Our Aesthetic Doldrums and Timewave Zero

What if the world really did stop in 2012?

The most well -known thing about Terrence McKenna — perhaps besides his description of various entities psychonauts encounter in DMT trips as “self transforming machine elves — was his prediction that in 2012, corresponding with the popular New Age gobbledygook about the Mayan Calendar, a kind of singularity of novelty would occur.

His thought, which was based on the rapidly altering aesthetic landscape he observed in his lifetime (which was prime boomer years 1946-2000) was that acceleration of the rate of cultural change would lead to an explosion of novelty, something completely unimaginable. And, much like Peter Turchin, he made something of an unfortunate attempt to dress it up and mathematize his theory, since such quantification has been the currency of respectability among most “intellectual” people for a while now.¹

Of course, those of us still alive in 2022 know that nothing happened in 2012. But lately I’ve been thinking that that may be more of a confirmation of Terrence’s theory than we’d like to believe.

Mathematically, in a singularity, nothing is defined. It is a place where the rules of mathematics breakdown. Dividing by zero is the grade school example of what a singularity is, for all the prestige and awe that the term unjustly provokes in people. It is singular, it doesn’t follow the general rule or pattern, and so mathematics—which is the science of rules and patterns—can’t handle it.

Fig. Singularity of the function -1/x as it approaches 0

Terrence looked at a graph like the figure above and saw something that seemed to align with the progression of history as he saw it in terms of novel cultural developments. And who can blame him? If you were someone who was in elementary school in 1956 listening to Elvis, turned 20 in 1966 dropping acid and wearing tie dye, and was 50 in 1996 logging on to usenet servers and playing 3d video games, this looks like an amazing fit!

If Terrence saw himself at around t = -0.3, it looks like the world is about to explode into unmeasurable aesthetic novelty!

But here’s another graph which might also be equally, or even more appealing to our novelty theorist when he considers the data:

Fig 2. An alternative novelty timewave function

You can look at Fig 2 from the perspective and maybe it even makes more sense than the blow up in fig 1. After all the hats, ties, and trousers of 19th and early 20th centuries were a bit drab fashion-wise compared to the powdered wigs, laced shirts, and culottes of the 18th, so maybe there was a decrease or lull leading into the post-atomic explosion of newness. Either way, it’s obvious that things are about to take off!

But here is what the actual continuation of Fig 2 looks like:

Fig 3. The mathematical continuation of figure 2

Yikes. Like the function in Fig 1, the wave has a singularity as it approaches t = 0. But instead of exploding upward, it rapidly degenerates into meaningless noise.

---

This little counter-example has got me thinking, maybe Terrence was correct in essence? There is a pattern to cultural novelty, and it certainly was on the upswing in the late 20th century, but it did not follow the simple “blow up” curve and instead degenerated into the bounded noise we see on the right of Fig 3?

This seems to fit the world as I’ve experienced it in the past few decades. A movie like Boogie Nights could come out in 1997, 20 years after its setting, and make the viewer feel like they’ve entered a world almost as alien as a cowboy Western or medieval melodrama. Movies like American Psycho or Donnie Darko could be made in the year 2000, and watching the year 1988 felt like visiting a colony on Mars.

But can the same be said for anything since? Was it possible to make the world of 2000 feel so pervasively aesthetically foreign to viewers in 2013 or 2018? It wasn’t possible, because it wasn’t the case. The world had stopped changing, at least in a meaningful or correlated sense of culture and aesthetics.

The novelty singularity did happen! Though it’s arguable about the date when we passed the threshold². But instead of exploding into a world of uncountable newness, it degenerated into spasm of noise with a net zero overall change.

---

If one accepts this hypothesis—even in spirit if not in detail— the logical question to ask is why did this occur?

My proposed answer is derived from this observation:

Homogeneity in space leads to homogeneity in time.

The increasing social and cultural connection we experience has allowed for a homogenization of style across borders. Whereas in 1995 a denizen of Atlanta had to go to the trendy clubs of New York to see what local mall rats would be wearing in a few years time—and likewise could treat a trip out to Iowa as a kind time capsule if one were a New York fashionista—, now there is little difference. Internet and cheap air travel have combined to homogenize everything.

But much like in biological evolution or language, the time-wise change in cultural forms is derived from the diversity of cultural forms across social space.

So instead of increasing connection promoting more combination and novelty, it has succeeded to reducing everything into a kind of stagnant cultural grey goop. Like exotic dog breeds regressing to plain wolfish mutt forms as mixing increases.

I’m afraid that, if correct, this paints a rather bleak picture for those of us hoping for a path out of the current aesthetic malaise and cultural doldrums.

The only ray of light I see is that there does seem to be an increasing trend towards fragmentation and ramification on the internet—a bit of reversal of the trends that really accelerated with the rise of youtube and facebook in the late-mid 2000’s.

Let’s hope that reversal trend continues.

1. I like to think Terrence did it more as a joke than anything else, Turchin is obviously deadly (and, to be honest, embarrassingly) serious.

2. Ironically, instead of 2012, the date of McKenna’s death in April of 2000 seems like as good a timestamp as any to me.