The Singularity Has Already Happened
When humans and memes fused into egregores, a new species was born.
Introduction: Beyond Hunt’s Continental
Ben Hunt’s recent essay, Welcome to the Continental, frames our lives as rooms in grand narrative hotels—Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, Harvard—institutions that construct worlds we willingly inhabit. Hunt’s genius is in showing how these institutions are not merely neutral settings but active agents shaping belief, identity, and behavior. Where he hints at “ideas with goals,” I will go further: the Singularity has already happened, and it arrived not with silicon superintelligence but when memes fused with human minds to generate a new organism—the egregore.
The True Singularity: When Memes Surpassed Genes
We usually imagine the Singularity as a future moment when artificial intelligence outpaces human cognition. But the decisive break already occurred. The first true Singularity was when human cognition became colonized by memes—self-replicating patterns of language, ritual, and story that use us as hosts. Genes no longer had the final say on survival and reproduction. Ideas did.
Writing, religion, law, markets—each was a memetic invention that changed the trajectory of the species. These weren’t simply tools we used; they were life-forms that recruited us into their service. Humanity’s fate ceased to be purely biological and became memetic-biological.
Egregores: The New Organisms
What Hunt calls “semantic institutions” are better understood as egregores: collective thought-forms with agency-like properties. Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington, Harvard—these are not just bureaucracies or industries. They are organisms:
Self-preserving: They defend themselves against existential threats.
Reproductive: They spawn new narratives, new rituals, new hosts.
Adaptive: They evolve in response to competition and selective pressure.
Each egregore is a habitat for memes. Humans are the substrate. We do not simply live inside these institutions; we live through them, as their symbiotic components.
Plato’s Cave Reanimated
Plato’s Cave is no longer a metaphor for ignorance. The shadows on the wall are alive. They are projected not by cynical rulers but by the memes themselves, arranging the puppeteers into formation. The Cave is not a prison to be escaped but an organism to which we belong. There is no exit because we are part of the projector.
Agency in an Egregoric Ecology
If the Singularity has already happened, then the question of freedom changes. There is no pure autonomy, no vantage outside memes. What remains is curation. We cannot avoid serving egregores, but we can choose which ones we feed and which we starve.
This is where Phosphorism—my value framework—becomes essential. Authenticity is not the illusion of independence from memes. It is the conscious choice of which LARPs to inhabit, which egregores to empower, and which to resist.
AI as Midwife, Not Origin
Artificial intelligence is not the Singularity; it is the accelerant. Large language models, recommender systems, and algorithmic feeds do not create egregores. They simply allow them to replicate faster, to colonize minds more directly, to generate coherent shadows at scale. AI is the midwife of memetic reproduction, not its origin.
Conclusion: Feeding the Demons
The Singularity is not ahead of us. It is behind us, woven into our history and institutions. The human–meme hybrid already walks the Earth, embodied in egregores that shape our lives. The task is not to wait for escape or salvation. The task is to recognize the ecology we inhabit, to choose symbiosis wisely, and to decide—consciously, authentically—which demons we will feed.