After The Pulse
When the whole world comes tumbling down, it will begin with the internet. The oncoming global disaster won’t be caused by hackers or even a new virus. The internet will be shut down in a deliberate act of state-sponsored sabotage. The cities and metropolitan areas will immediately collapse into chaos, especially the heavily touted smart cities of the fictional future, which will die a death of a thousand cuts.
The least developed countries, the most recent to jump onto the technological bandwagon will recover the fastest. But those that have pioneered connectivity, relying on modern technology for every function of society will never be the same again.
There will be a mass exodus. You might even witness the beginning of it now, seeing the that global lockdown is in remission. People are deciding to sell up their property in the city and relocate to the countryside and coast. They aren’t the first, and they most certainly won’t be the last. What many haven’t entirely realised yet is that the corporate dream, the new world order of commerce and connectivity, has hit a brick wall.
The virus spread across the world because of mass transportation, but the lockdown could only work because of mass communication. If we’d only had the radio, the political class wouldn’t have even tried to enforce unwritten laws upon billions of people, they’d have carried on as usual and kept their fingers crossed. The state is nothing without its brothers at arms, the technocracy of the valley, where code is farmed and harvested. Those NPC’s who believe we’d all be better off hooked up to virtual reality. Those behind the scenes who run the whole show are all Mister Smith’s, and we’re all Neo’s.
The radicals have sold their souls for a slice of the corporate action, garnering a small faction of the power play that’s unfolding before our eyes. The legacy media are all on board, and the old guard bluebloods are doing their best to re-brand. The new kids on the block can hardly speak, they’ll send pictures to friends and dox their enemies, rather than take a stand.
But the truth is that today’s rebels are nothing but spoilt children, who fear retribution more than they love any cause. Because it’s only any fun when the world’s on your side, it’s a generation with a gang mentality, who believe that their insular virtual community has some clout in the real world of gang violence, guns and drugs, police brutality and political chicanery. Just because something feels right doesn’t mean you have right on your side. The world today has no principles, it’s a money game, where famous brats throw shade while their legion of fans takes the flack. When a wild child confronts true authority, they’ll fall to their knees just like the rest of us. At first, they might protest, but eventually, they’ll bow down to the state, or the internet gods will have their say and remove them from life’s virtual game.
Human beings are unpredictable, and those who sow panic are well aware that it takes very little to upset the precarious balance of this tenuous civilisation. This age of mediocre wonders could collapse in the blink of an eye, and be written out of history within a decade. Fiction has prepared us for many end-world scenarios, insisting that our culture of survival will lead to some kind of eventual return to the way things were. But that’s all it is, stories for children, for when all this goes everything is over.
We, the human race, have always been beasts of burden. Historically, the elites have relied on disease and mortality to keep the masses at bay, for biology and environment are their preferred weapons of choice. Poison the earth, and hence the food chain, oversupply on demand for decades at a time, and then simply stop, and watch the world die. Encourage consumption of reliance upon the state, and legislate against anything that might encourage individual independence. The legal hoops we must jump through to grow food or generate power, build homes and travel the world, all of this has been put in place to makes us prisoners of society.
After the pulse, your worst enemies will be your neighbours, those people that in the past might’ve been friends will compete with you for food and fuel and anything else they can get their hands on. There are those more prepared, with supplies to last them months or even years, but they will become the prime targets of opportunists and random looters passing through. Some will have taken up arms and will be prepared to kill rather than die. But I wonder, is life honestly worth the price? Would you rather live like an animal than not at all? What’s the point of protecting all this, come the fall?
Some might relish the idea of watching their subjugators suffer, to witness those who’ve inflicted all the rules and laws upon humanity. To see them plead for forgiveness, like so many other despots in the past, ‘they were only following orders’.
I’m not one of them, although I feel no pity for those at the top of the tree. They have none for you or me. There’s no place for emotion in the boardrooms of hell, where contingency plans are planned and executed, should we get out of line and tear down their corporate heaven.
They’d rather see a cull than share vast resources with humankind, for in their eyes, we are nothing but animals and this planet is our farm. We are bred as beasts of burden, and once we are no longer needed, the human race will be slaughtered. No doubt, we will do it to ourselves, chaos born out of fear and paranoia. For without the constant distraction and convenience of modern life, many of us will quickly devolve into creatures of the basest instincts.
Head for the hills if you can, don’t listen to the signal, the call to arms, the call for action, for that is the voice of the enemy of the people. Take heed, learn what you can, store information in your head and not your phone, for sooner or later we will all be alone. Good luck for the future. I wish you all well. Hopefully, everything I speak of is years or decades away. However, I suspect, much like twenty-first-century life, that the turn of events continues to accelerate. It’s not even a matter of preparation, but rather acceptance, for this world that we live in is a fool’s paradise, a paradise for the wealthy and powerful, and an open prison for all the poor fools.
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