At a recent journalism pow-wow, the role of journalists in two apocalyptic scenarios — global pandemic and alien invasion — were discussed with funny and useful results.
Very interesting discussion here.
This has fascinated me for years. I’d like to see it some day.
There are plenty of theories about how the world might end, but most have one thing in common: The ending.
No matter how the death knell occurs, the world as we know it will cease to exist someday. Either the planet will become unable to sustain life (possibly all life, possibly just current life) or our civilization will break down, leaving those humans who manage to survive limping along, less civilized than ever.
Corporations are getting better and better at seducing us into thinking the way they think — of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality. Cleverness as opposed to wisdom. Wanting and having instead of thinking and making. We cannot stop it.
I suspect what’ll happen is that there will be some sort of disaster—depression, hyperinflation—and then it’ll be showtime: We’ll either wake up and retake our freedom or we’ll fall apart utterly. Like Rome — conqueror of its own people.
Darren Fleet, “How To Negotiate The End Times” (via Adbusters)
Adbusters is a level-headed buzzkill when it comes to the impending apocalypse. So many quotable things in this article, so please go ahead and read it.
(via xkcd)
A Georgia bill would outlaw ALL abortion and any action that could possibly cause miscarriage.
I try to be mindful of my dystopian literary comparisons, because sometimes references to 1984 are overused, but if this isn’t foreshadowing for The Handmaid’s Tale, then what the fuck is it?
And this, friends, is what we mean by the apocalypse: futures like those we read about in our favorite dystopian novels.
Consider this training. If you survive, submit your stories and your pics.
While we’re seeing this article because of the situation over in Egypt right now, it seems prudent to start thinking about these things elsewhere as well, especially in the post-apocalyptic future we envision.
Net Neutrality, Keith Olbermann, and the Limits of Schadenfreude (via garlandgrey)
Relevant. Later on in the piece, Garland also adds:
Do you see how I can make a distinction between supporting a cause Olbermann supported and my full unrepentant condemnation of what Olbermann did while reporting on Assange? Do you see how I am actually able to despise and work against the creeping fascism of the corporate state and not forget that when society breaks down, women will be among the more vulnerable members of society, and thus must fight against rape culture and class warfare and the kudzu that is the surveillance arm of the United States Government in order to protect themselves? Do you know what it is like to mentally plan for the Apocalypse and know that your body will be turned into a commodity if you are captured by men looting the countryside? If you still think any of this was about a vendetta, or grandstanding, or the rage of marginalized groups who aren’t sophisticated enough to be sensitive to the political climate? If you honestly think we don’t know the ways in which the state is closing in order to effect an ersatz order where the least among us are required to be profitable in order to live? I mean Jesus, corporations have started taking out life insurance policies on their employees to make money off their deaths and offset the cost of replacing them. If you think that doesn’t make alarm bells go off in our heads, we who have read the dystopias and the post-apocalyptic fiction and know that all of the advances we’ve made could evaporate in a moment? You need to phase yourself out of the conversation.
