and shuffled through the papers. I was stunned. stammered out a few larger themes of the book. But that did little to convince him that my year-plus of labor had a point.

In fairness, it was late, and he’d been neck-deep in tax stuff all day. And I’m accustomed enough to indifference to my work not to hold it against anyone. But there was something about the question that kept ringing in my ears.   

The point of a novel - what is it? It can be entertainment, or protest, or a balm on a bad conscience. It can be titillation, a daydream, a goad, a manifesto and more things still. For the writer, it can be an exploration, a cry of joy or despair, or a way to make money or a catharsis, among other things. I had these answers to his question.

But there was something about my accountant’s question. It was something that had been studiously left unsaid, at some cost. After all, there’s no shortage of material to read, and for free (once you buy the device and pay for the electricity and the connection). Certainly no one had been badgering me to write another book. And the last one hadn’t sold so great.

Why create a story, or just more words, in a world supposedly drowning in information? Why write in a world where one of the most successful companies grew massive on the promise to organize that information? What is the point, indeed?

The copy-and-paste singularity

These could be the end of times, or the infancy of a galaxy-spanning, billion-year cosmic adventure. No one knows. But the answer, however I decide it, affects how I respond to a parking ticket, and to the plight of my fellow man. No one knows the future, but we know how we feel about it. And it’s what I’d like to talk about.

Lately, the feeling is connected to information. There’s more of it every year. This growth is connected to the idea of a historical and technological singularity. The term - singularity - is borrowed from physics, where it represents something like the incredible density of space-time in a black hole. It’s something unknowable and possibly infinite, something that outpaces our ability to comprehend or even witness.

But when applied to information, the singularity doesn’t feel like an acceleration. But actually new information can only come through the senses. Information as stored multiplies mostly through copying and possibly reconfiguration. How this process feels to human beings is that every decision they could make or protest they could muster is swallowed up in a river of data, with the active crux of reality escaping our grasp at superhuman speed.

The money and the people with the money may believe in something like an acceleration of technology beyond our ability to control or eventually even comprehend. That’s not new - this year’s winners always prefer doctrines that make the present appear inevitable, and that make the future look like more of the present. The theology of those at the top of the pyramid, has a powerful effect on how they behave, and the general prejudices under which we all have to labor.

After the end of time

Their vision of helpless humans in a reshuffling of predetermined data sets is gaining momentum, for a number of reasons (See “Ownership Creep” - coming in December). It stalks us, and makes us feel like we’re living after the end of time.

Time, after all, is marked by events - be it the unwinding of a watch spring tick by tick, or a world war. And if we ourselves have been demoted to a status of predictable data swirling in a larger hurricane of self-multiplying information, then we do not rise to the status of an event. And as such, we live either after time, or off to the side of it.

This isn’t true, of course. But it’s a conclusion that’s forming in the addled minds of our leaders. It shapes the imagination. It shows up in ideas like Universal Basic Income. And it’s one reason the idea smells off. Somehow, even people who would benefit from it, like artists and writers, haven’t gotten too excited by the notion. And I think that the tacit assumption of human irrelevance is partly why. There’s a terrible hook in the bait.

Still doing that

The sensation of being outside of time is something a lot of people feel. It’s in how people talk, the things they give up on, and the ways they get angry.

I can speak to it from my own experience. As a novelist and all-purpose writer-for-no-pay, I rarely hear anyone ask what the point of writing is as plainly and honestly as I did from my accountant that night. In most conversations, the presumed irrelevance of all my most heartfelt efforts comes in another form.

“It’s great you’re still doing that,” is the phrase.

I hear it from people I’ve only recently met, and from people I’ve known for decades. I hear it from people with absolutely no creative impulses, and from people who’ve devoted their lives in one way or another to the arts. I don’t doubt the sincerity of their good wishes. But it’s what you say to someone working at a rather severe tangent from the actual needs of actual people in the actual world.

It is great

Creativity, though championed by the corporate colossi of our day, is indeed tangent and peripheral to actual life (money, politics, technology and general grinding inevitability), as it seems to be lived in the United States these days.

But I think that general irrelevance a symptom of the growing phony-eschaton, the ideology that we’re all just copy-and-pasting our way to insignificance. This ideology dominates the little glowing rectangles full of titillation and bullying, where we go for comfort when we’re tired.

That said, sheer quantity of content can’s finish the job. It eventually makes itself useless, irrelevant - not us. So, yeah, I’m still doing it. And it is great. And that, I’m beginning to realize, may be the point.