Post and a ripple goes across the internet—perhaps not very far at all, but perhaps quite far if you’re lucky, and if you have the misfortune to go viral…well, it’ll come full circle and back onto you,trolls in tow.
How do memes act as carriers of affect across the internet? How are people expressing their doomer feelings? Is doomerism contagious? How does this change the way we think about speculative futures?
This is a turning point, a time of monsters and behemoths too strange and horrible to be dragged into the light of our conscious thought. This is getting too close to psychonanalysis and I don’t really want to do that, but I mean, it kinda seems true. There’s a deep, desperate, wise unease bubbling through us, an angry undercurrent that, if touched, would eat us up and subsume us all.
We know the system we’re in isn’t sustainable. Neither sustainable nor right. We know we’re caught endlessly reacting, attempting to maintain our emotional and social homeostasis without tumbling down into a reality with everything we tried to hold on to stripped away from it.That’s the social, the interpersonal, closeness, family, community, solidarity. Public life. Private life.
I’m interested in this unease, this wise worry about what might come.