#75: Collapse as Utopia
Welcome to 2019! Twitter continues to provide an IV drip of bad news and bleak sentiment that may or may not be fair to the actual state of things. Bruce Sterling called this the "new dark," or "the resigned malaise that fits the post-Snowden internet and tech industry's consolidation." One thing I noticed as 2018 progressed was that anti-technology takes became more tedious, probably because the barriers to entry shrank and the sheer quantity of such takes exploded. I'm not sure how much more I can read about Facebook, and anyway, wasn't everything we're now learning about Facebook kind of apparent five years ago? With all that malaise internalized and priced into our models, it feels like an opportune time to experiment with alternate, underrepresented attitudes.
Surprisingly, this search for an alternative to malaise has got me thinking about doomers—people who expect or even sort of hope for civilizational collapse, usually due to a combination of climate change and peak oil. I became fascinated by this subculture around 2007, at the same time I got into urban planning and for similar reasons: Both, in completely different ways, articulate problems with the built environment and the society that shapes it, as well as a vision for how that world could be better (for me, the motivating force was a sense that we depend on cars too much and should reduce that dependence). The major difference between the two approaches is obvious: Doomers await a rapture event that won't solve the problems they imagine it will, while urban planners incrementally chip away at problems that seemingly require a rapture-scale event to ever be solved.
I always detected a subtle, if misguided, optimism buried within the doomer movement. Imagining the apocalypse is like talking to the therapist. The value lies in unearthing what you already think. The collapse scenarios that the doomers actually hope for, far from the kinds that would actually happen, reveal aspects of the world that they would like to see improved, but can't imagine fixing with anything other than a deus ex machina. Again, cars: Doesn't it feel like they'll never go away otherwise? Collapse is a collectively-imagined utopia, onto which doomers project the wishes that more practical groups already pursue by other means. Walker Percy had a theory that "people felt better in hurricanes" because they temporarily disrupt the malaise that Sterling describes, a malaise that arises from a feeling of helplessness or alienation (I actually wrote something about this in 2012 after Hurricane Sandy). Everyone who has experienced such a disaster knows that people feel more connected to one another during and after, and this feeling is surely part of what the doomers seek. We could all take a cue from them and imagine our own apocalyptic utopia, not because we want it to arrive but to better understand what we'd like to change.
Reads:
The nightmarish side effects of transforming a small suburban town into a global logistics hub.
Researchers built a tool that predicts where you live and work with 90 percent accuracy using pre-2016 geotagged tweets.
Wave Function Collapse: an algorithm that procedurally generates an infinitely large city as you explore it (also, it's open source and can be exported for use in other projects).