page164
142
cory doctorow
The natural endpoint of Lapsarianism is apocalypse. If things
get worse, and worse, and
worse,
eventually they’ll just run out of
worseness. Eventually, they’ll bottom out, a kind of rotten death
of the universe when Lapsarian entropy hits the nadir and takes
us all with it.
Running counter to Lapsarianism is progressivism: the En-
lightenment ideal of a world of great people standing on the
shoulders of giants. Each of us contributes to improving the
world’s storehouse of knowledge (and thus its capacity for bring-
ing joy to all of us), and our descendants and protégés take our
work and improve on it. The very idea of “progress” runs counter
to the idea of Lapsarianism and the fall: it is the idea that we, as
a species, are falling in reverse, combing back the wild tangle of
entropy into a neat, tidy braid.
Of course, progress must also have a boundary condition — if
only because we eventually run out of imaginary ways that the
human condition can improve. And science fiction has a name for
the upper bound of progress, a name for the progressive apoca-
lypse:
We call it the Singularity.
Vernor Vinge’s Singularity takes place when our technology
reaches a stage that allows us to “upload” our minds into soft-
ware, run them at faster, hotter speeds than our neurological wet-
ware substrate allows for, and create multiple, parallel instances
of ourselves. After the Singularity, nothing is predictable because
everything is possible. We will cease to be human and become (as
the title of Rudy Rucker’s next novel would have it)
Postsingular.
The Singularity is what happens when we have
so much prog-
ress
that we run out of progress. It’s the apocalypse that ends the
human race in rapture and joy. Indeed, Ken MacLeod calls the
Singularity “the rapture of the nerds,” an apt description for the
mirror-world progressive version of the Lapsarian apocalypse.
Content 2nd gal final.indd 142
7/4/08 9:57:16 AM