Hopeful Apocalypse

Pop Culture Eschatology from Duff McDuffee My aim here is to collect mentions of apocalyptic-themed things in the media and provide commentary, especially noting the varied ways in which people respond to "end of the world" scenarios. For now it's just a collection of things I run across, but in the future I may also write longer articles. Topics may include global warming and climate change, peak oil, survivalists and SHTF scenario planning, Left Behinders, Conservative Christianity and reading Israel into Revelations, resilient and local community movements, 2012 and Mayan Calendrics, the technological Singularity, Humanity+, global economic collapse, zombies and werewolves and vampires (oh my), Existentialism, the psychological of anxiety and despair, and anything else I deem relevant.

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Perhaps the real danger of robots isn't them turning on humans ala Terminator, but taking our jobs and thus putting the majority of humanity out of work.

The upside could be a redistribution of wealth in society and an age of leisure. But we've been promised such for decades if not centuries and so far it hasn't exactly happened.

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2045: A New Era for Humanity (by 2045ru) What could possibly go wrong? 

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...of the 90 most crucial environmental goals, little or no progress has been made over the past five years on nearly a third of them, including global warming. Significant progress has been made on just four of the objectives, the report says.

U.N. report warns environment is at tipping point

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An article on the same themes as this little Tumblr, from the Andrew Cohen people (I am not a fan of Cohen's cult leadership, but it was a good little article).

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Apocalypse music

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So, back to the question: what happened to cyberpunk? The answer is simple. It’s under our noses. Privacy and security online. Megacorporations with the same rights as human beings. Failures of the system to provide for the very poor. The struggle to establish identity that is not dependent on a technological framework: the common themes of the cyberpunk classics are the vital issues of 2012. Quite simply, we’re already there, and so of course cyberpunk as a genre is unfashionable: current events always are. Even William Gibson and Neal Stephenson don’t write science fiction anymore. Why bother? We live immersed in the cyberpunk culture that its O.G. prophets envisioned.

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So often I see apocalyptic predictions as the breakdown of rules and law. For instance in the recent post I put up from the Economist about "machine ethics" the problem was presented as a host of new and uncertain challenges to navigate. But what if the biggest potential problems are actually in the building up of new rules and laws? For instance in patenting DNA strands or even entire species, tracking both all internet activity and all offline activity as the two become merged and the subsequent loss of privacy, etc. Far from "when nothing is sacred, everything is permitted," fewer and fewer things are escaping the watchful eye of some regulatory agency. Which should we fear more: the breaking down of current society or the building up of a more oppressive one?

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Everything will (probably) be alright.

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This blog is interesting. Basically the author thinks that the global financial system will collapse soon and his response is to make his home "resilient." In practice this seems to be about growing a garden, installing solar panels, and otherwise becoming "off the grid."

A friend of mine who studies famine thinks this notion is pretty ridiculous, for as he said, "the first thing that happens in a famine is that everybody abandons their farms and heads to the cities in search of food." It also makes me wonder what would stop a tank filled with guys with machine guns from taking over your resilient home and your vegetable garden if the SHTF. But who knows, maybe this guy is onto something. 

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The nuclear arms race has morphed into the U.S. attempting to prevent Iran from getting nukes by means of a cyberwar arms race.

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"As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency.

...As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas. Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic? Such questions have led to the emergence of the field of “machine ethics”, which aims to give machines the ability to make such choices appropriately—in other words, to tell right from wrong."

What could possibly go wrong? Oh, right.

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Zombies are "the living dead." What activities rob us of our vitality and aliveness? Are mobile internet devices a culprit in creating zombies, in making us their mind-controlled slaves responding to every notification? Or can we use technology and remain alive and engaged?

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A common response to collective existential threat is denial. "You create your own (un)reality."

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