AEWCH 105: MARK O'CONNELL or WHY WE WANT AN APOCALYPSE

Against Everyone with Conner Habib

Against Everyone With Conner Habib

Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.8 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 7 April 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

I talk with Mark O'Connell, author of Notes From An Apocalypse, and To Be A Machine, about how apocalypses fulfill our fantasies, how tech culture is tangled up in apocalypses, and why doomsday prepping doesn't work.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Against Everyone with Connor Habib, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas in an engaging and accessible way.
0:13.6	Well, friends, it's the end of the world, or one of the ends of the world, or it is at least our end of the world.
0:22.5	So let's talk about it before the next end of the world happens. I needed an apocalyptic thinker to talk about all this with,
0:28.8	and by apocalyptic thinker, I don't mean somebody who is in a bunker, although it may feel
0:34.7	like we're all kind of in bunkers right now. Instead, I needed someone who was insightful and thoughtful about everything that's going on.
0:43.2	So, there is nobody better, really, than Mark O'Connell.
0:47.3	Mark is the author of The Very Timely Book, Notes from an Apocalypse, A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back, which comes
0:55.2	out this month. So really, he just arranged, what a hustler, he really arranged this well.
1:00.5	And very much relatedly, he's also the author of To Be a Machine, Adventures among Cyborgs,
1:06.6	Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the the modest problem of death. Both of his books are
1:13.1	about people planning for the end, whether personal or worldwide, and they have this great,
1:20.0	funny, lively tone, and also they have a lot of great theoretical angles on what's happening.
1:29.2	Mark and I talk about Peter Thiel's Doomsday Prepping.
1:33.6	We talk about how apocalyptic thinking is embedded in tech culture and its figureheads
1:38.7	and how that actually erodes connectivity in the world.
1:42.4	We talk about zombie movies, transhumanists doing exorcisms on their own souls,
1:48.2	and perhaps most urgently we talk about how we have the opportunity right now to organize. It's all
1:55.0	framed in the idea that apocalypse is attached to and connected to our own desires and our own fantasies.
2:03.6	You know, just on my end, I was walking through Dublin the other day,
2:08.6	and I saw a group of three people.
2:12.6	So there's nobody out at all.
2:15.6	Well, there are some people out, but there's not a lot of people out.
	...

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