The story of the flood is common throughout all civilizations, if for no other reason that it is a deep, cyclical archetypal truism of human societies. Like with every other living thing, near the end of the lifecycle of every civilization, there occurs an event, precipitating its decline. This event is generally an accumultion of existential threats. Maybe it's the impending ecological collapse or global warming. Maybe it’s technocapital expansion. Maybe it's nuclear war, economic debt, low fertility, deadly pandemics or overall civilisational decline. Maybe it’s the stampede of our networked collective mind, spamming our unconscious ghosts all across the web. Maybe it's all of these things at once, compounded by each other, and then still some.
What's important to realise is that floods are universal; that the further back we look in history, the more the myths around these events become ontological - that is, the more they end up constituting power and discourse. In the flood, the God(s), in anger, flooded the world, destroying an old civilisation as punishment for their moral decline, but preserving a select few to continue and birth civilisation anew. Atlantis and Noah are the Greek and Hebrew instantiations of this archetype; and today in the globalised world, that archetype is again resurfacing as the Digital Flood. It’s screamingly obvious the west is going through a moral crisis, a moral conflict. This will be further catalised by the disruption on our ability to attribute value to the world. This set of issues will be taken to a critical point of chaos and disarray, after which the old sense-making institutions will crumble into ruins. Technology is the precipitator of this process. It is our undoing. Let s acknowledge defeat, concede the ground, and learn to build arks.