Let’s talk about the end. Cue the tape: The Doors’ 1967 epic rock song, ‘The End’…
This is the end/Beautiful friend/
This is the end/My only friend, the end…
Humanity has been thinking about the end — like the Kali Yuga — since the beginning. A more concrete sense of apocalyptic end overtook popular consciousness after 9/11. A culture of crisis ensued. It began in the US, but spread to the majority of countries and eventually caught us and our media in its grip too: first, a terrorism and security crisis, but soon added on top of that a financial crisis, debt crisis, crisis of confidence in political leadership, both structurally (in the sense of dissatisfaction with the electoral processes) as well as materially (corporate influence, Wall-Street and banking criminality in the US, and corruption and cronyism in India).
Writing in 2012, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek captured this era thus: “The global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its ‘four horsemen of the Apocalypse’ are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.”
That same year, in the early morning of December 21, I had stopped at a Starbucks in New York on my way to an academic conference. As he was handing me my coffee, the barista wryly said, “Enjoy your Apocalypse”, in place of the usual Americanism, “Enjoy your day”. This day was unlike the average day: it was the day that hundreds of millions of people, relying upon widely-reported predictions from the Mayan calendar, actually believed that the world would end.
Covid has changed, and continues to change, the world. But don’t lump the pandemic and the new war in with the prior apocalyptic scenario. What we see now are acute ‘subjective’ changes. It is not ‘the end of the world as we know it’, so much as it is the end of the human person as we know her.
The personal apocalypse is riding in on four different horses. First is the screen, the virtual, the meta — as in metaverse. It is supplanting personal contact, where we see, smell, touch the other. Social intercourse is digitising. Residing in the metaverse may have always been the end logic of the smartphone, but it took covid to disclose this destiny.
Do you remember when we used to protest cameras in public spaces? Now with our Zoom lives, we place ourselves on camera for hours daily. The second horse rides in: the consummate apotheosis of the surveillance regime. Both government and big tech now know not only where we are, but where we are going. Not only what we own, but what we plan to acquire. They accumulate what we say and thus in aggregate know what we think, and constantly devise new and more intrusive means to manipulate this, us, to want something else, to do something else, tweaking the meaning of human freedom, changing the nature of the human subject.
The second horse brings a change of freedom, and the third a change to dignity. The nature of work and labour, long a source for our feeling of worth, our dignity, has been undergoing disruption. But now more rapidly than ever, AI, robotics, and other innovative technology is increasingly producing redundancies for human employment. It is not unemployment that is increasing, it is unemployability.
The fourth horse is epistemic collapse, a scenario where we do not know whom to trust or what to believe, where we cannot rely as we once did upon public information because we cannot know if it is real or fake news. Many say we live in a post-truth world. But to live in a post-truth environment is not just something ‘out there’. It affects your own brain, your own thoughts, your ability to acquire knowledge and even your understanding of what knowledge is.
Throughout the old apocalypse, we saw ourselves as free (with privacy rights), dignified (through labour and work), loving (with interpersonal social and physical contact), and seeking truth and knowledge. All of these are morphing fast. This is the Apocalypse now — it’s not just planetary crisis, but the destruction of the human person, too.
This is the end/
Of our elaborate plans, the end/
Of everything that stands, the end/
No safety or surprise, the end/
I’ll never look into your eyes again.
(Aakash Singh Rathore as Dr Jekyll is a Professor of Philosophy, Politics and Law, author and editor of over 20 books and counting, and as Mr Hyde, one of India’s top-ranking Ironman triathletes.)
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