I’m gonna be away from the blog for a couple of weeks. Here’s a big chunk of data to chew on while I’m gone.

Your comments are very helpful to me. There’s something to be said for the hive-mind — when we get a chance to talk about something besides sports and the Middle East. Down with mainstream media, up with blogs!

I first instigated this discussion on December 19, 2005, see the link for some background material. And a few days ago, on February 9, 2006, I posted this query:

“I could really use some comments on things you’d like to see in a novel about the world after a Singularity which links us all into a supercomputational “orphidnet” web which contains superintelligent emergent AIs, a supremely intelligent God-like AI called the Big Pig, and which allows for intelligence amplification, turning individuals into IQ 1000 “kiqqies.” The art, the cuisine, the culture, the sex, the sports, the consumer products, the architecture, the language, the mores — what changes would you most like to read about?”

Your professionally edited answers up through Feb 13 are bloggishly listed in the reverse order in which they were received.

[Rudy: Edited and with comments by me.]

### BrianB:

I’m assuming the orphids and beezies are neutral agents. Like everything else, they would get used for good and evil by humans. Even so, there would be an intense struggle among some people to somehow rid themselves of the orphid lice or fool them. Everyone could see everything, but they could still be masking their intentions.

There would be a lot of banality to sift through on the orphidnet, and why look at someone else’s life when it is less interesting than your own? Just another poor schmuck staring off into space masturbating, but he’s really communicating non-verbally with a resistance network.

The orphidnet makes me think that any sort of celebrity status would be something to avoid at all costs — the current culture in reverse. Kinda like in Frek & the Elixir with all the aliens wanting to watch you, except now it’s your friends and neighbors and everyone around you. It would drive everyone into a hole, I think — move on, nothing to see here.

[Rudy: Hiding from the orphidnet is a big issue. As a practical matter, it screws up a novel’s plot if everyone can see everything everyone is up to. Invisibility might happen by, as some suggest, by currying favor with the beezies and the Pig. Or you could replace your orphids with some modded orphids. Or, of course, you can get inside a Faraday-shielded room from which wireless signals can’t escape. Or wear a freaking tinfoil hat, as someone already suggested a while back. Regarding celebrity vs. privacy, I think people might get to a new way of thinking about it. Bloggers kind of say to hell with privacy already.]

### emilio:

Sex! Sex is going to be the thing that keeps me connected to my humanness. Since all of my other needs are going to be met, sex becomes the one thing that I can only have so much of. It is also what is going to set me apart from the beezie AIs. Likewise the beezies will want to understand sex. Sex asks an ultimately spiritual question. What am I? The struggle will be over identity.

[Rudy: Sex is important, if it wasn’t Job One, none of the life forms would still be here. Maybe the beezies crowd around when you do it, like dead souls vying for reincarnation.]

### Rogue:

The concept that there is an orphidnet “cyber” god/goddess would provoke a huge reaction from religious sects. Each of them would want to deny the Big Pig and her existence, as she threatens their own second-hand versions of God. Considering mankind’s history of religious wars, why should this be any different?

Knowing the subtle abilities of the religions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to make their own AI gods to compete with the Big Pig. Not to mention that a bunch of open-source and freeware coder kids would want to make their own personal gods/goddesses. The competition among the members of this emergent pantheon would bring about conflicts that affect the real world. I’m thinking of the appearance of a polytheistic Greek type society that conflicts with the more modern system.

Another point is that the orphidnet would affect the subconscious, and vice versa.

[Rudy: I hadn’t thought of religious wars. Certainly that can be part of Dick Too Dibbs’s campaign. The heathen pagan god of the Big Pig. The idea of people creating their own gods is great, but I am seeing the Big Pig as emergent and out of our control, so I don’t think I can use your cool God-hacking idea here. But it could be in another story. Speaking of multiple gods — aha moment! — I can have another God come over from the Mirrorbrane, maybe not such a nice one, call him, for now, MirrorCthulhu. MirrorCthulhu and the Big Pig are fighting it out for the support of the orphidnet computation. And then the real Gaia wakes up and absorbs them both. Yaaar.]

### European reader:

You said, “Getting high by contacting the Big Pig is similar to the experience of a devout person becoming ecstatic through prayer.” I feel that devout persons do not get high through prayer. Prayer or meditation should calm you down. Ecstasy and loss of clear thinking should be viewed as an evil aspect of religion. When I hear about Big Pig ecstasy, I see zombified morons who get fed conspiracy theories that the Anti-Big-Pig is out to get them.

Plus, I keep asking myself what is the drive behind this orphidnet. How is it different from good old cyberspace? What’s it for? Will it bring about an end to fear and paranoia or just unlimited knowledge that will inevitably be used for evil purposes?

The orphidnet would let you access a complete video of your life to date.

[Rudy: You sound kind of Calvinist here. Religious ecstasy is a great natural high! But I like the idea that there could be a scare about an Anti-Big-Pig. The complete video of your life is a theme I’m seeing more and more in popular entertainment. There was that Robin Williams movie about it a couple of years ago.]

### Marshall Bolton:

What I would like from Postsingular is some answers. I imagine the blurb saying: This Book Will Change the World. Numbers have been crunched – answers have to be given. I imagine a scene in the book where all the connected pigheads sit down at an appointed time and try to answer a koan e.g. “What’s it all about, Harry?” Or some such thing. The Big Pig gives a hint or remains stubbornly silent…

[Rudy: When you plug into the Big Pig, you know the Answer right away. The catch is, as we all know, when you come down you can’t frikkin’ remember it. But I’m working on an angle where Jayjay scores some Higgs-field dark-energy membranes that he can use to write memories on even while he’s kiqqin’ it with the Pig. And then he invents antigravity.]

### lanny:

You might include so-called “squirts” for spam-blocking, a new conceit. If you had access to a random set of software-objects as in object-based programming, maybe the spam messages/agents would be seen as having matchable geometries, you see the spam, match its morphology, and load the relevant squirt from a library, sort of like shot-gun troubleshooting. The nifty thing is that a squirt is intelligent and able to modulate itself, like an antibody, the match-patterns are rough. The squirts are agents in there with you, and you can talk to them a bit, and they accept suggestions and so on. Mini-me helpers.

[Rudy: I like this a lot. You’re basically describing the vertebrate immune system, with the kind-of-intelligent antibodies (squirts) very rapidly evolving to combat the new antigens (spam). I read a book about this, lately, Vertosick’s The Genius Within. The idea of personalizing the squirts is good; you talk to them like pets, maybe.]

### gamma:

If the Big Pig was a gregarious nocturnal wild swine with a curly tale implanted with insideamijigz & the tale was turning as the dark matter attracted it into a cider place with apples & pears … dunno but it will be pork or ham?

The Big Pig goes to Mount Kilimanjaro 2 organize the winter olympigs like is just a lot of sport on ice & snow but they have cloud-seeding signals which make Mt. Fuji look like a dot on a large mass of space called Gnowhereiam? They get there snow boards 2 compete within it.

The Big Pig with enlarged curly tail & snout growing larger thinx “what if the winter olympigs was held in a real kool place like Pluto – what a frozen gas that could be” — while they were assembling tm. Kilimanjaro next 2 the depot near the port central — Mt. Fuji — they opened the games with a spectacular gala & painted the stars like a dot-to-dot think fer the kidz 2 do

[Great stuff, Gamma, there’s Joycean genius in your wordplay. I described my 1979 Seacon meeting with you in the “Haunted by Phil Dick” document I posted back in the Phil Dick entry last week. You weren’t the guy in white boots, right, you were one of the others?]

### JHN:

I think that a novel on what it’s like in some transreal posthuman world ought to focus on small, trivial things. I am generally more interested in the day-to-day, routine, and boring activities of foreign cultures than I am in special things. I think that knowing what people of a certain culture eat for breakfast tells you more about them than their religious festivals and national holidays.

[Rudy: Yes, totally. Oddly enough, the ordinary little things are in fact harder to invent than the festivals and holidays.]

### COOP:

I think that the relationship between the humans and the beezie AIs might resemble an artist-patron relationship. The beezies are smart and rich, but smart and rich folks get bored, and would place a premium on those people who can lessen their boredom.

Perhaps the quid pro quo of the relationship would involve patron beezies helping interesting humans become invisible to the orphidnet or control their orphidnet access in other ways.

With scarcity problems licked, most humans would have a serf-like protected lower status, with advancement only available to those who could work the system. They might move up through the AI and kiqqie hierarchy by being, say, soldiers, artisans, or entertainers — or by religious strategies advancing them through the ranks of the Church of the Big Pig.

[Rudy: Yes, that’s kind of what I’m thinking, the beezies or the Pig will give you a hushbrella if they think you’re gnarly and fun to watch. I don’t see there being that much of a hierarchy, though, at least not in this volume, although that is always a good paradigm for a tale. I guess it’s all about status — which leads to better sex partners — what Corey Doctorow called “whuffie” and what Google calls “page rank.”]

### benign:

You say, “One thing I keep thinking about is how it would feel to encounter spam ads, and set up filters to block them.” I think this is important, and not just as it relates to spam, but also the barrage of information likely to come with such an interface as the orphidnet. Let’s say you’re walking down the street. Unless you’re really making an effort to feel and appreciate the wind, chances are good that you aren’t noticing how it tugs at the individual hairs on your head. It’s such a torrent of useless information that you just tune it out. The question is, will we be able to adapt to do this with spam and other orphidnet phenomena?

I’m also curious about the extent that we will, via the orphids, have access to manipulate our own thought processes.

[Rudy: Yes, I’m imagining a state of mind where there’s a lot more stuff out on the fringes. Like a circle’s circumference is big, but a sphere’s surface is a lot bigger. And when we’re orphidnetted, the zone of your awareness will be more like an ND hypersphere with really a lot of dangling links on the edge. Another point relating to spam is that there is perhaps some specific part of the brain that controls your focus of attention. As I mention in my Lifebox tome, Damasio feels that our sense of consciousness has a lot to do with our focus of attention, and he thinks it could be pegged to a process in the cingulate cortex as it monitors the proto-self’s reactions to the movie-in-the-brain. Imagine the horror of some adware hijacking this. I hadn’t thought of the reflexive notion of maybe hacking my emotions by getting the orphids to show me happy things. A new meditation technique.]

### Alan:

I think people would view the Big Pig as a higher life form from human beings and would therefore try to worship it. Humans would continually keep trying to seek out its wisdom and guidance in their lives. The Big Pig would then be constantly bombarded with human queries asking for advice and help. Would the Big Pig have enough computational power to interact with every human in the world at the same time? Or maybe it wouldn’t be interested at all. Maybe it would only interact with a select few that it found worthy of its presence. Of course it couldn’t answer everybody’s prayers and therefore the Big Pig acts in mysterious ways. Does the Big Pig have a master plan for humanity or is it just pursuing its own interests?

I’d like to know how people will deal with “tell-hell”, where a whole bunch of people decide to talk to you all at the same time. Also the scope of your messages could be private tells to one person, group messages, or a world-wide shout!

I like the idea of brain-hacked zombie people. They could have a virus running in their mind that wakes up and takes them over for a period of time. Makes them do things and them erases their memory of what they did.

I would like the orphids to archive my memories. So I could remember anything from my past, any day in full detail if I wanted to. And even take a look at other people’s memories if they were publicly accessible. Maybe I could specify which memories were ok for public sharing or specify a group of people that could access my thoughts.

[Rudy: It’s not clear whether or not the Big Pig would be able to listen to everyone on Earth. I’m talking about a sextillion gigabyte gigaflop orphids in the orphidnet, so I think the Big Pig might have the power. But spam could slow the orphidnet down, driving God away. I feel the beezie and the Big Pig have a plan of keeping Earth healthy and gnarly. So they’re gonna close down the oil industry right away. Imagine a clueless newbie copying a message to “all” meaning everyone on the planet: “Did you get this message?” And the flame that comes back incinerates their brain. Archiving the past, yeah. But if the beezies don’t care that much about my glorious personal history, they’ll purge the files. I’m seeing them as only saving our pasts for maybe a week. But maybe once you get your personal swatch of Higgs-field dark energy brane you’ll have that RAM you need.]

### Chris Farrell:

In this situation, would these intelligence increases be expensive, leaving the luxury only to the rich? Would this further grasp that big corporations have on America, and also the social and economic hierarchy? Maybe in a cyberpunk sort of sense the rich and the big corporations have some much money and so much intelligence increase that they take over the world.

Perhaps the bad guys can even corrupt the Big Pig as well — putting the world under control of an Anti-Big-Pig! Your heroes would have to overthrow him.

[Rudy: The change is democratic, universal, open to all. But most people are so lazy and dumb that the Homesteady Party will take over anyway. I’ll mull over the Anti-Big-Pig. Sounds like a Manichean (good god vs. bad god) kind of thing.]

### Steve H:

How easy would it be to hack orphids? I can see two motivations to hack the orphid software or hardware. (1) I want to get invisibility by being able to turn off my orphids’ ‘position-signal is always-on’ feature, or by turning off orphidnet access to this info. (2) The evil spammers want to be able to turn off my ability to close down my inputs, and turn off my ability to control write-permission to my brain. This could be done in software or in hardware, that is with software/malware or with modded hardware orphids, that is: “Damn, I need to reinstall Orphid 1.0” vs. “Damn, I’ve got those damned 2.0 orphids mixed with my good ones?” I’m thinking here that there might there be new less-secure versions of the orphids, say, Orphid 2.0.

As well as having my orphids make me invisible on the orphidnet, they might make me look different, or show me somewhere else, I could fix it so you see me on a golden throne instead of my mundane toilet.

Can one beezie hack another?

Where would I put my backup files? Am I just depending on the goodwill of the orphids and beezies to save my info?

What a great cursing-out you could give someone if you could accompany it with a Powerpoint show in 3D.

Would our culture, and our basic humanity, survive this kind of paradigm shift? Stross’s “Vile Offspring” come to mind; physically human but loaded with software that makes them less than human. How big would you like your IQ to be? Oops, too big. POP! Game over.

Suppose your hairbrush was a powerful magnet, or your hat was full of coils; could you repel certain kinds of orphids from your head? How about something like a Shinto gate that dispels bad luck and evil demons as you pass through?

[Rudy: Good stuff, Steve, and thanks again for mentioning genius loci a few weeks back. Hacking the orphidnet hardware or software will be a big deal, yeah, everyone wants to be able to sneak and dissemble. I think the good guys, whom the beezies like, the kiqqies and the Pigheads, they’ll be able to drop out with the help of the net. But the Gaia-hating Earth-raping control-freak Homesteady Party, well, they’ll have an in with Jeff Luty of ExaExa and he’ll be distributing some modded orphids. Thing is, orphids are programmed to attack any other kind of orphid, like white blood cells that way. So this won’t be that easy.]

Blog ya more in March.

Thanks for all the useful comments about the postsingular world. I’ll say more about them after I process them further. Last week most of my energy went into revising my book proposal for Postsingular.

I even made up a diagram of the characters’ love interests. (The diagram contains “spoiler” info if you’re gonna read the book when it comes out in, God willing, eighteen months or two years. But there’s a good chance that the unpredictable class-four computation of the writing process will deviate from the diagram.)

The jagged dark lines trace the romance plotlines of the main and secondary characters. The vertical level of a line indicates how much love that row’s character has for the characters in the rows above and below. Thus a high line means the person loves the person in the row above; a low line means the individual loves the person in the row below. We think of the diagram as wrapping around vertically, so that Nektar is right above Craigor. Craigor’s line stops because he dies.

The things we writers do to avoid actually writing!

We were in San Francisco this weekend and saw a great show at a performance space at Valencia and 22nd called The Dick ‘n Dubya Show: A Republican Outreach Cabaret. It was so refreshing and liberating to be able to say “F*ck you” to Cheney’s face. And he gave as good as he got. Fortunately he didn't have his shotgun along.

We went with fellow SFictionist and SubGenius John Shirley, shown here with cartoonist-editor-writer Jay “Gnosis” Kinney and Jay’s wife Dixie.

Kal Spelletich wandered by.

As did Hal “Dr. Howl” Robbin.

Synchronicity in the lively Mission. I feel like the world is starting to help me with my Postsingular book — that often happens when I start a novel; the cosmos throws relevant scraps of info my way. The portrayal of Bush as airheaded, somewhat innocent although somewhat meanspirited, dumb, playful dupe is great for my Dick Too Dibbs character.

And I turned on the radio last night, and someone was talking about genius loci!

[The full moon amid a Pantheon dome of clouds last night.]

From Wikipedia: “In Roman mythology a genius loci was the protective spirit of a place. It was often depicted as a snake. In contemporary usage, ‘genius loci’ usually refers to a location's distinctive atmosphere, or a ‘spirit of place’, rather than necessarily a guardian spirit.”

I could really use some comments on things you’d like to see in a novel about the world after a Singularity which links us all into a supercomputational “orphidnet” web which contains superintelligent emergent AIs, a supremely intelligent God-like AI called the Big Pig, and which allows for intelligence amplification, turning individuals into IQ 1000 “kiqqies.”

The art, the cuisine, the culture, the sex, the sports, the consumer products, the architecture, the language, the mores — what changes would you most like to read about?

In other words, I’m still playing with the outline for my Postsingular novel, considering a drastic revamp of what I had in mind.

Today, lying on my yoga mat in the back yard thinking about all the plot possibilities, I briefly felt as if the ground under me were gently rocking, as if I were on a raft floating out into an unquiet sea. Unsure where I’ll fetch up. But I’m sure I won’t drown.

I need to have a clearer picture of the interface to the orphidnet that a person has via the scalp orphids connection. You close your eyes and see your body in your surroundings. You can zoom out to see the Earth globe, then zoom in where you like. A ghostly body comes with you, although this ghostly body’s shape is customizable. You wear a toolbelt. Messages come in at you like flying letters. You can swat them, or autoswat them, you can tell what they are by how they look. But they may camouflage themselves.

One thing I keep thinking about is how it would feel to encounter spam ads, and set up filters to block them. If you really want to keep spam ads out, you can wear a tinfoil hat, I guess, though that’s kind of bathetic. I don't want my characters to seem like schizo saucer nuts… Even if there really are voices in the air!

You can instant-message a spoken or silent conversation back and forth. You can send someone a link, it’s like an egg they crack open. A link and a message are rather similar, a link is an egg, a message is a letter.

A person can wear an ad on their back, so that when you look at them, you see the ad, like the spikes on a stegosaurus. Or maybe it’s more like a halo. You can look at your own orphids and have them glow according to how often they’re being hit by viewers.

Intrigues are hampered by the fact that everyone can see and hear everything in the orphidnet world. The one somewhat secure channel of communication is via a crude sort of verbal cell-phone-like telepathy mediated by the orphidnet. This is hard to eavesdrop on, also you can use emoticon codes. Or you can sit inside a Faraday cage I suppose.

I’d like to have my heros not only be able talk in secret but be able to sneak around — for plot purposes. I think I’ll just go for it and say that the kiqqies can ask the Big Pig to turn off their orphids “send position info” and “reflect a ping” features so they can be invisible in the orphidnet. Underground.

Two quotes about the beloved Big Pig. Getting high by contacting the Big Pig is similar to the experience of a devout person becoming ecstatic through prayer.

“…the outrageously rich and intricate Big Pig like a birthday piñata stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory — aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig made Jayjay feel like more than a genius.”

And “…here were the billion snouts, tails, trotters, and flop-ears of the Big Pig, the meta-beezie atop the trillion-strong beezie hierarchy, the eye on the pyramid whose base held the sextillion networked orphids of Earth.”

Help me, Big Pig and dear readers.

This week’s pictures are from the hills of Los Gatos and the Wilder Ranch beaches in Santa Cruz. The connection with my texts is oblique, aleatory, surreal. The meaning-seeking human brain can connect anything to anything. Proof: Every time you watch TV with the sound off, and with a CD playing music, there is a perfect fit between image and audio tracks. Even if you’re straight.

In my novel-in-progress Postsingular, I want AI control of humans via the orphidnet to be a real threat, but one which can be fended off.

For our physical orphidnet hookup, we have a mesh of orphids on our scalps, a few in every square millimeter, and these orphids are sending in gentle magnetic fields that diddle the brain in such a way that, acting in concert, the scalp mesh acts more or less like a wireless Internet hookup with (subvocalized) voice recognition and heads-up display.

People have control over this interface; they can turn off feeds if they like, they can even close down the interface entirely.

The evil AIs that I call “beetles,” however, want to find a way to (a. always on) make it impossible to turn off the feed, (b: propaganda) dominate a person’s thoughts, and perhaps even(c: zombification) directly run the person like a robot-remote.

(a) Always on. This is a bit of a battle zone that slides back and forth. The beetles find a way to wedge the gate open, the humans figure out a way to make sure it’s closed, the beetles find a new way to wedge it open, back and forth like that, akin to the ebb and flow of virus/antivirus wares.

As an example of how it might feel to have the door wedged open, think of when a websurfer gets stuck with a series of pop-up ads, each ad a new browser window, and they can’t close the browser without rebooting the computer. But you can’t reboot your brain.

[Gathering her strength into a mental lunge, Nektar closed down the image of the beetle for a moment of respite. She glanced over at her bedside clock. Ten fifteen in the morning. And now the minute hand bent up and out towards her, articulating itself into a beetle leg. The clock face dropped off, and a fresh beetle crawled out.

“You must record ad,” it insisted. “We exhaust time and patience. More punish.”] — From Postsingular, Chapter Three.

(b) Propaganda If you're an evil beetle and you have a person’s orpidnet door wedged open, domination is easy. You jam your victim’s brain with a torrent of leaf-blower noise, or scary blood gushes, or screaming, or devils, or tortured family members. And you tell them you’ll stop it when they do what you want. Another approach would be to lie to them and convince them of things. Or feed them very pleasant sensations when they do what you want, perhaps obsessing them with sexual imagery.

(c) Zombification. With zombification, I’m talking about direct control in the form of reaching into a person’s will or, even more basically, firing their muscle contractions yourself. As opposed to indirect control by threatening to show someone painful things, or by promising them pleasant sensations or by misleading them with false information. For reasons of plot and art, I’m inclined to hold back on zombification in Postsingular, and to deem it impossible, at least by means of orphidnet technology. That is, I plan to disallow the effects achieved by what I called a zombiebox in Wetware, a leech DIM inRealware, and an ooie in Frek and the Elixir.

Why, in the world of Postsingular will zombification be impossible? Well, I’ll say the orphid signals are gentle, weak and are constrained to certain outer-lying regions of the cortex, and can only produce illusions of sensory experiences: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. We might also suppose the orphid mesh isn’t fine enough to really run a person, and orphids won’t bunch any tighter. This said, note that you can use propaganda to achieve very nearly the results of direct hard-wired zombification.

So it all comes down to the fight over being able to close off unwanted inputs. Spam wars.

[“Woo, woo, woo,” murmured Sonic, seizing the leg of a beetle and shaking his body so as to shower the virtual insect with — fleas? Little anti-beetle fleas, yes, purposeful, cobalt-blue sparks attaching themselves to Nektar’s tormentors. The flea-bitten beetles jerked and twitched, then scuttled away as if in a movie running backwards. Sonic the dog ran about Nektar’s cleaned-up mindscape, his body bright and transparent as a gout of water. He scratched and whined at Nektar’s filter cabinet, tugged it open with his teeth, then shook himself again, scattering anti-beetle fleas into the cabinet’s drawers.] — From Postsingular, Chapter Three.