Makena Kelly: Collapse - Let’s Prep

Talk Summary and Resources By Alex Turvy.

Talk Summary:
Verge Reporter Makena Kelly takes us into the distressing and disturbing underbelly of apocalyptic anxiety online: r/collapse.

Key Insights and Questions:

• We generally know where Boomers and Millenials are getting their doomsday narratives, but what about younger people?

• The actual risk for societal collapse is higher than ever, so how are they responding?

• Is it nihilism? Practical things like ‘prepper’ lifestyle? Activism?

Talk Notes and Related Resources:

• Collapse wiki

• Fukuyama // The End of History

• Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse

  • “The end of history dwells in the present as a rolling apocalypse”

• Doomsday Preppers and the Architecture of Dread

  • “In the prepper ideology, faith in adaptation has supplanted hope of mitigation, making contemporary bunkers more speculative than reactionary and more temporal than spatial."”

• Apocalypse Now! Fear and Doomsday Pleasures

  • “doomsday preachers who revel in the perverse pleasures offered by the announcement of the end—the nurturing of fear...followed by a set of techno-managerial fixes”

• Eco-Nihilism: The Philosophical Geopolitics of the Climate Change Apocalypse

• The World’s a Mess. So They’ve Stopped Saving for Tomorrow.

• The Preppers Next Door