The Mystery of Pre-COVID BotW#

One of the reasons Genshin Impact blew up was almost certainly this: with the whole world in lockdown because of COVID, a free-to-play game dropped in which you could adventure across a beautiful, vast world.

But BotW came out in 2017, more than three years before the pandemic. In this respect, at least, you can’t say it took off for the same reason Genshin did.

The Post-Apocalypse Boom#

2017 was also the year the first season of Kemono Friends aired, and the year the Girls’ Last Tour anime aired.

Calling BotW a post-apocalyptic story might be a bit of a stretch, but there’s something lonely hanging over the whole world, and the way you get stronger by running errands for the people you meet along the way feels strangely like Kemono Friends to me.

(And in the end, you reach the center of the map, the “navel of the world”! Same as Kemono Friends!)

Which raises the question: why did post-apocalyptic stories boom in 2017? I haven’t played it myself, but I hear NieR is also a 2017 post-apocalyptic work. I’m almost forced to conclude that “the post-apocalypse was the zeitgeist of 2017.”

But why??

The Great East Japan Earthquake?#

One hypothesis: after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, a kind of realization (or soul-searching) that “civilization can collapse easily under the force of nature” finally crystallized into works six years later, in 2017.

This seems like a pretty reasonable hypothesis. In fact, Shin Godzilla, a much more blatant depiction of the earthquake, came out in July 2016, and even if it’s a year off, it feels like it belongs in the same lineage.

Still, it doesn’t quite sit right with me. Let’s line these works up by how far they’ve given up.

• Shin Godzilla
  • It’s not over till it’s over. Somehow stop the disaster that’s happening right now.
• BotW
  • The calamity struck and everything fell apart, but after 100 years, let’s try again.
• Kemono Friends
  • Humans seem to be gone, but let’s all live happily in the new world.
• Girls’ Last Tour
  • The world is ending. Let’s quietly see it off.

What I find interesting is that Shin Godzilla is a noisy story about stopping a disaster that is about to happen or is happening right now, whereas the 2017 post-apocalyptic works (differences in attitude aside) depict a quiet world after the disaster has already happened.

Did the Post-Apocalyptic Works Predict COVID?#

Here comes the woo-woo part. I can’t shake the feeling that the 2017 post-apocalyptic works predicted the COVID pandemic that would hit two years later.

There’s an idea from my middle school science teacher that I’ve never forgotten: “if you gathered everything people say on the internet, you might be able to predict future events.” Humans have some built-in predictive power, so if you collect an enormous number of people’s utterances, you should be able to predict, say, an earthquake by the word “earthquake” suddenly showing up more often right before it hits.

At first glance it’s completely spiritual nonsense, but if you trust the sharpness of human intuition, it starts to seem not entirely impossible.

Take Jung’s synchronicity, for example. It’s basically about unconscious intuition at the individual level. If you think of it as the unconscious picking up some omen that current science can’t detect and bringing it up into consciousness, then synchronicity happens, and that just barely avoids contradicting current science.

By the same logic, it’s a totally unhinged idea, but I find it pretty convincing: many creators, working off intuition from the “collective unconscious,” caught in advance the “quiet world with nobody left” of a pandemic a few years away, and ended up putting it out in 2017.

Predicting “a pandemic will happen in a few years!” would have been impossible, but imagining “a large-scale pandemic could break out at any time,” “in a world this densely connected, infection would spread fast,” and “if it happened, logistics and the movement of people would have to stop” was surely well within reach even back then.

Taking measures before it became reality wasn’t realistic, but maybe they were picking up, with their unconscious radar, the things they’d vaguely noticed: the distortions and fragility of the system, the “this would be really bad, right?” feeling.

Looking Back at History#

It turns out this idea isn’t all that unusual in the worlds of thought and art.

As the saying goes, “art is an early warning system”: great artists and creators sense, with their unconscious radar, the invisible friction lurking deep in society and the future it will arrive at if it keeps going this way, and they end up putting it out as their work.

(I asked Professor Gemini (the AI) for examples, and The Machine Stops came up. Reading it hit me incredibly hard, but that’s for another time. Though I suspect that this one sentence alone has already made things pretty ironic.)

And somehow I get the feeling that this early warning system has been getting weaker with each era. Or maybe it’s better to say that the radar’s performance hasn’t changed, but society’s changes have accelerated, so the lead time for foresight keeps getting shorter.

It takes a certain amount of time for foresight to discover a possible future, analyze its dangers, and have it come out as art. Meanwhile, society keeps accelerating. We may already be in a state where something becomes reality before the early warning system can detect the vulnerability.

The unconscious warning can’t keep up, so new ideas get implemented without being scrutinized, with no social guardrails and no psychological preparation. Where we end up is, at best, a spaghetti society tangled beyond repair, and at worst, catastrophic system collapse.

The End of the Early Warning System#

I think this early warning system will eventually be neither “early” nor “warning.” In other words, I suspect the foresight window will keep shrinking until it hits zero seconds. That is, the unconscious intuition will be lost completely.

I don’t really know what that means. In the sense of a world where whatever you imagine is instantly realized, maybe it’s a world with an AI that, when you ask, outputs the text or image you were hoping for.

But maybe it doesn’t have to stop at zero. Maybe this foresight window can go negative.

If you believe the theory that “humans have no consciousness; every action is carried out unconsciously, and what we call consciousness is just something that adds meaning after the fact,” and if this “unconscious” is the same one that builds the early warning system, then it means “the result appears before the unconscious execution.”

It’s turning into wordplay, but I feel like I sort of get what it means.

When I’m zoning out on YouTube Shorts, the result, “watch the next video,” isn’t just ahead of any conscious decision. Isn’t it ahead even of the “unconscious act of trying to watch the next video,” already decided (or at least steered) by the algorithm?

If so, then at the individual level, our unconscious intuition may already have gone into negative foresight territory. The algorithm predicts my future better than I do, and it’s already waiting on the screen.

You could call this situation the defeat of the unconscious, or the loss of the unconscious. It feels like something really terrifying.

So What Do We Do?#

Maybe we need to follow The Machine Stops. That is, actively seek out direct experience (is this what Kitaro Nishida called “pure experience”?).

As a little exercise to remind myself of my own physicality, I’ve kept up hanging from a bar for about a year now. I can’t believe it’s a coincidence that in The Machine Stops, hanging was the means of access to the outside world.