The Plastic Direwolf Singularity

Is the techno-Rapture really coming?

This week I was lucky to catch the author Ewan Morrison on one of his rare forays out of the Scottish wilderness, for a conversation with the writer Nicholas Blincoe to mark the publication of Morrison’s ninth book: For Emma. Morrison and Blincoe explored “Accelerationist society”, Covidian paranoia, contemporary ambivalence about technological progress, and the increasingly transhumanist edge everything seems to have these days.

For Emma is, to my eye, the first proper imaginative reckoning with the Covidian digital transformation. It’s set in a near-future world, in which a bereaved father responds to the death of his brilliant scientist daughter, Emma, in a nanotechnology test programme at the hands of her employer, the shadowy conglomerate Biosys with a plot to kill the CEO. I won’t give away any more, except to say the story sets the narrator’s increasingly unhinged inner life and deteriorating physical condition against the suffocating backdrop of surveillance and control technologies, even as the story homes in on an unsettling central question: how do we know what’s real and human, and what’s really us thinking what we’re thinking?

I devoured For Emma in a few sittings, and it deserves to be widely read. But reflecting on the book I found myself wondering if its apocalyptic finale (no more spoilers!) grants more power to the dread technosphere than is truly warranted. Nick Land’s accelerationist vision, the theme of Morrison and Blincoe’s conversation, depicts technology itself as a kind of coldly inhuman agent ordering all we do toward its own alien moment of becoming. The human protagonists in For Emma feel caught in the grip of something like this: as though their human-ness is picked out against just such a total backdrop of inhuman becoming.

But something of this kind is a common theme across tech doomer and booster writing alike. I don’t think Morrison would object to me characterising For Emma as on the tech-doomer side. But tech boosters also often envisage a moment of techo-Rapture - just as a good thing. And yet, whether booster or doomer, I wonder if these visions accord too much power to the forces of instrumental technicity, and too little to the totality of entropy, chaos, complexity, and those shaping forces we aren’t aware of. That is, to the organic totality of becoming we call “evolution”.

Tech optimists routinely begin from the assumption that humans are already smarter than evolution. For example in John Brockman’s 2019 anthology Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking At AI the developer, investor, and physicist Jaan Tallinn makes a throwaway reference to evolution as a “blind and clumsy optimization process”. And albeit in animal rather than human engineering, we recently saw a classic of this type of confidence, when Colossal Biosciences announced that researchers had successfully gene-edited grey wolves to resemble the extinct direwolf species. Breathless headlines suggested that this represented a reversal of the direwolves’ extinction.

These techno-direwolves have been named Romulus and Remus. Their excited reception by tech bros such as Elon Musk suggests Jonathan Pageau is right to suggest they should be read symbolically. They are fitting omens for an apparently emerging Right-wing progressive order, whose aspiration appears to be an interplanetary, tech-augmented neo-Roman imperium. What could more eloquently symbolise this, along with its ambition to control the very building-blocks of life and consciousness, than a technologically de-extincted turbo-wolf?

But leaving aside the merits of the Right-wing progressive project itself, how confident should we really be, that evolution is “blind and clumsy”, or at least blinder and clumsier than us? Applied to ourselves, being “smarter than evolution” means, in essence, eugenics. Morrison touched on this theme in conversation with Blincoe, pointing out that getting from “human” to “augmented human” implies test subjects. This is a central theme in For Emma, whose eponymous Emma dies after volunteering as a test subject in just such an experiment. Outside fiction, history already documents many such horrific experiments, sometimes on unwilling subjects: a catalogue of nightmares now rightly denounced across the board.

But even among those who condemn human self-engineering as a path to horror often seen to give more credit than I think is warranted, to the notion that the project itself is achievable. But what if the application of technicity to organic life also fails on its own eugenicist terms?