If you feel like scaring yourself slightly shitless today, google the worst-case scenarios of an EMP attack.
The Cold War was all about total–and mutual–annihilation. Which is madness, and thus theoretically off-the-table. It’s a pretty crappy defense policy overall. Still, I wouldn’t put it past us–going out with a bang is the preferred exit strategy of despots and dictators everywhere–and some Kim Jong-un wannabe might well decide that the biggest bang’s the best bang, so “BOOM!” And off we go.
More likely, we’ll get hit with the sort of thing that won’t kill us all outright, but rather cause a societal upheaval that’ll have death-toll statisticians debating for a hundred years. Think weaponized small pox or some other engineered plague. Or the aforementioned nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack, which could flambe our all-things-electric infrastructure–that indispensable web of electron-passing wires and silicon-switching chips that keeps everything ticking–flipping 1’s and 0’s willy-nilly, data whipped up in a binary stew.
The result of a large-scale EMP attack wouldn’t be extinction of course, mankind being a tenacious beast, indeed one created a little higher than the cockroaches. But society might look a lot like Tatooine for a generation or two–life would be ragged, meager, and mean–but we’d have lots of gizmos and gadgets around, tools scavenged from the wreckage, working sporadically, unreliably on jerry-rigged generators burning biomass, belching into the black-smoke sky.
Most of the data captured in the last few decades would be quickly corrupted in the radiated frenzy. Server farms fried, and The Cloud–that eternal safety net on high–evaporating fast before the atomic blast of a thousand suns. All of those millions of songs on Spotify, all of the gifs and memes and the legions of one-off things never fully committed to flaccid, untrained Gen-Z mental-memory: Gone.
But eventually, inevitably, it will come crawling out of basements, fall from forgotten attics, be pulled from the overlooked rubble of small-town libraries everywhere: CDs, DVDs, illicit compilations lovingly captured on VHS and Cassette, shielded beneath stacks of Spin Magazines.
Welcome now to the New Renaissance, the rediscovery of what art and culture used to be–must wonderfully have been!–in a long-lost golden age. Yes! Here lies proof of our forebearer’s grandeur, that rumored Atlantis, their Edenic El Dorado. Civilization at last will be restored, society rebuilt, its sure foundation forever resting on the disproportionately high availability of ephemera from the 1990s.
Blame Columbia House, blame BMG, blame all those damn college kids gaming the system to accumulate as much free stuff as their campus postboxes could carry, but it was a sweet-spot in media availability. Production costs were dropping, the economy was ramping up, wallets loosened, and promoters sensed possibilities. Physical media cranked out its great final and fulsome blast of plastic product to Best Buys and Targets and Wal-Marts everywhere.
Borders and Barnes & Noble anchored strip malls–high-caffeinated Shangri-Las stocked with an unprecedented range of books and magazines–a mind-glutting abundance to enflame the imaginations of an over-indulged generation, mustering an army of suburban English majors, taunting them with lies about their god-breathed potential and certain marketability.
And now, an eon later, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture and 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Fail are passed down as rulebooks for right living, taught in schools, their pithier moments tacked up on teacher’s walls, inscribed in courtrooms, quoted, tut-tut. For these were the great men, consider their ways and be wise! Flannel-clad magistrates now sit forlorn in Doc Martens dispensing final judgements. Midnight raves replaced the mass. Hollowed out cathedrals, long dormant, have come alive again with jungle beats. Each Friday at sundown, in long-rolling weekend rapture, families together crack glowsticks, worshiping with The Prodigy as the ancients surely must have done: here at their local Temple of The Dog.
Finally, the lesser lights of grunge will get their due, and on their bones we will build civilization anew. Gavin Rossdale presides from the twenty; Silverchair ascends to a first-class stamp. New mothers wean boys named Gene and Dean, and raise daughters Phair and Morissette.
Oh yes, the dream of the 90s shall rise once again. Know this and rest well, ye spawn of the 70s. For your labor, it was not in vain.
