Apologies to T.S. Eliot for paraphrasing his line from “The Hollow Men” above, but
This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper.
is relevant here, for it’s the pace of the apocalypse that is the focus of this post. And though the Jackpot isn’t a “whimper” it’s certainly also not a “bang.”
William Gibson introduces the idea of the Jackpot in his 2014 novel, The Peripheral (now also a pretty-good TV show!). The basic premise is that the apocalypse is not an acute event, but rather a protracted series of bad things happening over a period of many years: mass extinctions, wars, pandemics, various environmental disasters, decimation of food production, etc. The resulting world is depopulated and ruled by a kleptocracy. It’s bad unless you’re very rich or are able to work for someone who is very rich—and if the latter, you may have some unsavory job duties because these folks didn’t get rich by being decent.
Growing up as I did in my dad’s unofficial evangelical christian apocalypse cult, this conception of the end-times initially struck me as confusing. The apocalypse is when God splits open the sky. There’s a rapture, an Anti-Christ, plagues, all sortsa stuff, but it happens fast. And there’s certainly not a whole society left afterward.
Having sat with Gibson’s Jackpot idea for a few years, it now seems overwhelmingly obvious to me that he’s got it right. He has a track record of calling technological and social realities before they come to fruition. Unfortunately, I think he’s done it again. If anything, in my mind, it’s not a matter of whether we’re headed (in reality, not just the novel) for the Jackpot, it’s a question of whether it’s already begun or, at the least, whether it’s already become inevitable.
Readers of The Peripheral discover the concept of the Jackpot by stages. Here and throughout his work, Gibson has the fascinating ability to eschew exposition and instead thrust readers into the midst of confusing—yet through the magic of his prose—enthralling scenarios. His novels compel you to decipher what’s happening and make you want to do the work of figuring it out—unlike a lot of celebrated experimental fiction, which is pretty unkind to the reader. In school, when you read the ancient epics, they teach you the Latin phrase in medias res, but what Gibson is doing is a few steps beyond. When Homer sang of the rage of Achilles, folks knew not only who Achilles was, they also already knew why he was mad. In contrast, Gibson drops you into a world entire. And it’s a world with a lot of characters, social structures, economies, and technologies that are completely novel—pun intended—for the first-time reader.
I was also initially confused by Gibson’s selection of the word jackpot, which for me, previously had only positive connotations. You win a jackpot—all the money in the middle of the table after a hand of poker. I learned the word has more valences. Check out def. #3 in the link above: “chiefly Western US: a tight spot: JAM.” That’s what this apocalypse is, a jam. That both makes light of it, but also looks it right in the eyes. The folks living post-Jackpot know things aren’t great. They have, for instance, never seen a tiger, and there are other even more practical day-to-day horrors with which to contend.
I wrote a song and called it “Jackpot.” I wrote this song the way I usually write songs, so it’s not in any direct way about WG’s books or his conception the Jackpot, but it’s the same vibe. A vibe I’ve occupied periodically and for various lengths of time: Something bad has happened and more bad things are just about to happen. My mental health journey is a topic for future posts, but for now, I wanted to link the cultural topics (i.e., writing about William Gibson) to my creative output and biography—as that’s the point of this interlinked Wikipedia-memoir.
More to come.