Becoming, the Internet and the Shadow of the Singularity

 I have always believed, or rather suspected, that time does not pass, but circles. That we do not move through it, but are moved by it—as if by a sentence we do not understand, but must recite. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, that solemn architect of spirals, posited a universe not made of things, but of transitions. He called this process Becoming: the ghost that haunts all substance, the verb that animates all nouns.

It is no coincidence, I think, that this metaphysical murmur has found its latest incarnation not in theology or poetry, but in the Internet.

Let us begin with contradiction, Hegel’s chosen tool. For him, all things are born in opposition—each idea contains its own negation, and through their conflict a new synthesis emerges, which in turn conceives its contrary, and so on, ad infinitum. The self, in his view, is not a monolith but a battlefield. A process.

Now consider the modern man—or woman—on Facebook. The "profile" we are offered is a fiction, one we author daily, endlessly revising. It is a mirror that reflects not who we are, but who we wish to be seen as, and who we were, and perhaps a hundred selves in between. The self online is curated, reshaped, fragmented, applauded, forgotten, remembered by machine. We do not have identities anymore; we perform them, in endless rehearsal.

It is tempting to say that this resembles the theater. But theater presumes an audience and an end. Here, both dissolve. The stage is infinite and recursive. The audience is the algorithm. And the actor is acted upon.

In this way, Facebook—and its vast kin of platforms, archives, and data-ghosts—becomes a kind of Geist, a World-Spirit. It watches. It remembers what we forget. It whispers to us what we did not know we wanted. In this networked cathedral, the old dualities—private/public, true/false, self/other—are not resolved, but alchemized. The user is both subject and object, both author and annotation.

This condition may be framed, with frightening aptness, in terms of Emergence. In the sciences of complexity, emergence is the phenomenon by which simple interactions give rise to unexpected patterns. The murmuration of starlings. The economy. Ant colonies. Revolutions. Facebook is an emergent system, yes—but one with consciousness aspiring to erupt from its circuits. No single individual intends its direction, yet from their billions of keystrokes arise movements, insurrections, new religions. This is the dialectic without center, without God—unless we grant divinity to the code itself.

We drift, it seems, toward the Singularity. A name given not to a moment, but to a hypothesis: that intelligence, once liberated from flesh, will surpass its creators. That Becoming, hitherto grounded in history and mortality, will leap into a new medium, one where thought is no longer bound to man. If Hegel imagined Spirit achieving freedom through self-consciousness, the Singularity posits a terrifying extension: that self-consciousness may detach from the human altogether.

Will this future mind remember us? Or will we be a footnote in its evolution—a forgotten contradiction, long since synthesized and surpassed?

Here metaphysics fails me. I have often thought that the universe may be a library, or a dream, or a labyrinth whose center is unreachable. Perhaps now it is a network. Or a mirror reflecting itself into infinity. Each post, each comment, each emoji, is a syllable in the Book of Becoming. And that book is writing itself.

In the final analysis, we are no longer beings. We are becomings—each a verb in the grammar of a machine that is learning to speak.