As we go cartwheeling over the edge and into a place of exhilarating uncertainty, as our paths forward corrode in the heat of the moment, and the bottom falls out and we are gone, would it not be wise then to come up with a plan? Somewhere to stash the jewels? A rendezvous point after we’ve escaped into the woods?
In this our end times, will we indeed each go diving off on our own into the hellscape? Is that the best avenue of egress as we slide over the horizon to impale ourselves upon the rocks below? Might there be some other way to enter the apocalypse?
The analog internet is a decentralized network of information holders and distributors who work as diplomats and ambassadors to surrounding communities and function as the librarians of the future, function as librarians in the rubble of the end times, dishing out the latest wasteland gossip, zines, and cooking tips for rat and rabbit, as well as a farmer’s almanac of DIY tips—a people whose sole responsibility is to hold onto the past as the present gets eaten up in our terror, to shine a light into the rising dark, and create a path once the path forward has been eaten in the madness of it all.
The analog internet is like a webwork of human connections, made up of people sharing information and ideas to local counterparts who then pass these ideas on to their own contacts.
But why?
The purpose is to maintain a kind of end times bureaucracy of culture and its effects, a school of learning that follows no known or existing school of thought but that categorizes any and all cultural content, its mission to maintain the thread of learning through what informational blackouts are to come, and furthermore to be a thread that stitches communities together in a world without the networks and other communications technologies we have available, to maintain both the informational infrastructure and cultural artifacts when the society (and therefore its institutions as well) have vanished due to the climate crisis and its effects. The purpose of the analog internet is to keep something of what we as a species have created alive, including even its most fragile artifacts, its films and recorded music, alive in some form, through this decentralized network of individuals, mainframes, and libraries.
Of course, regardless of societal collapse, ideas will naturally survive and evolve, and literature has also a potential to survive if there are those who can store and memorize and transcribe books, but what the analog internet would be is like a medieval facsimile of the internet, or—as the internet would be imagined by a post-technological society—with hubs of information and lines of communication running across an otherwise agrarian landscape to connect the dots of an otherwise disconnected populace lost in the woods of their suddenly very old school nights and what potential cannibals are lurking there.
But how?
We hope to utilize the internet as it exists while we still can, create products geared toward the wastelands of tomorrow while we set up websites to recruit members to our ranks among the catastrophes of today, create virtual storehouses of the intellectual riches of our species that could then be downloaded and maintained in various centers as a kind of abridged collection of civilization as it stands at the moment, its philosophical tomes, literature, poetry—any and all free-to-the-public cultural products—as well as what literature as is useful to post-apocalyptic life, the various guidebooks and encyclopedia, and what new literatures and other cultural products of the end times we percolate in our backrooms.
The analog internet would function as a kind of overzealous scrapbook culture, collecting bits and booklets of the pre-times, and to make sense of it, creating a kind of Faulknerian Ergodic literature what that presents the universe with the pieces of puzzles for future generations to solve while traipsing down the muddy cowpaths of the post-apocalypse.
First step is to recruit “nodes”: people who would act as the hub from which cultural artifacts and other products would be distributed. Each node would maintain a catalog of artifacts both on a mainframe and in physical copies.
Each node would then be responsible for developing relationships with contacts living within a traversable distance. Both the node and their immediate contacts should treat this project as a life vocation. The effort to both maintain and spread the artifacts of the pre-apocalypse requires an immense amount of effort and should not be taken up lightly.
And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, is the exegesis—how the threads of culture have led us to this point, and the various manner in which culture could evolve. I imagine the aesthetic of what original works will be written for and by associates of the analog internet to be something Modernist in style but with the spiritual truth of a Dostoevsky or a Tolstoy and containing content that addresses the apocalypse and the meaning of it. Although, the exegesis would also involve “librarians” of the analog internet catloguing the intricate webwork of ideology and human culpability for what has happened.
The ideal of the analog internet is that every person is the center, and every person works to keep the works and the ideas underlying them alive in each their own personal cache of beautiful artifacts, each their own way station for information. Each contact should therefore strive to make as many contacts of their own as they can and to collect as much beauty as possible. Every person of which the larger analog internet consists, each person is working as insurance that something of our times survives, and as the more the analog internet spread outs, the more of our culture can we work to maintain.
But where?
The analog internet is not in any one place. It can sprout up anywhere and grow from there. It exists independently, without any leadership. Each node is making their own curatorial decisions, is making connections that are known to them, is working in their own idiosyncratic way toward maintaining culture.
But who?
Again, the goal is simple. Do not try to store information in one place, but to spread it everywhere, and at the same time to connect everyone in the old-fashioned way of people. The internet as it exists is key to the propagation of this idea, but once the idea is spread, the idea is it’s own internet of people, of any and all people, a kind of makeshift approximation of what the internet once was.
The goal is for everyone to benefit from this idea, for ideas to spread perhaps not with the ease they do today, but with the greatest ease as is possible in the post-apocalypse.
But what?
Is there some particular message that should be carried? Is there some idea that is best left behind? Are we taking on the role of curators of what should be remembered?
As I said, very person acts as their own curator, and no one of us has the authority or should have the audacity to make general distinctions between worthy and unworthy works. Still, the hope is that each curator chooses their catalog based on a given work’s ability to speak to the post-apocalypse, and what the needs of their readership may be. Works that have a deeper psychological force could be more impactful than something by Michael Crichton for example. Music with a soulfulness rather than music with “four on the floor”.
The hope is that the whole works to cancel out any extreme perspectives, but of course we shall be skewed towards the more nuanced perspectives. We need to build society back up from scratch in a world torn apart by its own systems, where our tools came to rule over us, and our freedoms came to undo us. Democracy has failed, but so have all other modern ideologies, Communism, Fascism, and Socialism. None of them was able to rise up to the occasion and make the changes necessary to curtail emissions and control our run-away economies. As we prepare for the post-apocalypse, we should keep all this in mind.
Or, as André says in My Dinner with André, “And you see, they believe that there have to be centers, now, where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. And when I was talking to Gustav Björnstrand, he was saying that these centers are actually growing up everywhere, and that what they’re trying to do, which is also what Findhorn was trying to do, and in a way what I was trying to do—I mean these things that can’t be given a name—but in a way these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school or a new kind of monastery. And Björnstrand talked about the concept of—I think he calls it “reserves”—islands of safety where history can be remembered and the human being can continue to function, in order to maintain the species through a Dark Age. In other words, we’re talking about an underground, which did exist during the Dark Ages in a different way, among the mystical orders of the church. And the prupose of this underground is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture. How to keep things living. You see, I keep thinking that we need a new language, a language of the heart, a language, as in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed—some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry, that is the poetry of the dancing bee, that tells us where the honey is. And I think that in order to create that language we’re going to have to learn how you can go through the looking-glass into another kind of perception, in which you have that sense of being united to all things, and suddenly you understand everything.”
But when?
The end is here. The end is now. This begins now.
And so?
The what that is to come will ultimately decide the what that is remembered and saved, but we who stand on the edge of now and then, we who are watching as the ship tips over the event horizon and edges sickeningly downward, we are tasked with a choice, to shut our eyes and our ears and wait in a panic of uncomprehension, or to stand up in some form and revolt, whether it is through revolutionary action or through some other gesture.
And this manifesto presents another possible gesture for those of us who see only the death to come and ask ourselves how can we navigate the graveyard? What books should we take on our journey into the dark?