Stories for an Ongoing Apocalypse

For so many centuries, the people had imagined apocalypse would be instant: devastating and wild. The Apocalypse was figured as a thing that you could see. You watched it approach, or you traced it moving along the horizon. Though it would take different forms in many fictions, the awe caused by its arrival was identical across stories. It began with a comet across the sky. Or, it morphed into a tsunami wave, a shadow stretching to capture skyscrapers. It might be a flood and a plague and a hurricane, all at once. A burning, a clearing, a total cleanse. Each soul pulled up from its grave, and sent skyward.

Most importantly, the event was sudden. An overthrow that could catch you in the middle of pouring milk into your tea on a Tuesday. This made for a significant pause, a reevaluation, that was part of the appeal. In the wake of the story, listeners would consider their own sudden end, and scope out their choices, their lives to that point, to only break out into a sweat. Peoples, cultures, moved in relation to their imaginary of apocalypse.

In the earliest predictions, etched into rock, fire winds gathered as rage blossoms in the sky. Little figures, survivors, danced below. It seemed they told stories of their worlds being wiped so they could imagine being like children again. In the wake of apocalypse, after a breath, a space to imagine the clearing, the storyteller had permission to imagine new futures, even radical ones. Blank slates, they’d live without harm, only when this violent world was dismantled.They could imagine new forms of exchange, of gathering. They could, at last, take up repair and mending as professions.

There were almost no old stories of how apocalypse could be soft, slow, unseen, happening in the midst of life, unfolding even as people thrived. I found nothing in the archives on how doomsday could be distributed over billions of instances, over trillions of devastating moments that accumulate over time. We were living through ongoing disaster that no one could grasp, or point to, or name, or mark on the calendar. Apocalypse was a low-level dread felt all the time, like a gas seeping through everything. It never ended things completely; it had always been unfolding, and would keep on with its spread.

We had no stories, and so we were not prepared for the ways microcosmic packets of information would chip away at our integrity. How to tell stories about a scentless gas, about land being stripped over generations, about losing language and origins over many decades? How to tell stories about pieces of us, gathered to recreate simulations of us, embedded into unchangeable stories about who we were, and who we would be? No one spoke on an apocalypse of mind, or on a crisis of intelligence, of degraded understanding across difference. There weren’t legible scripts for people knowing they were locked into futures, long foretold. Few stories about the texture of lives cut short, or about how it felt to know that, because of the difference engines that drove their lives, their great-grandchildren would be be affected by the zip code they lived in and the work they had available.

I was tasked with trying to get people to feel the invisible apocalypse, to help them understand that is was ongoing around, all the time. My main work was as an artist and a programmer. I created “immersive” installations about bees dying, or the history of redlining, for the city government, depending on the theme. There was next to no oversight of my job; artists weren’t really worth worrying about with all that was going on.

Most of the time I felt like a person on the sidewalk, holding up a sign that reads The End is Here, Not Just Near. When people got to talking to me, they both sighed and laughed with recognition, and also felt a tinge of conspiracy in my voice that made them eventually back away.

This job was hard. Charts and graphs and precise simulations couldn’t even convey its reality. Perfect, data-rich representations of what was literally happening couldn’t communicate enough for people to even respond. Sometimes disaster didn’t even look like disaster, but like celebration, or a beginning. Surely, the way people stopped caring for each other was a kind of small ending. A total alienation from the land and origins was an ending. There was just no precise date, no moment, no metaphor for these things that are mostly felt, perceived, sensually understood. Some had begun to understand the small changes, and track these changes, calling them a slow death. But most waited for the event, the firestorm, to find that it never came or looked as spectacular as it should.

I tried telling the stories of what was happening: that the ending was happening in many abstract forms, in hearing doors closed, in opportunities taken off the table. The end was imperceptible, taking place at the level of speech, in relationships, rending the unseen fabric connecting unseen things. We knew that our non-neutral technologies were surveillant, and we were seduced even as we were captured. We were the authors of this death, as much as we were the victims of our own devotions to ourselves. We applied for jobs while vaguely aware of algorithmic choices being weighed against our answers. We were denied medical care and loans with no access to why. We moved within a sticky, impossible, predictive veil, little lords over our illusory digital manors.

I experimented with better ways to tell on disaster, to make its unimaginable scale a spectacle. I needed a conceit that was precise and spectacular enough that people could feel for this loss, the way they felt for a single comet. The apocalypse was in infrastructure collapsing, in flattening digital mediation, in the hidden violence of the carceral state, in, yes, still, burning seas. There were just too many comets to process. The story of a single devastation was too strong.

I thrifted heart-shaped lockets and sat them on plinths in a public square. You could open each one, once a day, to find an LED that showed a small film. An algorithm gathered all the data of ending for that day, and narrated it along a theme, which I'd edit.

Visitors opened the first to find all the civic buildings and historical homes that had collapsed or been cleared for new property to be build, that day. Another showed how the predictions of corporate personality tests from the ‘50s and ‘60s affected a single person’s life, the jobs they were able to access, trickling down to their children’s lives, ending with a short film of the life of the grandchild, and what they had access to, on that day.

Yet another heart-shaped locked showed the animals that passed away on that day, the last birds and insects of their kind.

Another locket showed how severe isolation and lack of community shaped an older person’s last months, up to that day.

One locket captured how a single piece of misinformation rippled throughout a group of friends that day. Another showed how an arrest through predictive policing played out in court, in the months after for all involved.

The locket's stories slowed down and extended the scale of apocalypse, helped them see it moving like molasses over the ground from a distance. They could read it daily as many, many tiny violent events, choices, made in the name of a shiny progress, of the next big thing. They could track patters. Openness and progress turned out to be closed, more like alienation.

The final locket showed the lives of the men and women had designed this excruciatingly banal apocalypse. They were like priests who hoarded sacred knowledge, making lines of codes live, teaching systems to gather and track, to perform brilliantly without noise. They had changed the scale of time itself. The locket showed them designing their micro-worlds, creating frontier after frontier. It showed them boarding private spacecraft, building up bunkers and lookouts. They showed how their knowledge made them invincible, untouchable by the slow death.

They built artificial selves that learned greedily, and acted rapaciously. Much like the ongoing, eventless apocalypse, these selves had no single form. They were invisible and self-concealing. Their intelligence was distributed, collective. Their decision-making was inaccessible.

Making such artifice that speaks and learns had to make one feel like a god, or, at the very least, a great pioneer, weaving dreams at the edge of the known world. One could watch stories of how proximity to these artificial selves slowly made us think we were better than our neighbors who lived without them. We made them, and had them, and so, we - we - deserved to survive, to be taken on the flight to the bunker.

Over time, the lockets showed simulations of how our neighbors would treat us in a real crisis; the future showed they, of course, didn't trust us as we never had trusted them. And the priests, who had designed much of the slow destruction? They would not help us rebuild what had burned down.

The visitors opened each locket, stood in the tiny glow, and seemed a little more able to process the information, the facts, of so many small endings accreted over time. The crisis they saw, I hope, was also psychological: to register the end of ten million years of evolution, to feel so much ending, needed a fluidity in moving between scales, from the level of fungi and microbes out to the the scale of the stars and new galaxies, and back to our plane, again.

They became alive to how well-trained they were in a different kind of storytelling, in that of simulation. Future-casting. They stood around the lockets, telling better stories about what they'd do in the wake of disaster, or through ongoing disaster. They wouldn't fight to the death to protect their family alone. They would trace the duplicity, the doubling, the evasion, the constant capitalizing on their deepest histories, cultures, memories, and name it as what it was. Bankrupt and obscene. They would better track and name and see what was unseen.

Here was a new story:

In the event of disaster, we, the people who have always been surviving, will simply continue to survive. We have learned skills you wouldn’t believe, enduring under police states. We refine trauma into gold and use exile as jet propellant.

Yet we lack a vision of our lives past survival. What will we do when we head “back to the land” that was never ours? We do not see ourselves in the paranoiac manuals of preppers, in minimalist lifestyle retreats, in the nativist isolationism of militiamen.

We do not want to repeat these dreams of being the center, forever tyrants over little kingdoms. In this beyond, we will contaminate one another. We first learn from the past, building lookouts to keep our homes from burning.

We then seek an unruly communion. New languages, icons, guides, rituals, spun and fired beneath a twilight canopy of fungi. We claim a gorgeous, baroque maximalism, a future that sounds, looks, and feels like our innermost thoughts.