Anti-dystopianism: Musings on the End of the World , part 2

This is the second part of a series on the end of the world and imagination. If you have not read the first part, it would be a good idea to check it out. If you don't wanna do that then fuck me what do I know right?

So who gains from these narratives of armageddon, and how are they utilised? You would not be surprised to learn that i think it is the Capitalist status quo and the little bitches that uphold it.

Through pervasive narrative, we find ourselves stuck between nostalgia and mourning for a utopia that never formalised and the triumph of the current status quo. Capitalism thrives on crisis. Instead of working toward utopian futures, we are bombarded with dystopian ones. Financial crashes, environmental disasters, and technological risks don’t challenge capitalism; they reinforce it by making us dependent on its solutions.

We can think of our collective obsession with collapse as a haunting; there were alternative futures that never materialized, and their ghosts linger. Climate action, economic justice, and technological ethics could have taken us down different paths, but capitalism shut those doors. This seems to be in line with postmodernist thinking: Nothing has meaning, and nothing we do can actually change the outcome. It is the age of apathy, nostalgia and defeatism.

The cyberpunk, utopian sci-fi dreams of the 20th century of AI freeing us, of post-scarcity societies, never came true. Instead, we got an AI-driven gig economy, worsening inequality, and an impending climate crisis. Financial crashes lead to austerity, climate disasters lead to privatized relief efforts, and AI doomsday scenarios lead to more surveillance. The apocalypse isn’t a failure of capitalism; it’s how capitalism sustains itself.

All this seems to be in line with a linear “enlightened” view of history, the follies of progressive determinism, whether the people perpetuating them understand what they are doing or not. They see the outside arc of the circle and think it is a straight line. They do not heed the fact that creation can only coexist with destruction. They see the mountain and not the other side. We are now unwittingly in a descent we are not ready for. We build all the things we could think of to accelerate, yet no safety nets. This is why the belief in predestination (if not along this path, then all is lost) sends us fanatically towards progress. The risk that these fucks are willing to take comes at the price of human lives. And since they are not the test pilot, they gamble with our lives in the fanatical drive towards progress. It is easy to advocate for moving fast and breaking things when you are doing the breaking and you are not the things.

To conclude, it seems like belief in the inevitability of armageddon is a pacifying force in our practical life and even in our imagination and our abilities to change the course of history. This is intrinsically linked with the linear understanding of progress. I suggest we attempt to be slightly less fatalistic and egocentric. We are not the peak of progress, and if this trajectory fails, that is not the end of time. Nature and Society are both cyclical and regenerative, and we need to be able to imagine a different future and a different trajectory if we do not wish to slowly rot in this exploitative hellscape we call home.

[originally posted to Patreon on 22/4/25]