Preparing for Doomsday is no longer a fringe obsession. The survival movement, which for a long time was stereotyped as comprised of older right-wing white men with firearms, is evolving. However, in mainstream society, interest in preparing generally invites ridicule over bunkers and tinfoil hats. The preparers have spent years being the subject of our collective mockery.
The problem is that disasters always seem like remote possibilities before they occur and historical abstractions later. Even the coronavirus, as insurmountable as it may seem, will eventually pass; we will return to normality, and then to complacency, and maybe we will even ridicule the preparers again. For years, one of the most mocked subspecies of the technological ecosystem was that of Silicon Valley Prepper. It's gone, says John Ramey, who runs an online community of preparers in North America called The Prepared.
But in January, when I began to notice the preparers in a particularly sharp tone for some kind of pneumonia in China, I bought some Lysol. For years, I watched Silicon Valley preparers as an eccentric local tribe, at best, foolish fans, and at worst, elite separatists who fantasized about leaving the rest of us behind to die. I wanted to make the preparatory scene more welcoming to an urban, liberal cosmopolitan cohort worried about climate change and social instability, fearful that the Trump administration would exacerbate problems or ruin a crisis. But as a woman in her late thirties, she barely fits the widely held stereotype of a prepper—with an escape route, medical supplies, a few weeks of food, or even an isolated and well-stocked bunker with chemical insulation in the back of the afterlife.
Julie says she loves her life in the city with its restaurants and theaters, making it a cry far removed from the lonely survivors - perhaps living on the fringes of society and suspecting any government interference in their lives - who populate the public imagination when it comes to preparers. He sells survival kits (known to preparers as insect bags) and was endorsed by the Kardashians on Instagram. The preparers lived in times of waves in a beautiful region, but it seemed that the first thing they did with money was steel for the apocalypse. But in recent years many people with liberal and left-wing politics have joined their ideological nemesis to prepare for that moment when, in preparatory language, the SHTF (things hit the fanatics).
Doomsday preparation has long been associated with the right wing (the spirit is based on survival, a term that connotes far-right militias, and many preparers prefer not to use it). And so, as wealthy urban preparers overcome the coronavirus crisis, perhaps with their wealth intact, or even improved, they are increasingly aware of a new danger. I have noticed that an instinct among those who first mocked Silicon Valley preparers as alarmists is now to call them conceited.
