Words by Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee
The apocalypse is here. But it’s not what most have in mind.
Remember how the world was ending in 2012? Eschatological gossip spread like wildfire on YouTube and public forums. Memes dripped with infectious pseudo-cataclysmic verses with retweeters, shitposters and doomscrollers fanning the flames of the Mayan calendar.
2024 has become a hyper-real manifestation of this rumour.
In game theory, multi-polar traps refer to players acting in their own self-interest, competing with each other for resources and power. This collectively — and unwantedly — accelerates towards a devastating outcome. Today, the world finds itself in one of these inextricable binds across multiple fronts. Irreversible destruction and brutality multiply across the world. System failures and moral panic exacerbate the sense of doom. It’s a time of continuous grief and mourning, with scant sites for refuge or release.
Contrary to popular belief, apocalypse doesn’t mean a complete, utter elimination of the world. In Latin, it translates to an unveiling, and these moments have come to assume different monikers in different disciplines. Philosopher Bayo Akomolafe calls these openings cracks, and forecaster Sean Monahan christened it a vibe shift. Cultural critic Legacy Russell proposes to tear it all down with the glitch, while para-thinker
insists we’re living in perpetual permaweirdness.This metamodern age is rife with pastiche and lore-crafting at scale. The liminal web is a prime example. This rhizomatic media superstructure sees para-academics, podcasters and collectives crafting new vocabularies to sense-make in increasingly nebulous times. What else might take form in the murky presence of indescribable horrors?
I propose Endarkenment, an aesthetic posturing that’s emerging from the abyss of ultimate system failures and chronic mass despair. I’m not interested in a doomsday, pure-nihilistic dystopian narrative. That’s too conveniently mediocre.
Endarkenment is about finding luminosity in the abyss. It takes a stab at the horrors of Western enlightenment and the aftershock of the European Renaissance. Amid mass dispossession and disillusionment, how might enchantment be salvaged?
In this time of blatant precarity, finding strategies to thrive in the ruins and to glow in the aftershock may be the bitter medicine humans so desperately need. That’s why the crack is so seductive compared to simplistic doom-and-gloom rhetorics. When essentialist narratives and reductive god-splaining have ubiquitously become a default, Endarkenment defies with moreness amid the impulse to simplify. By extension, the crack becomes the portal to the dazzling hellscapes of Endarkenment.
Let’s take an example. The higher chakras in the body are associated with foresight and divine channelling, while the lower chakras relate to the so-called primitive aspects: carnal lust, bodily pleasures, tribalism, and fight or flight responses. If we map social media trends on the chakra system, it could look like this ⤵
Being off-kilter and unhinged — take #indiesleaze and #ratgirlsummer — are seen as wretched and primitive in chakra discourse. Conversely, #cleangirl (minimal, snatched make-up) and #everythingshower (four-hour self-love showers) vibrate on the higher plane because of their put-togetherness.
Endarkenment is an embrace of the lower chakras. It’s an invitation to wander into fertile fecundity, to productively fall into cracks, to lucidly spiral into the unknown. It conspires against the fallacies of achieving progress through transcendence and knowledge acquisition progress. Endarkenment revels in this crackling glitch that refuses interpretations. In this era subject to ongoing abject terror, Endarkenment may be that hard, cackling and unhinged love we need.
Endarkenment can be mapped across four vectors ⤵
Endarkenment vectors can be illustrated through emerging aesthetics and behaviours:
Possibility x Introspection: NovusHex
Possibility x Reactivity: Netmesh
Introspection x Futility: Candyblade360
Reactivity x Futility: Hyper-ogre
Rather than hard boundaries, the vectors are permeable, and the visual expressions are fluid and hybrid.
Guild #1: NovusHex
NovusHexers pine for wonder that is ancient and futuristic. They reckon with histories that have excluded minority communities from accessing nature, and wean away from merely touching grass as a viable solution for human/nature relationality. Challenging the binary between nature and technology, NovusHexers pursue technobiophilia — connecting to nature through technology — and eco-futurist movements like solarpunk, the rise of which is even catching the hearts of tech leaders. Art platforms like Random_Kingdom and Solo Show propel artists making work that reference connection with etheric and otherworldly forces. Instagram curatorial accounts like @data_replication and @bruisedbonez444 disperse and propel visions of re-enchantment through technological symbiosis. Designers such as Azura Lovisa, Snake Divine and @middaia weave totems and spells into their silhouettes, fabrics and accessories. In the world of high fashion, Alexander McQueen’s Plato’s Atlantis and Iris van Herpen’s Crystallisation dress construct symbiotic futures in a post-Anthropocene landscape.
Guild #2: Netmesh
Disenchanted with the blue-sky thinking of Silicon Valley, Netmeshers aim to touch a new sort of sublime and unwarranted experimentation through technology. From Spotify’s resident psychic to ask_jesus on Twitch, Netmeshers yearn for a merging of the spiritual and cybernetics, leading to the rise of technomysticism and technopaganism. This aesthetic guild is bent on forming new networks of solidarity and cooperation. It’s in this mesh that they rework models of care. Music collectives such as katharsis, Endless Return, odyxxey and Inner Most use sound as a language for crafting new forms of sacredness. Meanwhile, post-fashion viral brands like Praying rewire Catholic guilt and offer a heavenly appeal doused with irony.
Guild #3: Candyblade360
If Netmeshers confront institutional rejection through community building, then Candyblade360ers reflect back mutual tragedy to each other in connected disassociation. Yami Kawaii and Menhera emerged as a form of coping with reductionist mental health portrayals. Telegram sticker packs angel of bloodspilling, doomsday angels and white paradise are revivalist emo Tumblr girl. While #traumacore memes are exchanged between channel members, Lana del Rey lyrics become litanies for survival among girlbloggers. Pink cigarettes, Sailor Moon syringes, Lotte Milkis cans and bejewelled penknives are used to signal their crestfallen state, beyond repair. Leaning into the innate violences within Lolita and anime culture, Candyblade360 enlists cuteness as a trojan horse for subverting archaic agendas and dusty dogmas. This shimmers in the overdose of bows and ruffles in SHUSHU/TONG and Nφdress, accelerating towards hyperfemininity.
Guild #4: Hyper-ogre
Fatigued from the age of Millennial Pink, there’s a hard pivot towards an era of trashy unfurling. Hyper-ogres not only refuse the aspirational and unattainable #thatgirl, but blitz the sleekness that is enshrined in the cult of Helvetica and quiet luxury. Hyper-ogreism longs for a post-COS world that embraces, performs and rewards cringe, messiness, and downright disgust. Unhinged consumption, unapologetic bad taste and self-deprecating humour is splayed all over TikTok: #bedrotting, #goblinmode, #weirdgirl, #cluttercore, #frazzledenglishwoman. Even former minimalist queenMarie Kondo says she’s given up on tidying. Low-brow rebellions have given rise to labels like HuDieGongZhu, celebrating rural Chinese tastelessness. Amplifying grotesqueness, @raw.nailsss pushes for everyday body horror with zombie, decaying, fungal nail art, while archivists @uglydesign and @designhardcore highlight the best design repulsions.
Endarkenment is an outright contradiction. It is a playground of simultaneous oppositions: decay and radiance; symbiosis and fragmentation; horror and heaven. Endarkenment equips us with a vocabulary — Sublime Horror, Sacred Synthesis, Willful Decoupling, Crude Heaven — to articulate living amid paradoxical states in this ending of times.
To be plainly heartbroken by ongoing crises is easier than to be enamoured with wreckage.
Notes from the author:
This isn’t a piece of cultural criticism, but of nearby sensing of emerging digital cultures that emanate the principles of Endarkenment.
This is not an extension or an attempt to evolve the neo-reactionary lineage of Nick Land’s Dark Enlightenment. It’s a separate paradigm of unworlding.
The Endarkenment miasma is a slowly growing pantheon and is non-exhaustive. It runs across sectors and disciplines.
Elizabeth Gabrielle Lee is an interdisciplinary practitioner based between London and Singapore. Her practice slips between the fields of visual art, cultural research and education. She is interested in encountering themes of soft histories, sensuous and sacred ecologies, salvage fiction and mechanics of control in her work. She lectures in Creative Direction for Fashion at London College of Fashion. Follow her on IG.
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