The apocalypse is typically depicted as humanity reduced to mere life, fragile, exposed to all forms of exploitation and the arbitrary exercise of power. But these dystopian future scenarios are nothing worse than the conditions in which most humans live as their day-to-day reality. By ���end of the world���, we usually mean the end of our world. What we don���t tend to ask is who gets included in the ���we���, what it cost to attain our world, and whether we were entitled to such a world in the first place.

What contemporary post-apocalyptic culture fears isn���t the end of ���the world��� so much as the end of ���a world��� ��� the rich, white, leisured, affluent one. Western lifestyles are reliant on what the French philosopher Bruno Latour has referred to as a ���slowly built set of irreversibilities���, requiring the rest of the world to live in conditions that ���humanity��� regards as unliveable. And nothing could be more precarious than a species that contracts itself to a small portion of the Earth, draws its resources from elsewhere, transfers its waste and violence, and then declares that its mode of existence is humanity as such.

To define humanity as such by this specific form of humanity is to see the end of that humanity as the end of the world. If everything that defines ���us��� relies upon such a complex, exploitative and appropriative mode of existence, then of course any diminution of this hyper-humanity is deemed to be an apocalyptic event. ���We��� have lost our world of security, we seem to be telling ourselves, and will soon be living like all those peoples on whom we have relied to bear the true cost of what it means for ���us��� to be ���human���.

Claire Colebrook, 'End-Times for Humanity'