In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind.

“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay on his “terms of reference”, yet it sums up the whole dilemma of so-called “big data” processing.

Additivism / #Kipple / #SonicActs