SANTA FE, NM — After the events of the last couple of weeks, America could be rapidly approaching the “news singularity,” according to Dr. Keith Kimball, a futurist and researcher at New Mexico’s Santa Fe Institute.
“The news singularity is a very real threat that few are talking about,” Kimball said. “Cast your mind back to late August of 2001. Do you remember the top news story? Actress Anne Heche had written a book. That was the news. It got weeks of coverage. There wasn’t much else going on.”
Then, of course, 9/11 happened and everything changed.
“How bad has it gotten?” Kimball said. “In the span of about a week, there was a failed assassination attempt on a former President, the current President decided not to pursue a second term three months before the election, half of the computers in the world stopped working for a day, and Hulk Hogan showed up at the RNC and performed his biggest heel turn since he joined the nWo at ‘Bash at the Beach ’96.’”
“It’s hard to remember, but it used to be that if someone tried to shoot the President, it would stay in the news cycle longer than 36 hours,” Kimball added.
This leads us, Kimball said, to the dreaded news singularity, an event that he predicts will happen as early as 2034.
“It will start with the news cycle speeding up more and more,” he said. “At first, any story, no matter how major, will only stay in the 24 hour news cycle for a few hours. Over time, news stories will break so quickly that they’re abandoned the moment they’re reported on. By 2032 or 2033, news stories will begin breaking before the newscasters have finished reporting the previous story.
“Finally,” Kimball said, “news stories will reach infinite density and gravity, and all news will begin happening simultaneously. What will this look like? Politicians will announce their candidacy and get caught in their inevitable scandal on the same day. Every Taylor Swift album will release at the exact same time. The new Spider-Man movie will launch on the same day as its reboot. We’re talking sheer chaos.”
Disturbingly, Kimball said, the news singularity will eventually extend to news events that happened many years earlier and news that won’t occur until the distant future.
“The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act will pass at the same time that Imperator Gleebo announces his candidacy for Galactic President,” he said. “The Transcontinental Railroad will be completed on the same day as the Transcosmic Space Railroad. Earth Day and Earth Memorial Day will fall on the same day. Calendar sales are destined to plummet.”
While everyone will suffer when the news singularity occurs, Kimball said that he ultimately felt the most sympathy for one particular group of American heroes.
“I’m referring, of course, to newspaper columnists,” Kimball said. “These are folks who often write their columns a week in advance, and as the news cycle accelerates, they’re going to have to increasingly throw out already written columns that are brilliantly funny but no longer relevant and replace them with some weird idea they had while driving to work.”
