Apocalyptic Rhetoric

Shifting gears here, I'm going to start talking about a different rhetorical strategy that is commonly used in media representations of science, and then I'm going to relate it to tech pessimism.

Apocalyptic rhetoric is defined in multiple ways depending on the perspective you're coming from, but for the purposes of this analysis, I'm going to use Killingsworth and Palmer's definition: rhetoric that "'uses images of future destruction—‘apocalyptic narratives’—to predict the fall of the current technocapitalist order,' an order represented especially by 'big business, big government, and big science'" (qtd. by Johnson 34). It, like rhetoric of effortlessness, seems pretty self-explanatory: apocalyptic rhetoric is rhetoric that hints that the apocalypse is nigh.

The word "apocalypse" has become pretty commonplace in pop culture (e.g. "zombie apocalypse," "robot apocalypse," Apocalypse Now, etc.), and many ideas of those apocalypses usually result in collapse of business, government, and science. Apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic media representations usually involve people bartering or scavenging for goods instead of going into stores and paying for goods and services; the government as we understand it has either collapsed completely or has become like Big Brother, no longer resembling democracy so much as dictatorship; and science has often failed society, either being the reason the apocalypse has happened in the first place (e.g. zombie and robot apocalypse movies) or failing to save society the way people expected it to.

Apocalyptic rhetoric is often used in biblical contexts, since the Bible is one of the most studied texts that discusses an apocalypse, but it's also used a lot in environmental rhetoric and, increasingly, rhetoric of science. Casadevall, Howard, and Imperiale point out how apocalyptic rhetoric at the Asilomar conference led to a moratorium (a temporary ban on a particular activity/practice) on certain experiments concerning recombinant DNA (1). This makes sense, since Johnson writes that apocalyptic rhetoric is most often used to shock people and rally support for political issues more than it's used for "wholescale [attacks] on the ideology of progress" (34). Apocalyptic rhetoric isn't meant to be a tool of Karl Marx to bring down the system in one fell, apocalyptic swoop; rather, it is a tool for micro-change that comes in short bursts and stages.

This strategy is also based in perceptions of risk. What we think is likely to happen in the future (i.e. the risk we perceive) can be easily swayed by something such as apocalyptic rhetoric. Since apocalyptic rhetoric frames situations as being extremely risky (like, "end of the world" risky), it is extremely effective as it plays off deep human fears (Casadevall et al. 2). What apocalyptical rhetoric lacks in likelihood (of risk), it makes up for in magnitude. We might never see a zombie, robot, germ, religious, etc. apocalypse, but according to almost every representation of any of those things, when it DOES come, we're all pretty much screwed.

References (listed by order of reference)
Johnson, Laura. "(Environmental) Rhetorics Of Tempered Apocalypticism In 'An Inconvenient Truth.'" Rhetoric Review 28.1 (2009): 29-46. Academic Search Premier. Web.

Casadevall, Arturo, Don Howard, and Michael J. Imperiale. "The Apocalypse as a Rhetorical Device in the Influenza Virus Gain-of- Function Debate." mBio 5.5 (2014): 1-2. Web.