boring apocalypse | Technology | THE COUNTRY

We live in strange times. Several weeks have passed since the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops, and kyiv has become an Instagram background. Once the pressure of the Russian offensive has been concentrated in the south, the Ukrainian president has flourished dignitaries. Volodymyr Zelensky, a hero by accident, confessed to Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg in an interview with Atlantic that he was fed up with so many visits from a foreign dignitary to take his picture. I imagine Volodymyr as those natives who go to work in papier-mâché villages so that packaged tourists can savor the local color. One earns a living this way and the other tries to keep the Russian invasion on the Western agenda.

At first, we were all in shock. I myself admit having spent the month of March in a hazy state, a torpor of neurons turned into pea cream. The horror came with Bucha, although we had previously been shocked by the idea vaunted by television that nuclear war was at the gates of Europe. Inflation, the cost of living as a whole, shot up even more and we had to pull out savings to pay the exorbitant electricity bill. But then we continue with ours, slowly heating up to extinction like the boiled frog in Olivier Clerc’s morality tale.

The apocalypse was not as promised. Not at least as the millenarians and pious had told us. You can no longer enjoy a decent apocalypse, one of mutually assured destruction (although Putin is always on the lookout to surprise us), with burning bodies, seven seals and trumpets, dragons, whores and a new Jerusalem. Now risk experts have invented a new ending, slow, warm and gradually painful, the boring apocalypse, and biologists and economists a new scientific discipline: collapselogy.

Created by Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens in 2015, collapsology predicts or analyzes the events that can ruin a civilization. Starting from the threat of climate change, in his work How everything can fall apart (translated as Collapseology in the Spanish edition), both dissect how it is not necessary for existential catastrophes to occur for existence to be called into question, as small events, unexpectedly interconnected, are enough to turn consolidated situations into weak ones. Technological hyperconnection, derailed speed, global interdependence and a lot of short-termism make up the elements of the next end of the world.

But what is a collapse? It is not about the end of the world, nor about the apocalypse of the seven trumpets and the seven seals. Nor of punctual catastrophes. For Servigne and Stevens, a collapse is “the process from which a majority of the population no longer has basic needs (water, food, shelter, clothing, energy, etc.) covered. [por un precio razonable] for services provided by law. Therefore, it is an irreversible process on a large scale, like the end of the world, indeed, only it is not the end! What will come next is expected to be long-lasting, and we will have to experience it with one certainty: we have no way of knowing what it will consist of. However, if our “basic needs” are threatened, it is easy for us to imagine that the situation could be incalculably catastrophic.”

Wharton School organizational psychologist, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know, and host of the TED WorkLife podcast. Adam Grant, published in the New York Times an opinion column titled “Welcome to the boring apocalypse” in which he never ceases to be amazed at our numb reaction to potentially catastrophic events. He mentions in this piece a 2018 paper signed by Hin-Yan Liu and Kristian Cedervall Lauta of the University of Copenhagen and Matthijs Maas of the University of Cambridge, in which this concept is invented. Liu, Cedervall and Maas recognize that, beyond existential risks, there are many others that go completely unnoticed or of which, being aware, we do not perceive their consequences, which, properly combined, can ruin civilization. They propose a methodology to try to identify them but, the truth is, the enormous complexity involved, for example, being able to have a video call or order a blanket in an online store, is something that not even those who manage them most closely have. the whole picture.

We have the example very close: trying to avoid deaths from covid and the collapse of the health system has caused a cascade of unexpected and potentially unexpected effects. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic did not immediately bring us a situation of Mad Max, as much as the confinement was for many, but it did stir up the silt with enough force to leave a series of effects, the concatenation of which is leading us to a situation of possible collapse: supply chain breakdown; increase in the price of raw materials; shortage of materials and components that stop, in turn, other production chains; runaway increase in the price of energy; inflation has risen to unacceptable limits; drought; water as a tradable product in the futures market; war, the absence of rights and totalitarianism. Putin’s own mental state, after two years away from any human being, could, why not, have a clear influence on his extreme decision to invade Ukraine.

For those of us who have been raised based on dystopias, it is not difficult for us to imagine a future of wars for scrap metal, without electricity, with absolute digital control, and with a lot of ragged clothes on top. Many of us are a bunch of doomsayers who pay screams like a broken Cassandra trying to warn of the evils that lie in wait for us, with the same success that Cassandra herself had. We announce a collapse that has not just arrived and we bore Santo Job. However, we are not prepared for the boring apocalypse

And since the apocalypse is slow, boring but ineffable, Zelensky is on his war and we are on to something else.

Paloma Llaneza Gonzalez She is a lawyer, essayist and ikebanaka. She has a degree in Law from the Complutense University and a Diploma in Higher European Studies from the College of Europe in Bruges. She has been practicing as a lawyer, auditor and drafter of standards in Spain, Europe and the USA. She is the author of ‘Datanomics’ (Planeta-Deusto) and the novel ‘Appetite for risk’ (Books.com)