Fake-Out Fade-Out Pop Music Singularity

So you're listening to a song and it gets all quiet and then boom! It comes back full force. In Britney Spears' Till the World Ends, there's that part about three-quarters of the way through, where the music gets all compressed sounding, all quiet and muffled? Then it reopens and comes back, spreading itself back open. (Sort of appropriate, considering the "world ending" topic of the song.) What I like about it is that it's more than just the typical  "Fake-out Fade-Out" device used in pop song construction (like Madonna's Hung Up) because of this subtle little extra noise they add in Till. It's the sound almost of the buzz you hear for a second when you turn on or off the TV. And then when the music reopens, you hear a Britney sex-kitten breath out, like this ahhhhh, that reminds me a little of that Philip K. Dick quote from The Divine Invasion:

You are the breath of your Creator, and as he breathes in and out, you live. Remember that, for that sums up everything that you need to know about your God. There is first an exhalation from God, on the part of all creation; and then, at a certain point, it starts its journey back, its inhalation. This cycle never ceases.

Interestingly, at the end of the Till video, you see Britney push the grate off the sewer where the all night dance party was (and during which we see the world explode). I'm noticing that in Britney Spears videos, that's an example of this common thing that happens where "It's supposed to end -- BUT NOT REALLY."


What I mean by that is that I remember reading somewhere that the video for Everytime she was supposed to die (in a bath tub, after sustaining a head injury) and reborn as a baby. But then NOT REALLY. Her head rises out of the bathtub and IT WAS ALL A DREAM. There was somebody who must have decided they couldn't show Britney dying. Who are we kidding though? Everybody talks about her being dead in the eyes anyway.

Last Scenes of Till the World Ends

Last Scene of Everytime

"Technological singularity" is a thing.

While I was searching around the internet to see if anybody has written a book about the cultural history of the conept of singularity, I found what looks like someone's academic paper about technological singularity.

A "technological singularity" is when a technological advance happens, and that advancement is so complicated, that if you were to take that technology back in time and show it to somebody in the past, they wouldn't understand it at all. That is to say, the technology is too difficult for anybody that came before it to understand. (A dinosaur wouldn't understand a computer etc.) Sometimes it can also mean that AI overtakes human intelligence in a Matrix-y kinda way.
That pretty much explains any TV show or movie about going back in time. What happens if you transplant a caveman in Encino? He doesn't understand the slurpee machine. (And certainly, nobody understands how Pauly Shore could be funny.) What happens if you play Van Halen on headphones to a teenage boy in the 50s?! He thinks its an alien. And so on.

I found a good site about singularity tropes on television, and it made reference to the concept of technological singularity as being "The rapture of the nerds," which I took to mean, when the revolution comes the nerds will be the elite few with the brains and know how to understand technology that the rest of the mindless sheep have not woken up to, also very Matrix-y.

By and large a lot of the writing about technological singularites sems to be about reaching a point where there's no going back; things have gotten either so chaotic or so unpredictable and complicated that the feeling of safety in believing in cause and effect is unreliable. Mmmm... Chicken or egg omelette? Neither. Who wants to eat a chicken omlette? That's like asking if a pig can be kosher.

How many times?

So when everything is over (the universe), does it (the universe? reality?) all fold in on itself? How many times has that happened? Isn't that what the cylons believed in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, that everything keeps happening over and over again? I can't remember what episode it was in and I can't figure out what to plug into battlestarwiki.org to find the quote, but I did find it intriguing that the cylons were the bad guys and they are monotheists and the humans are the good guys and they're the polytheists. Hip hip hooray for some good ol' pagany mother earthy touch-with-our-roots theism.

It makes me think of David Eagleman's book Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, one of the stories is about how one theory of the afterlife is that right before we are reborn, we get to decide what kind of a being we can be for that life. Specifically, we can decide whether we want to be a simpler being than we were in the past life. But here's the thing: you don't get to remember what you were before. So let's say in this life you're a human. After you die, right before you're reborn, you can say, "Wow, life was really hard as a human. Maybe I'll become a simpler being for the next life, like say, a horse." And as you're turning into a horse, you're thinking "Oh no, what have I done? I'm losing my essential human-ness, who? what?  Hee haw HEE HAW" and then you're gone, all memory of the subtleness of humanness disappeared, gone forever...So if, each time, we decide to become something simpler, then what were we before? Before all the simplifying started?

So...Do we keep starting over and over? Is it the same thing? Do we get simpler? More complex? Do we reach a state of complexity where we use up all the everything and fold over? And start over?

Sort of unrelated note: David Eagleman is a neurologist/writer. Also the consultant for the show Perception and a bunch of other super interesting brain-related endeavors.

The First and Also, The Glorious Common Feeling of Falling

So the topic I seem to be preoccupied with lately is the concept of singularity.

There's a variety of TV shows, movies and video games related to the word of singularity. It would be cool if somebody did some kind of anthology about the concept of singularity and how it captures the public's interest in the topic, and how those concepts play out in our media. There are definitely websites that touch on some of this stuff (historical singularity -- when life has gotten so chaotic its impossible to predict what might happen, technological singularity -- when technology is so advanced that anybody who came before it wouldn't understand it or when AI overtakes human intelligence etc.) But I feel like I keep encountering the concept of singularity in my own media consumption and state of mind as of late, almost as if I've been surrounded by a cultural history of the topic.

So but this singularity, let's start here...

What came before the Big Bang? Clearly I am not the first person to think about this. But specifically, I am really caught up in thinking about how the universe supposedly started from a singularity. A singular what?  This is the part that causes me a great deal of both anxiety and wonder. I love thinking about this but it also makes me nauseously butterfly-stomached. I recently learned that this compelling sick fucked-upness feeling manifesting physically, specifically in reference to this concept of "what came before the before?" is commonly described as the "feeling of falling." (I also have the same feeling when I think about "if the universe is always expanding what is it expanding into?") I was delighted to learn that THIS IS A THING. It was very exciting to me that other people experience this wonder in the exact same way I do. And then I thought, But of course! If we're talking about singularities, we all come from the same, er, thingy. Of course we might experience things in the same way as each other. (Sometimes. Maybe?)