The future never arrives with the aesthetics of anybody who’s been actually preparing for it even if it’s a functional equivalent

Exhibit A: colorfully home-made domestic cozy Etsy masks where all the preppers were prepping grimdark80s tacticool madmaxterminator https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249925342631886848?s=21 https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1249925342631886848

Exhibit B: Everybody projecting their favorite dystopian scifi onto today’s regionalism tendency of governors vs Trump. It’s going to play out with tediously bureaucratic banality. You’re not getting names like “Cascadia” etc out of this.

https://twitter.com/qiaochuyuan/status/1249812835229503488?s=21 https://twitter.com/qiaochuyuan/status/1249812835229503488

Exhibit C: Instead of epic apocalypse sermons and stirring leaderly speeches we get... LinkedIn style infoporn https://twitter.com/news24/status/1249790819684560898?s=21 https://twitter.com/news24/status/1249790819684560898

I’m probably going to turn more prepper in the process of adapting right now but I’m gonna look for anti-aesthetic ways. Even grey-man is too much aesthetic because normal breaks during crisis so you can’t blend into what doesn’t exist yet. No normcore without norms.

Humans have a need for narrative projection to dramatize counterfactual thinking, and that means non-functional signifier elements. Like grim events call for beige clothes, right? But when grim events do unfold, and you need fabric, you’ll kinda use whatever the hell you have.

Take facial hair and haircuts. Stubble and beards are more apocalyptic, but... guys are shaving because masks fit better

Haircuts: movie apocalypses have fancy tribal hair. We are dealing with overgrown hair or bad home haircuts because salons and barbershops are closed.

Backpacks and duffels are standard apocalypse style. But I’m carrying around around disposable paper/plastic bags because I don’t want to decontaminate durable bags each time I step out.

Suggestion to budding sci-fi writers. World-build a normal world before your apocalypse and then scavenge it for improv survival artifacts after the crash. Don’t dress your hero in beige henleys if the crashed society is a fancy suits world. He’s gonna wear a battered suit.

I guess the opposite of my old idea of a manufactured normalcy field is... improvised weirdness crash-site? https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/

Another interesting thing: food. We’re supposed to all be eating grey unidentifiable, unappetizing soylent mush with luxury fine food being rare. But I’m eating random fancy shit while some staples are getting harder to find. And of course as much remarked, everybody is baking.

There’s some moral projection too. Apocalypse stories are often written with a “we must pay for our sins” moral angle. So there must be privation and no luxuries.

But half of us middle-classes are having a fine vacation developing long-dormant side projects. Unfair but true.

Hmm. I need to write this up.

Kinda tired though, I’ve written so many damn things that are loosely like this, it’s not as much fun for me anymore. Maybe I’ll turn it into a bounty challenge. $100 for most viral execution on this color-by-numbers template.

Caveat: this is very far from over and we’re just in phase 1 of n. Who knows, maybe one of the aesthetic predictions true in phase 3 or 7.