Collapse test

The idea of collapse is one of the signs of our times, as the corny would say, and the dread of a new end of the world has led to the conversion of the apocalyptic into a much cooler sect; the collapsologists. I would say that the fear of a planetary implosion responds more to a sadomasochistic impulse of joyful pessimism: after all, humanity has lived through much darker episodes than our frothy eco-anxiety and chronic depression, such as truly global wars or the decline of empires that seemed eternal. Lacking a solid religious discourse and addicted to a sickly narcissism, we Westerners are pleased to fantasize about an end that has some relation to our own foolishness, because if everything must end, at least let us be protagonists of the end. However, despite the pessimists' nagging, the world continues to spin with relative comfort.

All this armchair metaphysics comes to mind because of the very recent temporary fall of Microsoft, a computer short circuit that, in the eyes of world journalism, practically caused an endless number of plagues, especially visible in the field of tourism, businesses, and the media itself. I suppose that by now, when the reader reads this new Punyalada, the Apocalypse will have almost completely ended and of this new end of the world we will only remember the images of airports with crowds of tourists sleeping in terminals and the video of some television station that stopped broadcasting for a few hours. As computer experts have warned us, and as happens with our own mobile phones, the virtual world needs to be updated, and often this process ends in a breakdown. The world's great computer has heated up again, now it is reviving, and tourists will see it from their sofa.

 In fact, the big news from this latest collapse drill... is that nothing happened. As we already saw during the outbreak of Covid-19 and the subsequent home confinement, our system (whatever it may be) is capable of going dormant for a certain period while pretending to do a reset, even allowing us to experience a great sense of peace. Secretly, many inhabitants of the first world miss those months when governmental authority locked us in our homes and we could dedicate ourselves to finally finishing War and Peace, to learning to make some cupcakes that turn out wonderfully, and also to realizing that our cities, without so many people and especially freed from cars, can become frankly hospitable places. Well, yesterday, and affected people forgive me, almost the same thing happened. A lot of noise, a lot of frenzy from collapse-ologists on TV and, in the end, only silence.

Many fellow citizens were honestly moved to see again how the world can function perfectly with handwritten boarding passes

Today the system works again through an insulting light that lasts 24/7, we can do whatever we please (as long as it involves handling money, of course), and believe ourselves to be small divinities with no more problems than to keep waiting for the definitive collapse. Nothing has changed, of course, and the gentlemen from Microsoft ---whatever happens--- will continue to earn the same exact tons of money as the day before yesterday. The world is still alive, and the news will be nothing like recognizing that nothing has happened.