My first memory of the apocalypse was in a Marvel X-Man alternative universe comic book series, The Age of Apocalypse, that I bought at a grocery store in Leesburg Florida in 1994. Near the end of this series, Magneto and Rogue and their child are standing on a mountain stoically watching the advancing end-of-the-world and cooly accepting their fate. This was moving to me, when a child, and a first encounter with the apocalyptic sublime, where I was just as overwhelmed by the idea of the end of the world, as I was by my newfound ability to think it.
Now the world ends in nearly every marvel movie. At one point in the mid 2010s I was reviewing movies for a now defunct internet magazine and I remarked in those reviews, of transformers and Marvel movies and the like, that these were movies that had been made by an algorithm, they had been produced by market forces more than by any one director or producer. Now in the age of AI, I understand this to mean that these movies were in effect already slop; slop avant la lettre; movies directed by the market, whose sole purpose is to satisfy the bottom line.
The apocalypse in marvel movie slop, happening over and over again, is a fine example of the apocalypse as a symptom; a kind of symptomatic doomerism. In short, fantasies of the apocalypse—whether found in paranoia, or the marvel cinematic universe—reveal an acute failure of the imagination (note 1). Certain persons keep imagining the end of the world because they literally can’t imagine anything else. Fantasies of apocalypse come as a relief to the interminable grinding that is modern life in late capitalism; just as suicidal ideation provide relief to intolerable feelings.
This is how I understand those recent tech-elite chicken littles who exclaim to a susceptible populace that AI is going to kill us all within three years time, or whatever; they are projecting an internal catastrophe that had already happened to them. AI may very well be a foreclosure of the imagination, but it is merely foreclosing a human capacity that had already been greatly deforested—as is evident in our flattening media landscape.
Certain talking heads have said that AI doomerism is a ruse, a sleight of hand to hide the consolidation of power. I agree that it is a ruse, but what is hidden is the actual apocalypse as it is delivered to Palestinians (note 1).
That so many people are so convinced that the world is going to end, from this or that giant catastrophe, is testimony not only to the accelerating paroxysms and radical precarity of the age, but also how did so many people have their psychic dioramas done in so bad?
The General Zapped an Angel, 1970, Karel Thole
note:
Obviously if you live in an actual apocalypse the imagination of an open future is a forgone conclusion.
