The end, the beginning
que tras el colapso
de esta civilización ya condenada
siga habiendo quizá seres humanos
capaces de aprender de la catástrofe
y vivir una vida renovada
en un nexo distinto con la Tierra
(Jorge Riechmann, “En el fondo del valle ha muerto Jorge Riechmann”)
In my youth, I wondered how it was possible that great civilisations of the past had been reduced to mere ruins, and what the process was that connected the past to the present. I dreamed of being able to watch the flow of history in fast-forward so as to grasp it in its totality.
Faced with the evidence that the history of humanity is studded with vanished civilisations, I naturally asked myself whether a similar fate could befall us today. What events would have to occur to bring a global civilisation like ours to collapse? How could it come to pass that only a few ruins and some conjectures remained of our Greco-Roman culture?
Several decades have passed. We now find ourselves in a world on the brink of climate catastrophe, consumed by capitalist greed and in the hands of orange demons, chainsaw lords, entrepreneurs of darkness and other black-shirted devils. A world entirely digitised, where all human knowledge is stored in the cloud, on servers and hard disks.
Stripped of a body, human knowledge is omnipresent yet ephemeral. Contrary to what we’ve been sold, the survival of data is fragile — so fragile that even contemporary historians fear their future colleagues may struggle to find information about our era.
Then came AI, devouring and metabolising everything, with its biases, ambiguities and false equivalences. We have handed over the whole of human knowledge to the Machine, raising it to the status of an omniscient oracle to be consulted for every need. That knowledge is no longer ours, it’s hers. To centralise it and access it only through a machine that offers a potentially distorted interpretation means, in the end, to abdicate.
We have built a complex system that, in order to work, demands enormous quantities of natural resources. A sophisticated system, but a fragile one at the same time. A nuclear conflict, a solar storm, a satellite blackout or an unprecedented climate crisis could trigger its collapse. Let’s imagine a scenario of extreme drought, food and water scarcity, and the impossibility of accessing digital resources. One way or another, digitisation seems to be the crucial link in that process which, in my youth, seemed unthinkable: the disappearance of our civilisation.
The inability to connect with our past and with the knowledge accumulated over time could generate what we might call the Great Void, The Big Emptiness. In this state of widespread ignorance, barbarism and devastation would become the prelude to a new beginning, a point zero from which to rebuild a different future. Paraphrasing Smithson, a future buried in the past1.
It took me months to mourn the evidence: whatever happens, we are facing an end. Then, once I had accepted the fact (but can one really accept something of this magnitude?), and freed from the need to avoid the inevitable, I realised that a new certainty was taking shape: we must prepare and think about the after. To quote Eliane Brum, it’s no longer the time for hope, but for action, out of a need for survival. And that’s good news, because it’s the first step towards imagining a new future again.
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Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 194. “The future doesn’t exist, or if it does exist, it is the obsolete in reverse. The future is always going backwards. Our future tends to be prehistoric”. ⤶