Choose our apocalypse

Sam Byers wrote a beautiful piece in The Guardian yesterday: "‘We will have to choose our apocalypse’: the cost of freedom after the pandemic". It's partially a piece to market his new novel, but I don't hold that against him, we all have to eat. But it crystalises some of the dilemmas of life in 2021:

Somewhere in all of us is the very totemic figure we loudly claim to loathe: the lockdown-breaking Covid sceptic, the bloviating opinion columnist or gaseous radio host, the self-satisfied centrist or sneering ideologue, the diarrhoeic polluter, the bigoted, raging, punitive cop. Until we excise them from ourselves, we’ll continue to create them in the world...

...at some point we are going to have to accept an ugly, inconvenient but necessary truth: that the price of the life each of us wants is a world we are all collectively able to live in, and so sustaining a world we can all safely inhabit may very well depend on dismantling the individual life we desire.

...In the world to come we will have to choose our apocalypse. Either we will annihilate, finally, the sense of ourselves we cling to, or we will redouble our faith in it, feed it, build it until it dwarfs all else, and then watch, hopelessly, as it destroys the world we live in.

It reminded me, in a way, of another article from "Psyche" that I read recently (both shared with my by Alissa, which is not really all that surprising): "Why awesome natural beauty drops the jaw and lifts the spirit":

When my family moved from the United States to the north of England a few years ago, we soon adopted the local custom of going for a weekend walk in the Peak District National Park.

These walks are now a staple for our family of four. But during the COVID-19 pandemic, for me personally, they’ve become more than this. As strange as it might sound, these rambles have been an irreplaceable mechanism for maintaining a sense of connectedness to other people beyond my family, and have helped me maintain a spiritual vitality that could otherwise have flickered and died in these times of social distancing.

This actually wasn't a surprise to me at all. I grew up "bushwalking" in Tasmania, climbing limestone and basalt mountains, looking out to Forever from the top when we finally got there. I regularly think about the time I climbed Frenchman's Cap with three friends when we were about 19 or 20, reaching the top and gazing out over the blue sky until it touched the ocean far away. I turned around and saw rainclouds roll in, surrounding us just minutes later. It was the last time the skies were clear on the Cap for a week, and we made it with about 15 minutes to spare. Moments like that really are awe-inspiring, and if it makes me feel more connected to other humans it's really because it makes me feel connected to all of the "natural" world.

But the connection between these articles is in Byers' observations about the rise and fall of COVID optimism: how quickly so many fell back into old habits and old limits of imagination:

Last spring, the freshness of the lockdown air struck us like a revelation. By summer we were back in our cars, flocking to beaches we despoiled with trash and human shit, dreaming of the day we could not only drive but fly cheaply.

I've honestly been shocked by how many people are desperate to travel again, especially cheaply by air. But I wonder if there's a connection here between the smallness of our lives, cooped up in homes, offices, or places that seem to be both, without anything to inspire awe. People are desperate to connect with their loved ones and even just their liked-ones. Most of my family is in Tasmania so it seems I feel pulled to go back every now and then to be with them. But I wonder if it's as much to be in a place that still feels a bit wild and open, yet also familiar.

"Choosing our apocalypse" seems to chime with Margaret Killjoy's belief that we're already living in a slowmoving apocalypse, and she's probably right. Today I read about this amazing project "DeepMay" (sadly on hold due to COVID, ironically). It's a ...I was about to write "kind of anarchist code camp", but that doesn't seem to quite do it justice:

DeepMay is not an attempt at a redemption of technology – we are far more ambitious than that.

The neoliberal ethic of a work-life balance creates perpetual oscillations between fragmented realities – eating healthy, hitting the gym, maintaining a social life, while always maximizing productivity. At DeepMay, a consistency between these otherwise discrete spheres was established through the rhythms of communal life. We exercised together each morning and took turns cooking for the camp. Late into the night people could be found huddled together in front of a laptop solving a problem, or returning refreshed from the wood-fired sauna. Taking a long hike together did not feel like a side activity or a distraction, but as aligned with the purpose of the camp as time spent coding.

DeepMay is about providing space to explore coding as a curious and obsessive craft for it's own sake. It explicitly rejects any notion that this is about building or proving marketable skills for future employment. It's about exploring ideas and building together just because. It sounds wonderful. Also they're into mesh networks, which I must learn more about. We'll need them when shit gets real.

=> We will have to choose our apocalypse | Why awesome natural beauty drops the jaw and lifts the spirit | DeepMay: Experiments in Tech Autonomy