The golden age of "existential" dread

We say it with abandon now, in every context, about the continued existence of big things and the continued existence of small ones. Artificial intelligence, says Elon Musk, may pose an existential threat to humanity — but also, say some medical professionals, to the significantly more limited field of human radiologists, who fear being replaced by software. Donald Trump’s control of the American nuclear arsenal, according to a psychiatrist named John Zinner, poses an existential threat to the world; to others, Facebook’s recent string of bad press presents an existential threat to a large company. (Tech businesses are rife with existential threats: Uber presents an existential threat to taxi services, but it also faces existential threats from potential regulation.) Brain injuries are an existential threat to the sport of football. Tax cuts are an existential issue for the Republican Party. Anything that has the potential to end can be matched with some factor that promises to hasten that end — and what is there in the universe that cannot, in theory, cease to exist?…

Not 20 years ago, we seemed less apt to think this way. Totalizing, annihilating threats were for cranks, alarmists, extremists and speculating academics. Follow the path of existential danger, though, and you can track a slow shift in the tenor of our conversations. A few decades ago, we were still swaddled in a consensus that made us feel as if things were unlikely to change or end, even if we dearly wanted them to; the order of the world was too firm for that. Now we are more practiced than ever in spotting potential ends. We have made sport of it. We find wrenching, apocalyptic change lurking inside everything — enough to invoke just the kind of despair European intellectuals used to write plays about.