| abstract
| - Life in the Solarian age might be summed up by the term post-Singularity. But what exactly does this mean? The concept of a Singularity remains somewhat open and nebulous, having become a catch-all for a diversity of ideas about the future. Originally, the idea of a technological Singularity was based on the notion of some point in the future where the pace of technological advance, building on itself, has become so great it has become perceptually infinite, resulting in a seemingly spontaneous realization of innumerable and heretofore unimaginable technical breakthroughs that eliminate virtually all the persistent problems dogging civilization past to present. More recently, this concept has become associated with a series of key mutually amplifying technologies seen as the primary levers of change leading up to this breakthrough point; nanotechnology, biotechnology, and Artificial General Intelligence. These are, in turn, associated with a few key supposed breakthroughs at the civilization/societal level; the cure for aging and death, the elimination of material scarcity, and thus the elimination of economic competition and the race and class strife it has long produced. But what does all this mean in terms of a vision/model of lifestyle? Solaria is, essentially, the culmination of the goals of TMP, in part its technical goal of establishing a civilization across most of the solar system -a Type II civilization as suggested by the Kardechev Scale able to harness the whole energy output of our parent star- but also its social and cultural goals which can be summarized as achieving a post-scarcity, post-economics, post-politics, post-statist, post-industrial culture through the pursuit of space development. The original book lacked the language to describe this culture very well because it is something, today, we have few analogs for. We are sort of stuck naming this in terms of ‘post-this’ or ‘post-that’. In other words, that which comes after the way things are in the present. Alvin Toffler referred to this emergent new culture as The Third Wave; what comes after the Industrial Age or the Second Wave. This author has long favored the term Post-Industrial in it original use; what comes after the Industrial Age. We still struggle for a definitive language for this today, but in recent years it has become a focus -to varying degrees- of an assortment of cultural movements such as the Open Manufacturing movement, Peer-To-Peer, the Post-Industrial movement, the Intentional Community movement, the Stateless movement, Communitarianism, New Anarchism, the Zeitgeist movement, Extropianism and so on. These are all different things, of course, but have a common underlying thread in a shared notion of a future where, potentially aided by emerging technology, the social/cultural/economic systems that defined the Industrial Age have been obsolesced or have run their logical course and failed resulting in a new culture offering greater personal freedom, greater community independence paired to greater global identity and interconnectedness, an end of material scarcity and social and economic injustice rooted in the past’s engineered scarcity and competitive economics and thus an elimination of poverty and social discrimination. In essence, a culture freed of ‘profane’ concerns and able to focus on the pursuit of full human potential. A culture where homo-sapiens evolves into homo-ludens; man the player, as cultural theorist Johan Huizinga described early in the 20th century and situationist artist and architect Constant Nieuwenhuys later elaborated and advocated. Perhaps one of the most complete illustrations of what this means in terms of lifestyle has been described by the anonymous Swiss activist author P.M. in works like Bolo’Bolo. Here he describes a near-future culture where money, ‘jobs’, nation-states, and corporations have become obsolete in favor of a ‘work-less’ lifestyle centered on village-like communities -Bolos- formed around shared cultural/aesthetic affinities and local industrial capability. P.M. saw this potential future as possible without any particularly advanced technology, anticipating a social/cultural revolution compelled by the cumulative failings of economics and politics rather than a technological one. His vision was not a return to some agrarian pre-industrial lifestyle but it did assume an obsolescence of the massive power-concentrating resource-hoarding/squandering industrial infrastructures of the past in favor of production that could be done locally. A number of contemporary science fiction writers have elaborated on this vision considering the anticipated impact of Singularity technology -nanotechnology in particular. Much of the hierarchical social/political/economic/industrial architecture of Industrial Age culture is rooted in the logic of zero-sum economics based on a presumption of material scarcity. Nanotechnology promises to eliminate that scarcity and utterly demassify as well as fully automate production, thus removing the underpinnings of these past systems, replacing cash economics with resource-based economics and then social credit systems, and resulting in the emergence of social architectures based on social concerns rather than economic ones. Much like P.M., many see this as resulting in a new sort of tribalism based on sub-cultural affinity and manifesting in intentional communities. Although somewhat anachronistic in its otherwise astounding depictions of technology and design, futurist Jacque Fresco’s Venus Project offers a very detailed and high-tech vision of a Post-Industrial -or perhaps a ‘Super-Industrial’- culture based on the notion of a scientifically managed computer mediated global resource economy with lifestyle centered on ideal ‘smart cities’; scientifically planned cities organized around their comprehensively automated systems. This parallels such visions as that of Paulo Soleri with his concept of Arcology; ideal, automated, volumetric megacities which society pulls back from the landscape into, returning it to its pristine natural state and getting a radically improved quality of life in the bargain. It’s probably unlikely that very monolithic centralized systems would emerge of their own accord -these are the products of Industrial Age authoritarianism and the contemporary trends favor models that account for an industrial, economic, and general cultural demassification as is already emerging at the start of this new century. This is most likely a bottom-up revolution. But, though these Big Machine Futurist visions may be a bit anachronistic, many of their elements are still appropriate and likely to still be realized in different forms and by different means than their proponents originally imagined -much as how the benefits of super-computer visions of the past are being realized by network computing in the present. While new technology is clearly not necessary for this kind of Post-Industrial culture to happen or function, it will progressively make the proposition stronger, easier, and inescapable. As technology advances -technologies of production in particular- it increasingly makes the way things are and have been unsustainable and, in terms of public perception, increasingly silly and wrong. And any technology that’s available will be used by someone. So while the notes different people are playing may vary, we are arriving toward a common notion of what the tune is. In TMP the foundations of the Post-Industrial culture are found on Aquarius, where this would be deliberately and actively cultivated as a means of accommodating the economics of building large planned eco-communities and adapting to the conditions of living in relative infrastructure isolation on the Equatorial sea. Marshal Savage suggested that living at sea compelled one to live like colonists in space with less physical risks but just enough logistical constraints to be analogous, compelling voluntarily cooperative rather than competitive social systems paired to technologies of increasing industrial independence. The colonies and planned settlements of TMP are tribes, of a sort, bound by a shared vision of space development that gives their societies a sharp focus on the future. Thus the communities of TMP may become host to a kind of pocket-Singularity, ahead of the rest of the terrestrial society, because they are anticipating and actively working toward it and have already -as communities- anticipated and adopted aspects of the likely lifestyles that may result. This is as much the purpose of the Aquarius phase as its more practical role as a cultivator of renewable energy and marine space facilities. It is integral to the goal of space development because it is key to freeing people from the profane distractions that have hampered the general cultural attention span for space and thus, as Marshal Savage put it, creating a society with a laser-like focus on that goal. By the time of Solaria, this culture, originally started in Aquarius, will have reached full flower, aided by those Singularity technologies the communities of TMP have had a vested interest in cultivating in earnest for the purposes of inhabiting space. It will have spread over much of the Earth, carried by the technologies that TMP communities disseminate world-wide much as Western Industrial Age culture has been disseminated world-wide along with its products. So, what will this new Post-Industrial Post-Singularity culture look like? What will its lifestyles be like?
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)