Metamodernism and the End of the World
A Classic Narrative
The narratives of the world's ending have existed for thousands of years. A primal fear of the collective's death is embedded into such narratives. It was a common ground where humanity will face universal consequences when the end time comes. Just as every narrative is told in history, apocalypse stories usually serve a purpose. They are presented differently to fit the storyteller's interest as they have been passed down through time and across cultures.
For example, in the Christian context, the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is portrayed as the demolition of Earth by the Four Horsemen and the Wrath of God, whereas believers will gain redemption in the end. Entering the modern age, rejection of religion denies the existence of God and forwardly denies the religious metaphor of Apocalypse. The horrific world wars in the 20th century altered the optimistic belief in humanity and enforced the idea that the apocalypse is real and has already happened. In the postmodern world, for humanity has witnessed its ability of destruction, pessimism towards technology, sociology, and politics has become a cultural theme. Pop culture genres such as steampunk, cyberpunk, and solarpunk depict fictional dystopian worlds after ours that rely on technology but collapse inward.
The Apocalypse — The Four Horsemen
Albrecht Dürer, 1498
Apocalyptic City
Ludwig Meidner, 1913
War
Jackson Pollock, 1947
In these instances, the end of the world seems to be the inevitable incident that will eventually strike and demolish the whole human civilization. According to the storytellers, a final end seems to be destined in the linear line of our history.
Human, Nature, and Technology
Step back from the stories and peek into reality, we find our civilization at a pivotal moment revolving around these topics– humans, nature, and technology. Unavoidably, the world we live in is experiencing a lot of conflicts and crises among the three domains. Some of the conflicts are so severe that they could potentially lead to catastrophic consequences. Modern storytellers frequently explore these apocalyptic possibilities, imagining doomsday scenarios where these tensions reach their breaking points. In Fallout (1997), for instance, humanity's reckless use of nuclear technology transforms the Earth into a wasteland, where survivors have to continue relying on old technology to live in the devastating aftermath. In The Terminator (1984), humanity’s existence is threatened by machines. The righteous hero has to save the heroine from the vile AI to save the world. Similarly, WALL·E (2008) envisions a future where humans abandon a polluted Earth, leaving behind robots to continue cleaning up their mess.
While conflict is essential to compelling plot development, there are recent examples in films that present a more hopeful vision for a harmonious relationship between humans, nature, and technology. In Flow (2018), a group of animals fleeing a great flood stumbles upon the ruins of a lost civilization. At first, they were divided by their differences. Ultimately, they learn to accept one another, find common ground and survive together. The Wild Robot(2024) tells the story of a stranded robot who, after saving a duckling, integrates into the wild environment and forms a deep bond with the island’s inhabitants. Ultimately, the robot breaks out of her program of serving humans and protects the island from the threat. In these stories, there is no hero or villain. It simply portrays characters with flaws shaped by their nature—an animal's instinct, a robot's rigidity, or humanity's greed. The resolution of these conflicts arises not from defeating a villain but from characters overcoming their limitations, understanding one another, and helping each other.
In the contemporary storytelling of the world’s ending, it is crucial to avoid such dualism, neither to define the result to be dystopian or utopian or the cause to be virtuous or evil.
Genesis of a New Perspective
The Information Age that we currently live in has broadened our perspectives. However, our brains have not been ready to function normally in such a progressively disoriented world. Even though with the technology that we have, unlimited resources and knowledge will be within our reach as long as we are connected to the internet, we tend to live in echo chambers, judging based on our emotions, and looking for a ‘truth’ that is usually biased and polarized so that we have a pivot point to navigate our way in this chaotic world. The question is, how will we imagine the end of the world in this current era?
The access to infinite information paves too many ways to imagine what the end of the world will be, a collective sense of an end is lost and we have to coordinate our future individually. It seems that the judgmental moment will never come, but it can also come in the next few seconds. In other words, we are all living on the brink of the end of the world. In a world where religion and authority no longer answer the questions of when and how our world will end or continue, metamodernism comes in as a potential answer.
“It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity. Indeed, by oscillating to and from or back and forth, the metamodern negotiates between the modern and the postmodern.”