Sola Simulacrum: Living Through the End of the World

Nearly five hundred years ago, Englishmen saw the end of the world everywhere. Earthquakes, comets, famine, and plague provided believers with evidence of the end times. The mechanics of apocalypticism, including how symbols held traditional and newly negotiated meanings and how signs were effectively mobilized toward polemical and prescriptive ends regardless of how many people ‘truly believed’ in the apocalypse’s salvific power, offer a mirror to the twenty-first-century algorithm. Like us, the generation living after the invention of the printing press debated frightening, semiotically plural, multi-sensory technologies in symbolic terms. Perhaps the key to escaping our apocalyptic fate is understanding theirs.