From: JAMES FEHLINGER (fehlinger@home.com)
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 10:51:01 MDT
I was channel-surfing past The Sci-Fi Channel on cable TV the other
day, and was surprised to hear the term "singularity" come from the
mouth of a character in one of the failed TV shows that the Sci-Fi
Channel picks up and recycles.
The show was "Dark Skies", an X-Files knockoff (at least, after
"The X-Files" got stuck on the UFO theme), in which an alien race
called "The Hive" is taking over Earth by implanting each of their
human victims with an insectile organism known as a "ganglion"
(as in the Star Trek: Next Generation episode "Conspiracy",
Heinlein's _The Puppet Masters_, etc. -- makes for good gross-out
footage when victims are made to spit up these squealing bugs by
being forced to drink something that looks like Phillips Milk of
Magnesia). There's the usual government cover-up of the alien
invasion, a man and a woman who are fighting the aliens solo and
who are therefore being pursued both by the aliens and by the
government men-in-black, and the further gimmick that the story
is set in the 60s and amalgamates actual historical events (the
JFK assassination) and characters (Bobby Kennedy, J. Edgar Hoover).
It's conspiracy TV explicitly targeted at baby boomers.
Anyway, a bit of Web searching revealed that "Singularity" in
the context of this TV show refers to the final merger of a human
with the Hive (which occurs when a human who has been implanted
with a ganglion touches a ball of blue light called an "orb" -- a
human can only be freed from a ganglion, via the gross-out Milk of
Magnesia plus injections routine, before Singularity has taken
place). By extension, Singularity may also refer to the ultimate
absorption of the human race into the Hive (one of the Usenet
fans of "Dark Skies" uses the slogan "Resist Singularity!" in
his signature file).
This suggests the inevitability of the appropriation of whatever
terminology is used in Extropian discussions (particularly once
it has become somewhat more widely-known and trendy, perhaps by
having been mentioned in "Wired" magazine or discussed on ZDTV),
by whatever passes for sci-fi in the minds of Hollywood movie
and TV producers (which, at the moment, seems to cater strongly to
UFO cultists, conspiracy theorists, and other paranoids).
The term "matrix", used by William Gibson in _Neuromancer_ simply
to refer to the "user interface" between a human and cyberspace,
is similarly appropriated by the recent movie of the same title.
All the concepts and terminology originating in "high-brow"
sci-fi (Greg Egan, for instance) will, if they can be exploited for
the economic purposes of the mass media, undergo these uncontrolled
memetic shifts as they are recycled into "low-brow" movies
and TV (not that I didn't enjoy seeing "The Matrix" this week!).
It will, no doubt, only exacerbate the political volatility of these
issues.
Jim F.
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