Many longtime bloggers well to my left, with Steve Hynd and Kathy Kattenburg best known to me, have launched a new group blog called Not The Singularity. According to its manifesto:
Not The Singularity is a group blog, a partnership between authors who will seek to bring you the best commentary they can about range of subjects – literature, music, politics, foreign affairs, art, technology news and more. We promise we won’t dumb things down, but we also promise not to write in such densely academic pseudo-prose that you cripple your thinky-thing trying to understand what we’re driving at. We’ll be informative, stay classy and more than a little snarky, and we won’t pull our punches. Our politics will lean leftward, because “from each according to their means, to each according to their needs” seems to us to be the logical next step from “for the good of the greatest number”. We promise we’ll have fun writing so you have fun reading. There, that’s the mission statement.
So why “Not The Singularity”? Well, for one thing we couldn’t resist the geeky pun – it is a group blog, there’s more than one of us! For a second, we’re a bit skeptical about this whole “singularity” business in any case. The idea is that technological innovation transforms the human race, but fans of the notion never seem to deal with the fact that huge chunks of humanity don’t have drinkable water, never mind somewhere to plug their smartphone in to recharge. As William Gibson says, “the future is already here but it is unevenly distributed”. In other words, the singularity is a notion from rich elites and for rich elites, a have-and-have-not society which would further polarize humanity into a relatively few technology-rich Eloi and a vast underclass of Morlocks. That’s not nice, and it isn’t progressive thinking. As progressives we’d like to help find solutions to the world’s problems that help all of humanity first and foremost, rather than pursue an elitist fantasy, a “Rapture Of The Nerds”. If we can do that while fuelling our own geeky interest in gaming or politics, so much the better.
Steve has been around the blogosphere as long as I can remember, first at the old Newshoggers site and more recently as editor of The Agonist, where he took over from Sean-Paul Kelley a year ago. The combination of technical woes, declining ad revenues, and breakdown in negotiations ended the most recent venture.
Best of luck to Steve, Kathy, and the gang at their new digs.
