A Sign Of Things To Come™

The signs are clear. We don't need any more warnings

If you read the mass media, you notice how so much bad stuff is merely a sign of things to come.

This holds true for both the climate crisis and for covid.

Despite the fact that the things are happening now, everything is framed as a warning about the future.

This week The Guardian told us extreme heat in the Andes is “a sign of things to come.”

We’ve learnt that record heat in the UK is a “sign of things to come.”

That record flooding in New Zealand is “a sign of things to come.”

You get the point.

The problem with this framing is that it suggests that at some point in the future, conditions will settle into a new, catastrophic normal.

These are just the signs.

The climate disaster singularity is what we should fear.

But it doesn’t work like that.

If emissions keep being added to the atmosphere, there is no end point. No new catastrophic normal.

Things just keep getting more and more dangerous and more and more extreme. The suffering coming in layers as new places experience new and more brutal conditions.

Forever.

But if we take the media framing to its logical conclusion, then every extreme event becomes a sign of things to come.

New York Wiped Off Map by Mega-Flood: A Sign Of Things To Come

I don’t think this is particularly intentional. I think it is lazy. And probably subconsciously motivated by cognitive bias.

It is much easier to tell ourselves that the bad things happening in the present are temporal, fleeting. Signs of a future but not THE future.

It is much easier to cling to the belief that we haven’t entered the dystopia we fear.

But we have.

Because the things that are happening now we WERE warned about. BEFORE they happened.

That’s how real warnings work.

For the last 40 years climate scientists have been pumping out research paper upon research paper telling us what would happen.

They told us about the extreme heat we needed to brace for. And now it’s here.

About the floods that would start drowning us if we didn’t make radical changes. And now people are drowning.

About the crop failures we could expect before they started to happen. And now the food supply is faltering.

The other problem with presenting every climate event as a portal to the future is that it becomes disorientating. When is the future?

It leaves us scrambling to position the now relative to some more disastrous imagined future.

And being less able to reckon with the present reality can leave us less willing to react.

This kind of media framing on climate has been replicated almost identically for the pandemic.

In February 2020, before any lockdowns had even been instituted in the west, think-tanks were wondering if Covid was “the shape of things to come.”

In January 2021, deep in the pandemic, the BBC was telling us covid was a sign of things to come. They wondered what the next pandemic could be and how it could be stopped.

How about stopping this one?

Then when the monkeypox outbreak started, academics started wondering if in fact that was the sign of things to come.

25 million have died in 3.5 years of this pandemic. That is the sign!

This cognitive displacement activity is a form of soft denial. It allows us to indulge in imagining the future disaster - which might then be the point we act - without fully reckoning with the here and now.

It’s a way of thinking that has no end. Everything the sign of the next worse thing.

At some point we have to deal with the fact that disaster is here. That the future we feared has arrived. That things can no longer go on as they did before.

That at some point, we have to act.

If there is any intent to the media coverage, it is this: the cultivating of a soft denial about exactly how bad things are, presenting us with the gift of moderation relative to the extreme future. Blunting the instinct to take action in response.

But action is what we need.

That action will look different for everyone.

Protest, advocacy, community, self-sufficiency, organising, technology for the good.

In some way though, it has to be revolutionary.

It has to start taking on the institutions, conventions and normalising routines that have brought us to this point.

The point where we don’t need any more signs.

Because the signs are clearer than ever.

(artwork by @ronniefurbear on instagram)