The lazy Armageddon

The day the internet stopped working,

I think we all thought, "huh... that's weird." It was, we were right. I rode my bike to the corner Starbucks that morning. Didn't drink the stuff, but I knew it would be an accurate representation of the local buzz. People were gathered inside, too many people, spilling out to the efficiency-patio. They stood, smooshed together breathing each other’s anxiety; some commiserating, most of them empty vessels staring blankly at an emptier device. The chairs remained empty too, but nobody ever really sat outside there, despite the weather always being perfect. The zoo-of-a parking lot was however, not empty: tiny, built for efficiency, for driving through. There was a line, longer than usual, like those old pictures of people waiting to buy gas. It was a whole lane on the main street dedicated to the madness, with more empties sitting in empty looking at emptiness. They weren’t even honking. As I pedaled by I couldn’t help but wonder how the whole design was so clearly not prepared for everyone to stay and finish their cup while chatting with a neighbor. I never understood that. Brewing it at home had to be more efficient. Everyone knew it was cheaper. Didn’t they go to the shop to be with others? Welp… that’s all they had now.

That’s just how I saw it though: I’m not qualified to judge how cities, or people, work. We had just moved from one of the last rural towns in Colorado. It was an old trade hub, one of those places you pass through and never remember the name of. It had felt as if I was forgetting the place too, more than that, forgetting who I was. I didn't think much more of it that day, of not having the internet. A few of my friends said they were going surfing. Not like the waves were gonna stop because of us. I think it was a bit of a panic after the initial realization, with that huh... pause in between all of it. I remember wishing we could have lived in that pause a little longer, in that freedom. There's a calm in the unknown, before the fear sets in. To me, the fear was funny, aside from the death and destruction. There was plenty of that too. But for most of us, nothing really changed. It was less of an event as it was an accelerant: the fire already burning in the hearts of those who needed a reason. Nobody could have anticipated how badly some of us needed that release.

The days that came were... well, I'd call them a lazy Armageddon. Casual, anyone could have predicted the looting and debauchery. In some ways the web was holding us selectively accountable. There was a shame stalking the shameless internet, the threat that forever you might be "that guy" who did "that thing." And it might have not even been that bad, like you just said some stupid nonsense, while politicians publicly kick babies and drunkenly hit on your tween sister. Virality was unpredictable and ruthless, godlike. Authority lost its honor a while back, it was more like a fairy tale at that point. So "we" elected "them" to "lead us" while we watched the nameless and faceless endure a global flogging for saying something we were all thinking. But that's not why I never said stuff on the internet. I really never worried about the world hating me. Most of us are invisible anyways. In fact... the "crime" I started to see in the first week wasn't that alarming, especially compared the global atrocities we were desensitized to—watching juvenile genocide in real time. Nobody really cared about the next generation, it's not like any of us had hopes for "the future." My best friend might have written a manifesto and started mowing down the faculty, the world would have forgotten who he was before the weekend. But even that was less likely than him texting while driving us to school and wandering into oncoming traffic, nobody even heard about those anymore. Neither of us would have noticed our end either, cause really he wouldn’t have been texting, we would have been watching Wildflower practicing dance moves on her meritorious self discovery journey to join the next brigade of online strippers. Those videos, of people we hated, envied, cursed and pined for: those filtered faces (and asses) we would never meet… everyone pretended to miss them. So they took to the streets, as if they were meant for it. The funny part of all that loss was the way people wandered, animalistic, more animated than I’d ever seen them. They were demented, disgusted, outraged; like they could finally smell the rot fermenting in their chairs, the decay of their couch, the stench that clung to the walls that saw everything they weren’t doing in the world.

I could tell my parents were panicking, saw it all as a dystopian condemnation, but it was more scripted than anything. It was as if the new age robots had been finally released, taking in new data, reconstructing how to operate without the rote programming. They were tame in their savagery: scared, timid, curious. People become so accustomed to their surroundings, until they change. What we began to see, it was hard to even call them people anymore.

Opportunism was always there, and those who were waiting for their moment, seized it. Carpe... give me that InstaPot! Right now! It's not like it was totally lawless, and it couldn't get worse than the complacency we had before: the normalization of fentanyl zombies, non-human tent dwellers, exploitations of wide-smiled natives who just happened to build a mud hut over a cobalt vault. We were living in the next video game release anyways: Call of Duty WWIII - Minecraft Golcanda. With a loss the size of the internet, you'd think there would be mass gang-rapes and buildings crumbling, but everything pretty much kept working. The People hidden amongst us remained: trucks delivered food, water flowed from faucets, gas and electric kept pumping. The more I thought about it, the more I realized we were already living in the lazy Armageddon, and this was just the loss of a distraction which kept the insane preoccupied. And the more I met the insane, it felt like it wasn't them who had lost their minds, it was the hive that had lost its way, could no longer keep us busy busy bees, and they had to wander off to smell the flowers.

It was the spring of 2027, and we had finally broken civilization. I remember riding my bike that day, all day, forgetting what day it was. It was so quiet, a collective clarity drifted on with the clouds. I remember trying to check the date, the time. The numbers were there, meaningless; the reality of their existence living in a departed dimension. Now became messy, and deadly, and revealing. It seemed: none planned, none of it possible. The following decline was pungent, raucous—artful. It was the end of knowing, the end of always everything-ing. It was beautiful. I rode my bike that day, and I remembered.