I hate conferences. They’re loud, uncomfortable, make you walk on heels for way too long, and usually involve talking to exhausted academics who would probably make for excellent company any other time of year but mostly just want to get some sleep and not think too hard about whether they’ll have a job next year.
Unfortunately, this particular conference is looking even more questionable than usual. Maybe I should have been scared off by the title: “Thinking About the Future: Considerations of the Ultramodern”. Still, one rarely hears what one can only assume to be the broken script for a stand up comedy special about filling in at an academic conference because the scheduled speaker has been unable to attend due to an unexpected natural disaster, performed by someone filling in at an academic conference because the scheduled speaker has been unable to attend due to an unexpected natural disaster. Twice. We have, I suppose, only the Californian megafires to thank for our missing colleagues from Berkeley. At one p.m. we are dismissed for lunch only to find that the catering service was unable to supply the food because of a power cut in the area where they were storing their supplies. The same curse had evidently struck the Starbucks nearby, even before fifty hungry postgrads descended upon it like particularly disappointed vultures in the baking September heat. All in all, it’s not shaping up to be the best conference experience. I think about this as I much on my emergency out-of-state energy bar and bottled water on a security guard’s chair with no security guard in sight, drawing quite a few envious looks from passers-by. Still, it’s nothing out of the ordinary. I am therefore entirely surprised, and caught completely flat footed, when someone in a large bunny suit waddles across the convention hall, holding a large placard with the words “ASK ME WHY PROBLEMS ARE HAPPENING” scrawled over the surface in bold red comic sans.
I can’t resist the urge to walk over. “Okay, why are problems happening?”
The bunny gestures comically at a slightly more secluded nook of the convention hall with a high table, away from the glass walls and large poster-boards. We walk over, and they take off their head to reveal someone barely older than a teenager—who should definitely still be in high school. She has dark, frizzy hair and black skin that stands out against the fluffy white of the bunny costume.
“Nice costume.”
“I tried wearing a suit and sneaking in first, but nobody would take me seriously. At least this way I get some eyeballs.”
“You’ve been doing this more than once?”
She nods proudly. “I’ve snuck in every single time there’s an event happening, and I’ve never been wrong.”
“Wrong about…”
The teenager gestures at her placard. “Something always goes wrong. Usually food, but also water, speakers, supplies, and at least three power cuts during opening keynotes.”
“Unless you’re about to tell me you’re some kind of walking bad luck charm I can’t see how you’d be able to predict that. These are all different events with different suppliers and organisers, no?”
She nods earnestly. “Still, I haven’t been wrong.”
I chuckle. “Kid, listen. I’ve been going to conferences since 2005. Something always breaks or goes missing at a convention. It’s kind of inevitable.” She glares at me when I say “kid”, but lets me finish the sentence.
“Not like this. Because of accidents and human failure to plan and tech breaking, yes. But I’m talking about natural disasters, power cuts. Systemic failures.” She said that word, systemic, like one might refer to a holy relic, or that this is a church.
“Uh-huh.”
She winces, as if she were the forty year old talking to an unruly teenager. “What do you do?”
Now it’s my turn to wince. “Applied mathematics, with a specialty in quantum-safe cryptosystems.” It’s usually at this point that whoever I’m talking to starts making excuses to go. But the girl merely wrinkles her nose slightly.
“Hmm. I thought this was a book conference. Uh, conference for people who like books.”
“It is. My partner just has an unhealthy obsession with debating social scientists or, god forbid, anyone he thinks is a feminist. It’s a bit like the Sokal thing, if you know him. Wait, no, that’s way before your time.” She shakes her head anyways, making me feel like a dinosaur.
“Well if you’re a STEM person you might know more about this than me, then. I’m just in high school.”
At this point I’m slightly bored, and starting to wonder if any of the promised panels that afternoon had managed to resuscitate themselves. I also feel slightly foolish talking to someone in a bunny suit. “About what, exactly? You’ve been dancing around this answer of yours for a while.”
“Uh… one second…” With some difficulty, the girl produces her phone (there’s a large sticker on the back, one of the red and white ones that say HI MY NAME IS, and she’s drawn a heart in the box for the name), and pulls something up.
“This was your plan?” I can’t help it, the sarcasm just comes out sometimes. “Do the bunny thing, then pull up a pdf on your phone?” To my surprise, her eyes are filled with angry tears when she looks up again.
“You adults are all the same. What would you do if you knew the world was ending and nobody cared?”
I take the phone quietly. It’s a PDF describing something called the Societal Limit Theorem. It’s dense, written in a quasi-technical/quasi-mathematical jargon, and offers little in the way of actual numbers, which I take as a sign of humility from the author. It seems to broadly describe a theorised turning point beyond which society will begin rapidly collapsing due to the aftereffects of failure causing other, chained failures too fast for the systems set in place to recover. I’m not sure if I believe it.
“Surely, though, we can work to stop this chain effect. People are already doing that, disaster mitigations, climate mitigations—”
She makes a pooh-pooh gesture, and for a moment I remember she’s still in the suit, which must be boiling at this hour because of the weak air-conditioning. “It’s like putting a band-aid on your neck before or after you get hit with a guillotine. Before, it doesn’t make a difference. Afterwards, it’s already over.”
“That’s ridiculous. There have been disasters before, even massive ones like the Black Death or the world wars, and society has managed to recover. Humans are resilient.”
“This is different. The world is ending, miss…”
“Jolene. And it’s Mrs.”
“Mrs. Jolene. It’s like saying we can survive the sky falling down.”
I shake my head in disbelief. It’s hard to imagine how much despair one must feel growing up in 2024. “I understand your sentiment and sympathise. What do you suggest we do?”
The tears are back. “I thought someone here might have had an idea.” It seems intensely pathetic all of a sudden that I was ready to laugh at this teenager—this child—only ten minutes ago. I try and say a few encouraging words, but everything that comes out feels hollow. I promise I’ll contact her to talk more some other time, but I’m going back to Berkeley in two days. That night in the shitty Airbnb I start to research alternate means of living when my phone trills, but I’m too drained to read the message from my only PoC colleague about what is undoubtedly yet another case of harassment.
It’s still a long time before I can fall asleep, lying on that cramped double bed with a pit in the middle in the shitty Airbnb.