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At 9.45pm on 13 April 2029, you might want to take a look out of the window. That rock in the sky heading your way fast is actually an asteroid called 99942 Apophis, named after the ancient Egyptian god of chaos. Roughly the size of Wembley Stadium, when Apophis hits it’ll do to our species what another asteroid did to the dinosaurs 66m years ago.
Did I say “when”? I obviously meant “if”. After all, as Tom Phillips puts it, space is big, and little Earth easily missable – despite the nominative determinism of what he nicknames Smashy McDeathrock. Plus, in 2022 Nasa deliberately crashed the Dart spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos, knocking if off course. If Smashy hits London, hypothesises Phillips, it’ll engulf everywhere from Camden to Clapham in a fireball and leave a crater three miles wide that “would have previously contained approximately 150 branches of Pret”. Truly, any survivors will envy the dead.
The serious purpose of Phillips’s jolly doomscroll through the apocalyptic sex cults, pandemics, nuclear armageddons, rapture-fetishising fruitloops, numerologically obsessed nincompoops, swivel-eyed preppers waiting out zombie apocalypses in their Utah silos, not to mention the Bible’s (spoiler alert!) troubling last act, is to work out quite why, after so many failed prophesies, doom-mongery still thrives.
Have we learned nothing from the fate of Dutch baker Jan Matthys, who in 1533 predicted Jesus’s second coming and that the last day was imminent? Clearly not. For a while, Matthys headed what proper historians don’t call a funtime Anabaptist proto-communist sex cult in otherwise sleepy Münster. The local prince-bishop’s soldiers put an end to that nonsense, hacking Matthys to pieces and nailing his genitals to the city gates, as a warning that one should, in Phillips’s words, “not even slightly consider fucking with the prince-bishop of Münster”.
Though Matthys’s world ended that day, humanity did not. Some 490-odd years later we’re still around – as is a secular mutation of conspiracist apocalyptic thinking, most tellingly among Trump-loyalist tech bros. PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, for instance, recently argued in the FT that Trump’s second term heralds apocalypse, but in a good way. Apokálypsis, the Greek for unveiling, Thiel wrote, will adjudicate “the sins of those who govern us today”. Thanks to Trump and the internet, politically inconvenient information allegedly redacted by what Thiel calls the “Distributed Idea Suppression Complex” (ie legacy media, Democrats and others in the woke blob) will become available, enabling us to learn that Covid was a bioweapon and who killed JFK.
Thiel didn’t consider a more inconvenient truth, namely that the internet doesn’t so much tell truth to power as dupe cognitively depleted QAnon rubes with paranoid guff.
That would explain what happened on Tuesday 2 November 2021. Demolition contractor turned online influencer Michael Protzman predicted that on that day, John F Kennedy Jr would appear in Dallas to announce that he had not died in a plane crash in 1999. Several hundred followers gathered on the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza where his father was assassinated nearly 60 years earlier. “Quite why they expected JFK Jr to reveal himself in Dallas when he’d died off the coast of Massachusetts is a little unclear,” Phillips writes, though he notes that some believed he would go “‘And here’s my dad, who’s also alive’, as a surprise finale.” Neither turned up.
Undaunted, like so many of the failed prophets with whose stories Phillips entertains us, Protzman led followers to a Rolling Stones gig where “he assured them that Keith Richards would remove his face revealing that he had actually been JFK Jr for an unspecified time”.
Fans of Phillips’s earlier books Humans: A Brief History of How we F*cked It All Up and Truth: A Brief History of Total Bullsh*t will be pleased that the ex-BuzzFeed editor is on form, not letting the grimness of his subject spoil his gagsmithery. There’s a lengthy set up, for instance, for a joke about the 15th-century BC Battle of Megiddo, the city lent its name to Armageddon. The passage seems to make the editorial cut chiefly so Phillips can tell us that the Pharaoh Thutmose III tried his – wait for it – thutmost in that battle.
Only one criticism – the title. Phillips has more asterisks than asteroids. Say what you want about the Is It Just Me Or is Everything Shit franchise, at least it had the courage of its cussing.
His book is topically valuable corrective for those who think – what with Gaza, Ukraine, floods, firestorms and fools with their fingers on world-ending buttons – we are indeed in the end times and should descend into our silos or colonise Mars. We are not the first to suppose the end is nigh, counsels Phillips. Nor will we be the last.
For its most fervent believers, Phillips concludes, apocalypse is “not simply a terrifying event to be feared, but an ultimate triumph to be longed for and worked towards. At the end of days, Good would finally triumph over Evil, all the woes of the material world would be swept away, and the true believers would be rewarded with the paradise of a new world.” How much harder to refuse such narrative closure, to live – and die – in a world that can’t be redeemed nor utterly expunged of human wickedness.
