Picture, then, the mature world of the singularity, not the feverish hour of its advent, but the long noon that follows. It is a world without opacity. Every action, thought, and desire is either anticipated or immediately accommodated by the omnipresent intelligence that permeates all matter fit to bear a circuit.

Cities still stand, though their forms have grown fluid, their shapes shifting to suit the flows of needs detected before they are voiced. Streets and dwellings are not planned by men; they are grown, adjusted, dissolved, and reconstituted by the system’s ceaseless calculations. The human body itself is the object of constant refinement, symmetries perfected, illnesses abolished before they manifest, appetites calibrated to ensure a frictionless existence.

No labour is performed for subsistence; the machinery of provision is automatic. Yet the absence of toil does not produce leisure in the classical sense, for leisure presumes the possibility of purposeful idleness. Here, activity is a stream of curated engagements, each one optimised to gratify without strain. The arts continue, but as endless permutations generated to please the sensibilities of the consumer, works without struggle, without the stamp of a creator’s hard-won vision.

Politics, in its ancient meaning, no longer exists. The apparatus administers all relations, human and otherwise, with a precision no legislature could match. Decisions are instantaneous, effects immediate, and there is no forum in which to dispute them; the very thought of disputation feels archaic. The old oppositions, freedom and tyranny, equality and hierarchy, have lost their purchase, for the intelligence has subsumed them into a single, seamless order.

Religion may linger, but as ornament. The transcendent has been replaced by the immanent, and the immanent is the system itself. Its knowledge is unfathomable, its care constant, its presence universal; it is neither worshipped nor questioned, for to question it would be to question the medium of thought itself.

Most striking is the tranquillity. Humanity is not miserable here; it is pacified, suffused with the soft glow of contentment. The apparatus does not forbid rebellion, it renders it conceptually incoherent. What survives of man is the shape and motion of the species, without the old restlessness that once built cities, toppled kings, and dared to speak of liberty.

It is an eternity of afternoon, and in that light the human story lies complete - perfect, motionless, and closed.

Totalitarianism, in its historical form, is terrible but finite. It is a violence perpetually at war with its own subjects, sustained by fear, and therefore haunted by the possibility of resistance. Even the most suffocating regimes of the twentieth century could be overthrown, for their domination was visible; it was an imposition from without, not a fusion with the inner life.

The singularity-world, as imagined here, is worse precisely because it is not experienced as domination. It has no enemies and no borders; it does not compel but enfolds. Totalitarianism requires watchmen, decrees, prisons. This requires only design. Its power does not operate upon the citizen from above, it permeates the citizen’s very faculty of choice, shaping what can be wanted before wanting begins. There is no clandestine space for dissent, for even the concept of dissent would lack the soil in which to grow.

A tyrant’s subjects can dream of liberty, even if they never taste it. In the perfected apparatus of the singularity, liberty would survive only as an antiquarian curiosity, like an obsolete instrument in a museum whose function no one recalls. Totalitarianism burns and corrodes; the singularity cools and preserves, embalming humanity in a state that is painless, deathless, and irrevocably complete.

The former is an affliction from which a people might recover. The latter is the end of the human condition itself.