In a new Wired article Clive Thompson sketches out the gloom preceding the end of a world. Asheron's Call 2 is failing as a moneymaker, so the owners will pull the plug in a couple of weeks. Some lovely, melancholy passages, like this:
"Anybody out there?" I type, but I already know it's pointless. There's nobody anywhere near me. For almost an hour, I've been wandering around a desolate plain: Gray clouds scud slowly over rough quartz mountains, while a few birds wheel in the air near mushroom-shaped trees. I never see another living soul.
Nearly ten years ago I scheduled a week on apocalypse narratives in my Cyber and Gothic class. We looked at Byron's "Darkness", Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and various end-of-the-internet panics. Ten years... has it been that long?
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