 moyix [CC BY-SA 2.0] via Flickr
Today: Anna Merlan, author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power; and David Moore, co-founder of Sludge.
Issue No. 140It Follows
Anna Merlan A Chill In the Air
David Moore
For a time, the internet lived quietly in a chunky gray desktop computer in my sibling’s room. The computer had, until that point, mostly been for games: it spat out glitchy first-person shooters, misshapen hands grasped around a blackish blur of something that was probably supposed to be a tommy gun. Eventually, it was mostly for the beautiful adventure game Myst, which came home in a large and ceremonial blue box full of CD-ROMs. I never played these games, instead just peering over a shoulder and gasping at the image of a boat cutting through pixelated blue water or blood spurting from the chest of a mushy and barely coded bad guy. I watched the computer; it did not watch me. We got the internet, and at first it was hard to tell what exactly it did, aside from causing the computer to let out a tortured series of screeches and burps and beeps as the modem connected. But then AOL Instant Messenger changed everything. AIM launched in 1997, when I was 11, and I began using it maybe one or two years later, as a fresh middle schooler. This was my first-ever experience curating what was not yet called my “personal brand” (or “curating,” come to that). I made a profile with an embarrassing screenname and a string of quotes and snippets from songs (also lost to the sands of time; The Cure, probably?) and dove headlong into a world of one-on-one instant messages and chaotic chatrooms. Romances and flirtations bloomed and withered; away messages were carefully crafted to appeal to a crush, or to breezily convey that their absence hadn’t been felt at all, that not hearing the chime of a new message for hours or days hadn’t stung, just a little. The games had changed, from the kind that came on CD-ROMs to a more elemental kind of battle, a competition of flirtation and passion and competitive wit and the carefully pruned, ostentatious display of tastes. Things got weirder. A boy was talking to two girls simultaneously, angling for some kind of amorphous boyfriend status that might involve going to the movies or just talking more on AIM. He juggled conversations, was discovered to have been paying them the same compliments. As this was the dark ages, the girls got mad at each other. The computer was starting to leach something: interpersonal tension, a slug-trail of strain that led into our rooms and our phone conversations. I had my own landline on a see-through phone, its thick green circuit board agleam, that lit up blue when it rang. I began to prefer the phone when AIM became too stressful. It wasn’t just the teen drama that was off-putting—a threatening, sinister vibe was emerging, too. Much older men I’d never met were messaging me, finding me through those chatrooms; they gave off some kind of sweaty desperation I could smell through the screen. I ignored their messages until they drifted off in search of fresh game. The phone, on the other hand, was comforting, familiar, the voice of just one friend, with conversations that lasted hours, although I can’t remember a single thing we said. It was a form of togetherness, and sometimes a companionable silence or boredom, watching a rerun of Charmed with the phone cradled into my neck, a friend a few miles away doing the same thing. After they went to college, my sibling would call and sometimes just play the guitar for a while with the phone nearby before we both hung up. On my way to college, I signed up for Facebook. For a time, the internet receded back into contained, discrete dimensions like it was supposed to be–a strange pool that I could dive into only from my bedroom, a beautiful treehouse space in an underfurnished on-campus apartment. To communicate with my friends, I wrote on their Facebook walls—little boats dropped into the water, heading downstream. Mostly, though, I would wait for my campus landline to ring; I had my sibling’s old cellphone but didn’t enjoy using it, with its clunky keys that took a million years to spell out a simple text, and a laptop too heavy to take anywhere. I barely knew about any websites, so I mostly read two, over and over. Nerve.com, which was about sex and dating—often in New York—and was as exotic as reading about life on the moon. The Smoking Gun posted musicians’ tour riders, which I loved, and soon I started reading other stuff there: arrest records and police reports and lawsuits. All of these were dispatches from worlds I hadn’t visited yet, the settings for an adulthood that was still more or less theoretical. I wondered how someone got hold of things like a police report or a tour rider or a mugshot, little realizing that this new kind of curiosity was already taking root and establishing the preoccupations of my real adult life. Back then the whole thing seemed like witchcraft. The laptop was an enormous dark blue Dell. When I shut it—and I’d always shut it after a few minutes, nothing there to keep me any longer—it clicked with a solid finality. I followed the first faint tones of the internet almost unwittingly, as the background music it formed in my life started to get louder and louder. But it didn’t follow me, it couldn’t see me, hundreds of strangers in a subreddit or a comment thread couldn’t get together to agree on my shortcomings. That earlier time has an Edenic cast in my mind: the last time I could gaze into the abyss, before it got strong and smart enough to gaze into me.
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A Chill In the Airby David Moore Hunters in the Snow, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565); image public domain via Wikimedia Commons The scene seems, at first, idyllic as can be. It presents a vantage, in tranquil whites and blue-grays, of villagers ice skating and bustling in the distance, in a hushed winter light. But a closer look at the hunting party returning to the village in the foreground reveals their dejection. They have around a dozen dogs with them, yet are bringing home only one fox and a small game bag. The dogs seem doleful, too; one looks back at the viewer in quintessential dog pity. Crows perch overhead and a lone magpie circles in the sky. A foreboding sinks in, that the frozen village may not have enough to eat. Hunters in the Snow was painted in 1565 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder and is considered to be the first winter landscape painting—a smash hit that kicked off a genre of snow scenes in the Dutch Renaissance. The work is especially moving in its sensitivity to how human lifetimes are overlaid in times of catastrophe. People still play ice hockey, bandy over curling, pull one another by the hand on the frozen lake, start a cooking fire outside a run-down tavern, as the effects of natural forces play out implacably all around them. The painting inspires a consuming sense of precariousness: how bad are things going to get for the skaters of the village? The winter of 1564 was one of the coldest this part of the world had experienced in the Little Ice Age, a period of climate change that began around 1300 and lasted for centuries, some argue up to 1850. For the people of northern Europe, that winter was notably frigid, “harsh beyond measure” in the telling of one theologian. Severe storms and freezing winters killed a lot of people in those decades, with millions dying from famine when extreme weather ruined harvest after harvest. Bruegel’s wintry landscape is haunted by civilizational backsliding. The hallucinatory paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, Bruegel’s predecessor and anxious influencer, who was active in the decades around 1500, likewise documented the threat to daily survival brought by climate change. The damp growing environments of the Little Ice Age favored the proliferation of a fungal rot that infected rye grain, causing the terrible illness of ergot poisoning, also known as St. Anthony’s Fire. The disease unleashes symptoms including delirium and a sensation of engulfing flames, growing increasingly hellish from there. Art historians see, in the visages of Bosch’s goony goblins and nightmarish visions, reminders of the widespread threat of ergotism.
Climate change has the world on the threshold of a new era of unpredictability. Europe may be in for a Bruegelian future, facing the consequences of humans’ heavily degraded climate and rising heat driven by greenhouse gas emissions. In October 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, which detailed several climate “tipping points” that could tumble the planet into unknown territory. One of these is thermohaline circulation: a potential slowdown or failure of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), whereby warm ocean water from Southern Africa travels to the North Atlantic and back. The cycle brings heat from the tropics to Europe, keeping the weather milder. Current models predict that ice sheets melting into the North Atlantic will collapse the AMOC, unleashing global climate disruption—and research published earlier this year by René van Westen of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, now undergoing peer review, found the collapse could happen sooner than expected, more likely than not by 2050. Previous research had reckoned the AMOC collapse could happen as early as 2025 and no later than 2095. The cascading effects of a broken Atlantic Ocean could cause the Southern Hemisphere to grow even hotter. The Amazon could entirely flip its rainy and dry seasons, and temperatures in Western Europe could paradoxically plunge to a degree where agriculture is kaput. The AMOC collapse is just one of five climate tipping points already identified as on the verge of being crossed, per a report released in December by more than 200 researchers from over two dozen countries. Also in the cards: the thawing of Northern permafrost, which contains twice as much carbon as exists in the atmosphere and is rapidly warming, spewing even more carbon dioxide and methane.
Hunters in the Snow was one of six Bruegel panels on the seasons commissioned by Antwerp merchant banker and collector Niclaes Jonghelinck for his country house, Ter Beke. (The Harvesters, the summertime one, can be taken in at The Met in New York City.) Wealthy guests at Jonghelinck’s villa might have smiled at the bent-over villagers hauling sticks. Maybe the real-life villagers of 1565 wished they had set aside more dry firewood and drier rye the year before. Jonghelinck died in 1570, his estate so encumbered with debts that his younger brother and heir, the sculptor Jacques Jonghelinck, was forced to break up and sell the storied collection immediately. Nor did the chateau, Ter Beke, escape a reckoning; it was destroyed in 1585 during the siege of Antwerp, in an assault led by Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma. In our own times, 8.1 million people worldwide died in 2021 alone from air pollution, a report in partnership with UNICEF found, many from breathing particulates and pollution from burning fossil fuels. Many nations already have renewable energy sources available to replace oil, gas, and coal, with immense economic savings to be had from rapid decarbonization—but they are being blocked by lawmakers, or coming online too slowly to halve emissions by 2030. For people at the end of this century, the hours we spend daily on quick-burn social media while hurtling toward climate tipping points might seem like a guilty distraction, emptying the bottom third of the wine bottle into the glass. Below the foreboding Bruegelian snows, the older Boschian demons are waiting in the permafrost, ready to emerge.
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