Apocalypse Online
It’s the end of the world as we know it…
Late August always feels like standing at the edge of something. The air shifts, the sunset glows brighter, earlier. Every day feels like the last day of summer camp. I’ve been feeling it more this year than usual—the feeling of end, like we’re losing something we can never get back. I’ve been wondering for a while if the world is ending; The influx of “unprecedented times” of the last few years, followed by a “return to normalcy” that has looked entirely like skyrocketing food prices and the proliferation of illness, has left me with an ambient sense that the world is constantly poised to tumble headlong off the edge of a high cliff. I don’t think I’m the only one who feels this way: all my friends are on SSRIs, no one can afford their rent, the Internet is full of demands for urgent re-posts that will save the world. Conservatives think that drag queens are the sign that the Endtimes are nigh; Liberals think the world is heating slowly, slowly. The Climate Clock in Union Square, which counts down the time we have left to avoid climate disaster, is currently set at 4 years and 300-some days.
It can be difficult to parse the real threats from the imagined. We are told that climate change will render the world inhospitable; we are then told that such thinking “limits our capacity to create change.” We are told that Trump will cause a nuclear war, that the pandemic is “over,” that inflation is good for the economy, or it’s bad, or stocks are up, but none of us can afford to move apartments anymore because of broker’s fees and work has been so slow lately, and when I open my phone I see so much blood and fire that it’s defeating my animal addiction to the Internet’s usual sounds and colors.
There’s a tarot card that represents destruction. It’s called The Tower, and it’s depicted as a tall tower struck by lightning, its golden crown shocked into the air as its walls crumble beneath it. When I pull the card for my friends, I always tell them the same thing: that something’s about to end, which means a new thing can begin. I reassure them that destruction is essential for growth; that the card doesn’t represent death, it represents change.
I wonder, though, at how often we are encouraged to see “change” instead of the destruction that births it. My neighborhood is “changing”—new storefronts with higher prices, rent hikes, more and more young professional white families and fewer of the Afro-Caribbean residents that have made the place home for decades. It’s amazing how things change, and we acknowledge it with a sort of melancholy but never with the horror that destruction warrants. One of my favorite essays of all time is called “Apocalypse in Everyday Life” by Naomi Goldenberg, a professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottowa. The essay opens by describing the story of Henny Penny, a Doomsday fanatic who does, ultimately, get gobbled up, but not by the apocalypse she fears; rather, she is destroyed by a danger—Foxy Loxy—that was in her midst all along, mundane and ever-present, taking the form of someone she relied upon to save her. Goldenberg explains that like Henny Penny, our obsession with apocalypse is a way to channel our anxiety about very real but far more mundane threats to our world; it’s an avenue through which to express that our everyday lives are shrinking, being picked apart by a million tiny deaths. “The only terrors we allow ourselves to recognize,” she writes, “are the huge ones.”
Goldenberg attributes this “modern malaise” to the integration of technology into everyday life at the expense of interpersonal connection: the TV for company instead of friends, the computer terminal instead of the office. She writes that we’re “engaged in the process of making one another disappear”—that more and more of our activities are spent in the company of machines, rather than human beings.
“Apocalypse in Everyday Life” was published in 1990. Consider how much the web of mechanization has expanded since then: Doordash instead of dining in, work-from-home, Instagram. New things grow—AI-generated Mickey Mouse, Marvel movies, military drones—but those things so often feel either hollow or entirely evil. I’m left to consider that while I experience a vague, ambient sense that the world is about to end, felt through the loss of comfort and communion, there are many for whom the world is actually ending, right now, in fire and blood. Computer-driven remote weaponry is designed to protect those that use them while optimizing lethality; the US has gifted thousands of precision-guided munitions to Israel this year, rockets that can course-correct mid-flight to increase the chances of a lethal hit while IDF soldiers sit comfortably behind a computer screen or in a cockpit. Drones, bombs, tanks invading Palestinian refugee camps and civilian centers—the new weapons of war allow soldiers to kill without facing the blood, the grief, the rage of those whose lives they destroy. They don’t even have to smell the smoke.
Contemporary middle- and upper-class American life can feel like a string of soul-wrenching transactions while a life we were promised, a life of connection and security, fades before us. How many of us know where our food comes from? Who harvests it, who prepares it? How many of us know who makes our clothes, our furniture? Where our trash goes when it’s taken away? Who takes it? Our rent money goes to anonymous leasing companies, our mortgage to Wells Fargo; we watch strangers pretend to be other strangers, mediated through screens, to while away our evenings or our afternoons, to keep us company during meals. The communities we watch on TV—Friends, Cheers, New Girl—are meant to depict “real life,” but instead replace it. How many of us live in the same building as our best friends? In the same city?
My life often feels like wading through others’ suffering to achieve a life that I’m told is supposed to be “normal.” The food I order on Doordash is delivered by sweaty, anonymous drivers on rickety motorbikes; the apartment I live in while someone without a home sits on the stoop, the pandemic raging on. I’m playing “normal” while my tax money pays for bombs halfway across the world, for fossil fuel subsidies. Real existential threats play out far away, supported by my government, in my name. The expansion of the machine has translated into a vacant network of sensation, on the one hand, and hyper-efficient, soulless destruction and murder on the other. A million tiny deaths, and apocalypse.
