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Digg and The Singularity

Unless you live under a rock, I’m sure you’ve heard about BioShock by now. Don’t worry, I’m not really going to talk about BioShock. What I’m more interested in is the Internet’s reaction to it. If you wanted to do a reasonable impersonation of the Internet as of this morning, you could do something like this:

“Bioshock bioshock bioshock. Bioshock? Bioshock, bioshock bioshock.”

The launches of Half-Life 2 and Halo 2 didn’t garner anywhere near this level of Malkovichism. What this phenomenon brings to light, though, is perhaps even more interesting. Something we’ll call “auto-Digg”. It would seem that certain topics reach a level of popularity that causes people to Digg the article based on the topic or title only, regardless of content, accuracy or any other factor that might make it newsworthy. BioShock is the most recent example, but really, you can pretty much guarantee that any article with the word Wii, Ubuntu or Ron Paul in the title is going to get Dugg.

Let’s be perfectly clear about something: When you use Digg, you are working for the machine, not the other way around. Digg is a robot with a digital mind, but its eyes, ears and hands made out of meat. You could almost say that Digg is the mechanical representation of the aggregated interests of the entire Internet in a given moment. It’s like we’ve given birth to a new form of quasi-A.I. A fat, insistent, libertarian fanboy A.I.

It’s hard to imagine what the future holds beyond emminent technological singularity, but I think it’s safe to say that if we continue with group-spawned A.I. the likes of Digg, post-humans are going to drink a lot of Mountain Dew. Maybe they’ll even use it as fuel.

Oh, and by the way, don’t forget to Digg this article. It’s not going to Digg itself. Yet.

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