Sleepwalking

We have been incredibly, incredibly stupid

Isn’t the digital age marvellous?

I have a little silicon pouch on my keyring which holds a chip. I can pay for things with it (only in Portugal) by touching it on a contactless terminal. I always say “Beep!” when paying with my chip thingy. I don’t think anyone is amused except me.

This would be flying-cars-level futurism to my teen self in the 80s. I imagine telling my then-self that in 2025 I would be laid out on a sofa in Portugal, half-wrapped in an electric throw blanket, with a small computer on my lap, typing texts about any old thing I fancy and publishing them into a space that anyone in the entire world can see if they want to, and that I would illustrate that text with a drawing I make on a glass screened device and a plastic stylus, a drawing that I would send to the computer wirelessly. I would tell her that I make my living drawing like this and that if I wanted to stay on the sofa, wrapped in an electric blanket while I work, I could, but that I do prefer my desk, a desk that cranks up and down with a handle because in 2025 sitting down is now illegal.

I would tell her that I just video called our mother on her birthday (happy birthday, mother, although I already face-timed you just now) via my phone, and that I had a drawing of mine printed onto a bag and sent to her, from Latvia, without even leaving my house.

I would tell her that in 2025 we can buy anything, find anything, look up anything, write anything, hear anything, watch anything, read anything, play anything, without writing a cheque or handing over physical cash, and most of the time, we can do it from the sofa (we should have invented standing sofas by now considering how much we hate sitting). We can order food to come to our door and it’s not just pizza. We can send money instantly to our children, wherever they are, and charge the phone balance of our elderly mothers-in-law on the other side of the country. The whole of civilisation has been digitised, electronicafied, and onlined. Cars have computers, planes are flown by computers and now, sadly, even books are written by computers (they are shit, though).

There is so much we can do digitally. It’s mostly to do with paying for things and buying more crap than we need, but still, isn’t it amazing? We are so lucky to be living today. There are zero areas of our lives left untouched by the digital age.

I love a good apocalypse, don’t you?

This week in our house, we’re doing a season of disaster movies. More on that another day, but suffice to say for now that I love disaster movies with their vast earthquakes and volcanoes, meteor strikes, tsunamis, towering infernos, 1975 airports, virus outbreaks, etc., etc. Huge, silly apocalyptic stories are my bag.

More than the apocalypses themselves, the post-apocalypses and dystopias (which usually result from apocalypses, but sometimes through simple mismanagement) thrill me. Books, films, tv series, I will partake of any post-apocalyptic drama.

In 1975, the BBC aired a series called The Changes on children’s TV. I was five. It was about a dystopian Britain where the people killed all the machines. It stuck with me, but I couldn’t remember the name of it. Only once the internet happened could I go back and find out what this dystopia was, from which I can still, 50 years later, recall scenes.

The same year, Survivors began, and ran until 1977. I was a terrible sleeper when I was little, because tartrazine was my drug of choice, and I often snuck down the stairs and watched the TV from the bottom until I was spotted and sent back to bed, so that’s probably how I saw bits of Survivors. There were bearded men and at least one Land Rover, and some rabies.

It must have been because of the TV series of The Day of the Triffids in 1981 that I became a huge John Wyndham fan, and I read all the books of his that I could get. Triffids, Chocky, The Chrysalids, Midwich Cuckoos, The Kraken Wakes.¹

Like many teenagers in 1980s UK, I was obsessed with nuclear war. The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) did not cause this. The Cold War was the Big Thing and, before them in the early 80s, there was a series of public information films (and leaflets) about how to live behind a door, shit in a bucket, and put your dead out in the back garden. They were voiced by an actor whose voice strikes fear into the heart of anyone of my age. That and the sound of a siren. Today, I live in Almada, a former shipbuilding/repair town, and twice a day, a siren sounds (for nostalgia, I think), exactly the same siren that we would hear in the information films. It sounds for about 30 seconds each time. Sometimes, it plays for about 5 minutes (I believe as a tribute when somebody in the fire service dies). God, my nerves.

Mad Max 3 (Beyond the Thunderdome) came out in 1985, and it was very of its time, the first one of the Max films with “oops we had a nuclear war” in its context. I’m not sure how I would have seen Mad Max 1 and 2, because they came out when I was 9 and 11… maybe they were on TV, or maybe I rented them on VHS, but I was a Mad Max completist in 1985. In 1 and 2, there hadn’t been an actual nuclear apocalypse, just the collapse of civilisation in Australia, but by 1985, there had been a war in the Mad Max Cinematic Universe. I don’t mind rewritings of history like this. It keeps things current and fun. Mad Max 1 is my favourite as a dystopia, though. It is by far the most chilling. One day, maybe I’ll write more about the Mad Max Cinematic Universe (much more interesting than the Marvel one… snore).

There are so many dystopias in books, film and TV to choose from… in no order whatsoever: 1984, Blade Runner, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, Judge Dredd , The Road, The Terminator, I Robot, Silo, 28 Days, -Weeks and, soon, -Years Later (beyond excited), The Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, Soylent Green, Escape from New York, Fahrenheit 451, A Quiet Place, Brave New World, Second Sleep, Planet of the Apes - various, The Hunger Games, Station Eleven,… those are just the ones, old and new, that live in my head. Post-apocalypses and dystopias, with or without zombies/robots/aliens, I just love them.

I like to see how other people imagine a future that’s gone to shit, how they think people would react and interact. Do they go full Immortan Joe with crazy clothes, or Negan with a crazy baseball bat? Or would they be the eminently sensible Emily Blunt and John Krasinksi in The Quiet Place? I love the worlds that those authors construct from the ashes of our current world.²

At the moment, I’m living a little bit in the Silo, waiting to get my hands on the books/audiobooks. The design on the Apple TV show is chef’s kiss wonderful.

I often daydream about apocalypses and what would happen in my part of the world if the unthinkable happened. How would I react, how would my neighbours react, how would the town/Portugal/world react to some kind of apocalypse?

My apocalypse du jour? Forget aliens, zombie viruses, nuclear wars or even the AI Singularity… my apocalypse is easier to imagine:

A power-crazed lunatic weirdo who has lost his mind having fallen out with another power-crazed lunatic (*cough cough*) or a vast geomagnetic storm, the likes of which we have seen before, takes out the internet, probably by simply turning off the electricity, seeing an end to our marvellous digital age with the flick of a switch.

From one moment to the next, logistics of all kinds would be gone. Food delivery, aid delivery, personnel delivery. Hospitals and all the technology medicine now relies on. Payment systems (even if you have cash, you can’t pay in any kind of shop without electricity and connection). Netflix gone. Telephones gone. Transport gone. The looting would begin, and Negan and Immortan Joe won’t be far behind. Even if you are of the generations that knew how to do stuff without the internet, almost the only things useful today would be the ability to light a fire and to knit (with looted wool). We’d have to hide our encyclopaedias to prevent them from being burnt as fuel.

We’d all be wearing headgear made out of PEZ dispensers and toilet brushes before the year is out.

There are zero areas of our lives left untouched by the digital age.

We have sleepwalked into a total civilisational dependency on something as fragile as electronics. How incredibly, incredibly stupid of us.

Anyway, happy Wednesday!

1. Only recently did I get to The Trouble with Lichen, The Outward Urge, Web, and Plan for Chaos, in audiobook form. Still marvellous.

2. I think that’s why don’t like pure fantasy fiction, the kind with magic and elves and dragons and sexy times in castles. It’s not (enough) based in our reality, and I like that springboard of “how might we get from here to there?”.