By: Ella Grim
Art by: Angela Shang
If I ask you to envision the end of the world, what do you see?
Is it a wasteland? An icy, frozen landscape like the film Snowpiercer (2013) or the end of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle? Or perhaps you see the opposite, a parched and scorching desert stretching to the horizon, like in the Tom Hanks film Finch (2021). Maybe, like in Cormac McCarthy’s haunting novel The Road, unexplained, cataclysmic disaster prompts a disintegration of society and rampant human cannibalism.
Maybe the aliens invade. (Often, they are thinly disguised, racist allegories for non-white or non-Western “alien” others). Or maybe, like we’ve seen in the recent Netflix films Don’t Look Up (2021) and Leave the World Behind (2023), it is humanity’s obsession with wealth, social status, and media influencers that prevents us from averting the ultimate disaster when it strikes. Take your pick. Choose your own disaster.
Are there survivors in your end? Is there that one man – usually a white, middle aged, heterosexual, cisgender man – hell bent on surviving against all odds? If you can’t be the man that saves the world, these films and stories promise, you can at least be the last man in the world. Both plotlines allow for a performance of that gritty, hypermasculine, single-handed heroism that has become synonymous with survival.
Most of these end-of-the-world stories — and perhaps your own visioning — present the end as a product of a decisive moment. A singular disaster. A clear divide. Before and After. A definitive step off the precipice between sane and insane, between calm and chaos, safety and danger, peace and war, health and sickness. The ice-nine is dropped. The bomb explodes. The aliens attack. The mega-asteroid hits.
These visions of apocalypse are lies.
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Consider the following lines of Franny Choi’s poem “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On.”
By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already
ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending
world spun in its place. It ended, and we woke up and ordered Greek coffees,
drew the hot liquid through our teeth, as everywhere, the apocalypse rumbled,
the apocalypse remembered, our dear, beloved apocalypse—it drifted
slowly from the trees all around us, so loud we stopped hearing it.
In her fourth collection of poetry, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, Choi reframes the end as a collection of historic and ongoing atrocities that have and still are causing death, destruction, and a slow crumbling of the world as we know it. She invokes the multitude of apocalypses marginalized people and people of color have been subjected to for centuries: “the apocalypse of boats [...] the apocalypse of the bombed mosque [...] the apocalypse of the leaving [...] the apocalypse of pipelines legislating their way through sacred water [...] the apocalypse of the settlement [...] Border fence apocalypse. Coat hanger apocalypse. Apocalypse in the textbooks’ selective silences.”
Choi provides us with a poetic and historically situated re-definition of the end of the world. An end made of hundreds of smaller ends. An end which is pervasive and global. An end driven by layered and complex systems of patriarchal, settler-colonial, racist, western empire.
When Choi visited Dartmouth in the spring of 2023, she spoke of her literary ancestors—Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Amiri Baraka, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K Le Guin, among others—and the way she roots her work in the knowledge of being in the aftermath of calamity. She talked of her own vision for her work, one in which speculation permits abolition and within which we all hold a deep responsibility as future ancestors to those who will inherit our earth and our systems when we are gone.
When we compare mass media visions of the end of the world to Choi’s alternative and radical view of apocalypse, there are a few glaring misalignments.
The sole survivor figure, that brave hulk of a man, contrasts with Choi’s “we” and “us.” Choi invokes millions of people stuck together in a cycle of apocalyptic endings, from historic genocides and displacements to ongoing disasters like the dehumanization of immigrants, restrictive abortion access, and climate change. In mainstream apocalypse media, the victim of the end is most often a white man, or, increasingly in the past few years, an affluent white woman. Choi’s apocalypses center the experiences of people of color, of immigrants and refugees, of Indigenous communities, of misogyny-affected folks, people who have been pushed to the margins, brutalized, and dehumanized for centuries. Mass media’s version of the end places the blame on often-poorly-explained crises that have an environmental or non-human dimension: asteroid strikes, nuclear winters, inhospitable climates, weapon-welding Martians. Choi’s endings are inflicted by humans and onto other humans. She frames our world ending disasters not as something out of human control, but as a direct result of human actions with a foundation in greed, capitalism, ignorance, and hate. Mass media’s apocalypse takes place in one moment, and then we see the aftermath. Choi’s visioning collapses this binary, placing us right in the middle of the end. We are living and breathing apocalypse daily.
~
When we consider current events, it is easy to see which version of the apocalypse is more accurate.
There are no cannibals. But there is the ongoing genocidal slaughter of thousands of Palestinian people in the name of settler-colonial empire. The earth is not a singular icy wasteland or vast desert. But climate disasters have become so frequent that the headlines about forest fires and superstorms and years-long droughts are no longer startling. There are no menacing extraterrestrials. But our media and our leaders attempt to frame entire groups of people as alien. Walls are built, restrictive immigration laws instituted, people sorted into arbitrary and divisive nation states.
We are living a plural apocalypse, one comprised of many localized disasters and world ending events. There is the apocalypse of the train crash in Ohio. The apocalypse of the children in the mines. The apocalypse of book bans and the queer suicides. The apocalypse of Line 5. The apocalypse of the pandemics. The apocalyptic genocides. A million, splintered world ending moments coalesce into one huge apocalypse, driven on by Western imperialism and late stage capitalism. The world is crumbling at our fingertips—just not in the ways mainstream media has taught us to see apocalypse.
~
We like to believe that in those blockbuster, end-of-the-world, survival scenarios, we would rally. It is easy to critique the characters on the screen, point out what they are doing wrong, and think about how we would do better. We’d gather supplies, build a shelter, trek through a dangerous wilderness to make it to the place where the last humans are rebuilding civilization. We wouldn’t go into that cave, or trust that stranger on the side of the road. We would do better, be smarter. We would survive.
(And, side note, if you’re one of those people whose response to Bumble’s “What’s your zombie apocalypse plan” prompt is “die lmao” and you’d rather just let the end come than take action, then you’ve succumbed to nihilism, an outlook that arises from a feeling of alienating detachment provoked by capitalist social conditions. Nihilism is a nifty trick that capitalist patriarchal empire uses to quell rebellious thinking in the face of the multiplicity of apocalypses by convincing us that at some level, nothing will save us, so we can fuck around and do whatever we’d like. This mindset breeds complacency and inaction in the face of gross injustices. Luckily, nihilism is reversible! Read on, I have solutions for you.)
We like to think we’d take action, when the world ends. We like the idea of survival, of saving ourselves and maybe a few others, of starting over and ridding civilization of its errors. We like to think we could lead the charge to build a better world. But we are living through an ongoing series of apocalyptic events with a startling amount of complacency and inaction, especially from those of us who hold privileged positions in society and in the globalized world we inhabit.
A similar complacency plays out in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which follows a young Black woman, Lauren Olamina, who lives in a gated community in a near-future California. The world around Lauren’s family’s compound is rapidly disintegrating: new hallucinatory drugs fuel destruction by gangs of pyromaniacs. Unrest in the streets makes traveling to work impossible for Lauren’s father. Agriculture has collapsed, and the little food the compound can grow is constantly stolen. Famine spreads. Company towns spring up near the coast, promising food and security but trapping workers in a state of debt and indentured servitude. It is clear from the outset of the novel that this world—which bears so many echoes of our own—is close to total collapse. Already it has eroded to the point where life-as-normal is next to impossible. Lauren’s father urges her to have faith, to wait passively for things to improve. Many of the other members of her community share this complacency. But Lauren resists. She sees the world is crumbling and begins to prepare. She reads widely, devouring books about medicine, shelter building, and agriculture—anything she thinks will help her build a different future. She begins to write, developing her own religion based around a principle belief: God is Change. She packs a bag and prepares to leave the safety of her community to spread her message of revolution. When her compound is raided and burned, she is ready. She survives, gathers a group of followers, and begins the long and difficult work of restructuring society around values of collective care, liberation, and survival.
In many ways, Butler’s universe mirrors our own. We are living in a similar crumbling of society. And many of us—like Lauren’s father and community—are stuck in vicious cycles of waiting, hoping, and praying for things to change, or for someone else to change them for us.
Much of this complacency is tied to how we are taught to think about the end of the world. So much of the mainstream media we consume—from blockbuster films to bestselling books to the news articles we read each morning and the social media posts we swipe through—builds this idea of the end as something distant and definitive. We are taught to worry about the end for brief moments: As the credits roll on the movie screen. When we read that page-long soliloquy. In the seconds before we scroll to the next headline, the next post.
Much of the disaster media we consume doesn’t urge us to take direct action. It startles, sure, or informs. But it doesn’t grip us, doesn’t force us to pay constant attention to our lived reality, doesn’t force us toward action. Why? Because mainstream media is deeply and irrevocably tied to capitalism and the status quo. To inspire or urge us into meaningful, sustained action would be to undermine the very world order that permits things like blockbuster movies and clickbait headlines to exist. We cannot let this media be the only media that informs how we think about the end of the world. We cannot let this media be the thing that shapes our actions, attitudes, and mindsets about apocalypse.
When I say “we,” I’m being slightly inaccurate. There is, at least in America, a very racialized and classed component to complacency. It is much easier to ignore the cacophony of apocalypses if you are racially white, economically comfortable, a cisgender man, straight, able-bodied, and “educated” through traditional schooling systems. To put it simply, the fewer everyday apocalypses affecting you, the easier it is to tune them out. Most apocalypses are identity dependent, and people who live at the intersection of many oppressed or marginalized identities are more likely to be able to resist complacency simply because they do not have the choice to ignore injustices that directly affect them. It is harder to push against the forces of both comfortable societal privilege and mass media brainwashing in order to arrive at a revolutionary mindset.
This concept can be extended globally as well, with Americans and citizens of other wealthy, Westernized countries struggling more with resisting mass complacency. I’ve found the way social justice influencer @ismatu.gwendolyn frames our existence “in the heart of the empire” to be extremely helpful lately. She mentions the “addictions” each of us who live lives of relative comfort in privileged places have in order to be able to tune out the atrocities happening globally, but mainly in places we don’t have to live within daily. She doesn’t specify what these addictions are, but it’s easy to generate a list. We’re addicted to our technology. To our overpriced drinks. To our collectable junk. To our projectable image. More and more, to drugs and alcohol and anything else that numbs out the pain we see around us, that pulls us out of the real world for a moment.
For white and otherwise privileged people in America, and for anyone who lives within the relative comfort of imperialist countries, learning to resist mass complacency and beginning to take both radical responsibility and radical healing actions takes time and effort. It is not an overnight mindset switch. You’re not going to wake up radicalized just because you’ve read this article. I’m not urging you to go join a commune or quit your 9–5. Instead, I’m asking you to begin to engage with media that reenvisions apocalypse and survival.
~
One way we can resist the far-off, monodisasterous end-of-the-world ideology mass media would love us to embrace is by engaging with alternative media—movies, books, poetry, art, reporting—that encourages a different kind of end-of-the-world vision. Much of this alternative media is deeply feminist. It is written or directed by and focused on centering the experiences of marginalized communities, telling hopeful stories of collaboration, resistance, and flourishing that resist the stereotype of the heroic white male survivor (sorry Tom Hanks). This alternative media provides both a starting place for reworking our mindsets around apocalypse, and a constellation of hopeful visions for the future—ones we can take inspiration from and adapt to find place-based, community centered solutions in our own daily lives.
I want to end this article with two media recommendation lists. “Better end of the world media” is a great place to start if the concepts I’m discussing feel new, intimidating, or scary to you. These stories push against the myth of a far off end of the world, instead showing how our current reality is slowly crumbling down around us (or envisioning how it might continue to dissolve in the coming decades). Like the blockbuster movies we’re used to, these stories are also engaging and fun to watch. As you read, draw parallels between the worlds they depict and the one we are living in today. What is similar? What is different? How might we need to rework our existing society to avoid these new end-of-the-world scenarios? How does our reality impact the messages and outlooks of these stories, and what interests do they serve?
The second list is a collection of “radical dream projects that urge us to take action.” Many of the pieces in this category are speculative in nature. They dare to dream big, to imagine collaborative communities that resist disaster and build communities based on trust, care, reciprocity, and love. This list is a great place to start if you’re already engaged with feminist and social justice work and the ideas I’ve been talking about resonate or make you say “well duh.” This is the media that we can draw from as we begin to take direct actions within and for our local communities, as well as for social justice movements worldwide, now and in the years to come.
Neither of these lists is complete, in any way. They are based on what I’ve read or watched within the past few years, and no doubt contain many holes. I’ll leave some space at the bottom of these lists for you to add in your own recommendations, and you can use the QR code to the right to share your book recommendations for a future book list.
better end of the world media
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On, by Franny Choi
A collection of poetry focusing on reframing our understanding of apocalypse as a force that is historic and ongoing. Choi also has some deeply hopeful poems that envision a future where transformative justice has replaced our current carceral and military state.
MaddAddam Trilogy, Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s end of the world-building in this trilogy reveals the deep wounds that industrial capitalism leaves on society and makes it easier to see how interlinked catastrophes lead to a slow crumbling of civilization. She subverts the “lone man” survivor narrative with her depiction of a community of survivors who follow ecofeminist principles.
Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica
This deeply horrifying cannibalism novel probes at the way government and mainstream media sway our moral compass and inforce a status quo that permits truly horrifying acts of violence.
Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler
A speculative vision of resisting complacency and finding ways to survive in a world rapidly disintegrating under extractive capitalism. Strong focus on community survival over individualism, and on the necessity of radically restructuring our belief systems in order to build a better society.
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
A beautiful film centered on a futuristic community living under extreme climate change, classism, and racism. Pairs well with Parable of the Sower as a piece of media that helps us see intersecting injustices and envision hopeful, revolutionary solutions.
Severance, Ling Ma
A bitingly satiric pandemic novel (written pre Covid-19) that critiques both the “lone man” survival narrative and how trapped we are within corporate America.
Bird Box (2018)
A thriller film with a happy ending—one that briefly gives us a glimpse of what collective, community based survival might look like.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements
A collection of short science fiction stories by writers of color that extend Octavia Butler’s legacy of envisioning future societies that break from our current exploitative world order.
radical dream projects that urge us to take action
Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer
A collection of essays that braid Indigenous wisdom with scientific and environmental analysis, urging us to rethink our relationship with the natural world and underscoring the necessity for reciprocity and community in our efforts to change the world.
How To Survive the End of the World (podcast)
Autumn Brown and adrienne maree brown’s podcast on survival, sisterhood, community, and how we find our way through endings together.
Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
From how-to guides to building care webs to manifestos on accessibility and disability justice, this book provides practical guidance for building communities that serve everyone, not just those who can most easily access them.
GRIST (climate justice news platform)
Hopeful, informative, and solutions-driven reporting on climate change and intersectional environmental justice.
Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors
A beautiful and diverse collection of short fiction that envisions place-based, community-centered, collaborative climate solutions.
The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Nonprofit Industrial Complex
A great primer text for understanding how capitalism impacts organizing work, especially for those using a nonprofit model to advocate for change. Discusses both the issues with nonprofit organizing and ways that nonprofit models have been used effectively or subverted to generate positive change.
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