Station Eleven
Art, Trauma, and the Future
Think for a moment: what art (film, play, painting, album, etc) has been so meaningful in your life that you personally would work to preserve it for future generations?
Class was unexpectedly canceled last week, so I'm reaching into the backlog for some content I've been saving up. After the fall semester, I subscribed to Max (formerly HBO Max) specifically to check out Station Eleven1 based on what I’d heard about it in piece after piece of effusive2 praise online. Well worth the cost of entry: not only was it an incredible series about the necessity and psychic cost of creating art in a broken world3, and the ability of art to connect creators, consumers, and downstream culture4, but it also touched on more (and more profound) futures issues than I had expected.
The basic outline of the setting I had in my brain was accurate: it’s a post-collapse narrative matching Dator’s description pretty closely; the main focus is on what people have built after the collapse of the current stage in civilization. There is, however, significantly more time throughout the series than I anticipated focusing on the inciting event itself, a nearly-universally fatal flu pandemic; be warned, if you have any unaddressed emotions about the early days of COVID, they may all come flooding back. Similarly, the setting itself is relatively bright and hopeful, though the specific events driving the plot forward are pretty grim.
Common to other post-collapse stories, a key part of the setting is that the death of the vast majority of the population allows humanity to survive without the constant intervention of modern technology; in addition, a sudden collapse leaves lots of extra supplies (clothing, canned food, etc) for the few that are left. I discussed this issue in greater depth with Andrew Navaro.
One of the reasons so many people die during pandemics is that the socially-generated “manufactured normalcy field”, to borrow a term from postnormal futures, is ruptured. What was polite in the old world (e.g. helping a stranger) can be fatal in the new one. This shows the value of the futures exercise of “reversing assumptions” to imagine possible futures - human contact becomes a risk, tuning out the news becomes a huge liability, what seemed like unreasonable preparation becomes the difference between life and death5, etc. In the long run, by contrast, the best form of resilience and self-reliance is relationships of trust and mutual care.
Showing the same location at multiple points in time is a powerful way to make the future visceral and immediate for people. This is similar to my idea for improving Extrapolations, and I’ve seen various projects to do this with climate change effects like rising sea levels.
There’s a challenging balancing loop connecting safety and vigilance: the more time society invests in avoiding a particular danger, the more safety is enjoyed. This safety, however, reduces the sense of urgency around the danger, and lowers future investment. In many ways, civilization is a bubble of safety for those inside (against exploitation, predators, etc) maintained by violence or at least a show of force at the boundaries; if an individual becomes unwilling to stomach the cost, there’s not a great alternative, especially when groups are too small for free riders. Part of the answer here is making sure you cultivate the appropriate set of myths and monsters to prime people to act differently on an instinctual level; building more useful myths is an important part of Causal Layered Analysis.
As much as combustion engines and AI, trust is a technology. I obliquely discuss this in my essay about Parable of the Sower; the ability to trust strangers to act in predictable and pro-social ways is the product of many overlapping institutions - a predictable criminal justice system, news media and social media giving a realistic view of the prevalence of crime, eBay seller ratings, etc. When those technologies change, the nature of trust - for strangers, but also for rumors etc - changes as well. So much of society’s current level of functioning is based on this trust, so the collapse of major parts of the foundation would have widespread consequences.
The work of Shakespeare plays an important part in the progression of the narrative, even more explicitly than it usually does in Western media. Making such a conscious effort to preserve the Bard’s work in a world with so many other pressing needs reframes the Futures Triangle: things that are classified among “the weight of the past” are usually considered a frustrating impediment to needed change, but remember that anchors exist to keep ships safe and secure as the winds shift. When we undertake to build a new future, we should be just as intentional about creating continuity and preserving what we need to keep as we are about creating transformation.
One of the challenges with futures work is to take a broad view of human possibility and realize that life in the future might be very different, without reaching Dr Manhattan levels of detachment. For example, the popularity of travel for the middle class is largely the result of the convergence of transportation technology and cheap energy, and most of the hobbies that people pursue are, in the end, an expensive waste of time. It’s easy to go from these thoughts to questioning the point of making art, or even the whole human enterprise of economy and reproduction. I talked about this danger of sliding into nihilism in my discussion of Alone on Silver Wings, and identified the importance of having a firm conviction of the significance of the human experience - Andrew Navaro spoke with me about this last month.
The show portrays powerfully how serious trauma holds us back from thinking about new futures and keeps people stuck in past harm or present survival. This matches the research and is an interesting area of study - focused healing can help increase the ability of people to extend their time horizon, as they shake the burdens of the past; in a way, the dead stay with us, but we stop being afraid of them.
Again, this show was wonderful, and hopefully I didn’t ruin it for you by overthinking it.
One that I’d referred to in the past despite never having seen it.
Also, no surprise to those who know me, praising something and then balancing with “but it’s very pretentious” raises the likelihood that I’ll enjoy it.
The line the series repeats is “survival is insufficient”.
It also features David Cross as actor who has clearly come a long way from his big audition.
This theme was also touched on in The Light Pirate, though I didn’t focus on it in my essay.