The scientists working on the world’s first nuclear weapon are said to have betted on the apocalypse. Half of them believed that their bomb, when detonated, would ignite the Earth’s atmosphere. Hedging bets on the end of the world isn’t all that unusual. It seems to form part of the gung-ho mentality behind modern techno-science, politics and industry, which all seem to be hastening toward a biblical fiery end. The passive indifference with which the Earth’s resources are being gobbled up is similarly catastrophic in tone. While a burgeoning telecommunications revolution is churning out billions of passive consumers and abject paupers, a bad case of planetary eczema is spreading industrial wastelands, urban sprawls, and sterile mono-cultured (and often severely degraded) farmland at a breakneck pace.

The apocalypse hasn’t come yet, but it’s been on the cultural radar-screen since the modern techno-scientific dynamo got jump-started. Following Nostradamus’s inchorent ramblings, Newton (in 1670) set an actual date for Judgement Day in 1876. It’s been fair-game since, with recent estimates placing it at the end of 2012. Meanwhile pop-culture teems with apocalyptic rap, End of Days-style runs at the cinema and Doomsday pc and playstation games.  Undoubtedly, apocalypse sells, but more so, it carries with it the seed of a cleansing and a new beginning.  After we’ve royally screwed things up, we can look forward to the so-called kingdom of God, an utopia that’s been taking on a distinctively technological feel since ‘God’ was toppled by the Enlightenment. If not God, then scientific progress, with its perennial promises of freedom, prosperity, and release from disease may extract us from our current mess?

Our obsession with apocalypse – scientific or otherwise – draws inspiration from Chiliasm, a Christian form of apocalyptic prophecy that emphasizes the immediacy of ‘Judgement Day’ and the utopian ‘Kingdom of God’. Equating the position held by technology in modern society with a religious fervor, sociologist William Stahl opines that the myth of technological and scientific progress, fueled by the rampant destruction of the natural world, has come to constitute the ‘One True Faith’ – an entwined mesh of beliefs, values and goals (not necessarily religious in origin) that is tightly woven into the Western world-view.  

In the midst of our Chiliastic conviction of kingdom-come, we are gripped by a nihilistic doubt that things may not work out for the faithful after-all. Increasingly speed, weirdness, and unbelievability are bringing us wind of a wild and decidedly debauched future. What we’re catching wind of isn’t the biblical apocalypse, reasons Hakim Bey – merely the empty husks of the social burning up and falling away. Some of our deepest uncertainties about the future now come from the very sources that were once supposed to make the world predictable – such as science and technology. The striking visual imagery, often unexplained, that accompanies quite straightforward scientific stories (animal heads grafted onto humans, human bodies in test-tubes, multiple images of the same person reproduced, identically over a bar-code) reveal a growing panic. In a world where the speed of technological progress is far outrunning the headlights, we appear to be taking plummeting drive down dark twisty roads knowing that next curve might end in a cliff.

Yet, to the brave and fearless, the panic of postmodernity seems to be a fruitful event.  “Panic is about the deliberate nurturing of states of mind usually regarded as dangerous and insane, using fear as a catalyst to crystallize and inspire”, declares a sleeve note by Coil, a group of electronic-musos inspired by the shamanic antics of chaos magic.“It is about performing surgery on yourself - a Murder in Reverse”.                                                                                                                                                    

As a way of overcoming our apocalyptic technological impasse, techno-historian Donna Harraway offers us the metsaphor of the human-machine hybrid, or cyborg. For Haraway, those that have the most to lose via the agency of technology – the disaffected and the underprivileged – have the most to gain by mastering it and subverting it. Cyborgs, she writes, do not espouse a suicidal coupling with technology; instead, they see the cancerous proliferation of modern technologies as the first stage in the production of a wholly new organism.  As hybrid and transgressive monsters (creatures that blend disparate and incongruous parts), cyborgs themselves are science-fictional assemblages of humans and machines that are involved in shamanic acts of cultural genesis and transformation.  Like their ancient shamanic counterparts, cyborgs read the metaphor of apocalypse differently.  For them, the idea of apocalypse is a cultural signifier that doesn’t point toward radical destruction, but to radical transformation and potential.  Shamans, in any event, have used panic as a mechanism of transformation and their initiations and rituals often involved radical transformations and confrontation with monsters.

In reshaping the apocalypse into something truly transformative, we should evidently learn to imagine ourselves and our technologies differently. Rather than adopting a reticent or pessimistic attitude with respect to the immense machinic revolution sweeping the planet (at the risk of destroying it) or of clinging onto traditional systems of values, we should commit ourselves to evolving a new aesthetic paradigm and exploring radical new modes of being, avers psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (1995:54).  Armed with a new perspective, we should imagine a new future and ride the storm of the apocalypse that marks our current sense of dislocation and displacement, attuning our being to new, radically different, aspects of existence. This is, arguably, the only way forward for a species that is already inseparably involved with its technologies and poised on the brink of multiple ecological, cultural and technological disasters.  Our hope, insists author Kathleen-Anne Goonan, lies in ecstatic seekers, “visionaries who have the audacity to swallow unrepentant the raw dirt of the moon, read humanity’s entrails, roll up their sleeves, and get to work”.