The Last Word On Nothing

When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock today, you might spare a little sympathy for the journalist. Jeremy Paxman was a heavy-hitting British national treasure. When politicians got scared at night, it was him they feared lurking under their beds. He had seen everything. And he thought, why is everyone losing their minds over a new content delivery system?

The entire concept of internetworked connectivity was swaddled in chirpy corporate AOL yellow, in unthreatening blueberry iMac vibes. This “sky’s the limit” techno-boosterism in fact had very clear limits, and these were predicated on the internet’s benign usefulness. It would make the world like itself, only more so, and more quick, more convenient, more fun.

Bowie saw it differently. “The potential for what the internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable,” he told Paxman.

Paxman made a sour lemon face at him. “It’s just a tool though, isn’t it?”

Bowie grimaced. “No it’s not. No. It’s an alien life form.”

It’s worth watching the whole clip, but especially starting around the 9-minute mark, the conversation will make you wonder if Bowie was hiding a time machine among his Ziggy Stardust paraphernalia. “I don’t think we’ve seen even the tip of the iceberg. We’re on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”

But if you think his prediction about the alien effects of the internet from 1999 is weirdly on point, check out Arthur C. Clarke’s first-contact novel Childhood’s End, published in 1953. The only trouble is, you might have a bad time sleeping afterwards.

Childhood’s End is the story of an inflection point in humanity’s journey. It describes a liminal era between when humanity is one thing and when it speciates into something that is indescribable to the people who came before. It describes the last generation of people who understood the world as it existed for thousands of years, and their end.

Pretty big spoilers are coming, so just in case you were planning to read this 70-year-old book with fresh eyes, avert them now!

It starts with the classic genre move: aliens arrive. Everybody freaks out, but the aliens are benign. Sure, they’re calling themselves “the Overlords”, but they don’t act the part; no eating or enslaving of humanity ensues. In fact, it’s not too clear what they’re getting out of the deal. They mainly just work hard to make the world more pleasant for everyone; they bring about green energy, prosperity, the end of war and strife. Despite some strange shadows in the side plots, Earth blooms into a true utopia.

Then the first baby is born that’s weird. These babies have occult abilities, and they are so unlike their parents that the parents are frightened of them. Clarke makes this quite emotionally striking; a mother can’t comprehend her child because the child doesn’t need love or a mother, or possess any of those mammalian instincts and impulses that have tied one generation of hominins to the next and to the next and to the next for the past 7 million years. This new cohort no longer shares the old reality. They can only relate to each other – but not as individuals. Instead they coordinate telepathically and act as a collective intelligence. Within one generation what was once humanity has speciated.

And – ta da! – turns out that’s what the Overlords had been up to all along. All those lazy, cozy utopian years, the Overlords had been preparing humanity for the arrival of the Overmind, a creepy, inarticulable, Eldritch-type force that alters a species beyond comprehension for a destiny the previous version can’t grasp, only watch as the last of their old selves die out.

Not everyone liked the occult themes of the Overmind. Some reviewers thought it was lazy or too left field. But I feel like turning to the occult was a clever way for Clarke to get at something that techno futurism always gets wrong. People assume the future happens on a linear trajectory based in how things are today. But the way technology creates step changes is from left field. In 1999, hell even in 2006, if you were going to extrapolate wildly about the future of interconnectivity, you might have pointed to people texting on their flip phone keyboards and conclude we would either evolve or gene-edit ourselves seven fingers so we could text hyper-fast. But the iPhone blew all that away and 25 years later instead of seven fingers we have sand shortages and Instagram face.

In an outtake of Kyle Chayka’s new book, he discusses how all coffee shops, workspaces, and offices look the same now. Their fashions may change but they do so in lock step, no central authority issuing dictates. And it’s because the people who run them get their information and their cues from the hive mind. “Internet geography” has trumped individual aesthetics.

Try describing the algorithm – that is powerful enough to create identical coffee shop designs around the world without a single central issuer of commands – to the 1953 NYT reviewer. Of course it’s occult. “Homogeneity in a diverse world is uncanny,” writes Chayka. And I think it is the same unease that Bowie felt, the intuition about the unknowable weirdness that would pop out when you networked all these billions of individual selves into an increasingly lock-stepped whole.

At the end of the book, the Overmind’s speciated generation coordinates its exit. They’re not human anymore. All trace of humanity is annihilated. It made me think about how the Neanderthals died out. They had been around for at least half a million years before H. sapiens showed up. “Over just a few thousand years after modern humans moved into Europe, Neanderthal numbers dwindled to the point of extinction,” the Smithsonian Institute tells us. “All traces of Neanderthals disappeared by about 40,000 years ago.” It may be facile of me to talk about coffee shop decor coordination in the same breath as the extinction of Neanderthals, but the fact remains: there is a hard line between people who remember what it was like not to be plugged unceasingly into the Feed, to have their own lives, and those for whom there is the algorithm.

I’ve heard it said that Childhood’s End was written by Arthur C. Clarke because he didn’t have children and he saw the future moving on without him. But I think in 2024 that book is for everyone who was ever aware of a world that wasn’t overtaken by this alien being, this internet. The increasing tendency to live in the hive mind instead of base reality still meets pockets of resistance, but its domination seems preordained. And just as Clarke’s ending doesn’t prescribe doom as the response (the 1953 NYT reviewer thought he’d read a happy ending!) we can’t definitively argue from our limited perspective that this monumental transition into a networked species will end in doom. It may be an ending but that doesn’t mean it’s the ending. What if total collective mind-sharing is a state humanity was meant to achieve? After all, isn’t our species’ problem, at least for all us depressives, that we feel so isolated and alone?

Towards the end of the book, one of the Overlords explains that “the time of humanity as a race composed of single individuals with a concrete identity is coming to an end”. I don’t know if I believe the saying that the arc of history bends toward progress, but that alien force sure seems to be bending it somewhere. And as it does, precious things will be lost, and precious things will be gained.