Location: Hall of Social History, Cardiff
Date: September 9, 2132
One Hundred and Five Years Since the Collapse
The crowd was polite, attentive, sipping nutrient tea in long-stemmed glassware. The lights were low. A soft archive reel flickered against the rear wall of the stage—montage clips from the early 21st century: advertisements, music videos, perfume commercials, reality TV.
Two chairs were arranged beneath it, occupied by Dr. Siena Vale, Professor of Visual Anthropology, and Dr. Noah Trenholm, a specialist in extinct behaviors.
They were halfway through the public forum, part of a seasonal lecture series titled Echoes of the Before.
“You can see it in everything,” Dr. Vale was saying. “In how they moved. How they dressed. How close they stood.”
She gestured to the screen, where two people were kissing on a 2003 soap opera.
“It’s all so... invasive,” Trenholm added. “There’s a kind of desperation to it. But also performance. As if attraction had become theatre.”
The audience chuckled softly—though not mockingly.
They played a clip from a fragrance commercial: a man shirtless in slow motion, water beading off his chest, a woman’s voiceover breathing heavy narration.
“We analysed over three hundred such clips,” Trenholm explained. “In nearly all of them, the physical form was stylized as commodity. The image was not just suggestive—it was instructional. It said: This is what you want. This is how wanting looks.”
Vale nodded. “We had to remind ourselves: this wasn’t parody. This was real.”
They paused for a moment. A still frame remained onscreen: a kiss, silhouetted in golden light.
Dr. Vale sipped her tea.
“And yet, what fascinates me,” she continued, “is how quickly we lost the ability to understand it. Not just to feel it—but to interpret it. We’ve had to reverse-engineer meaning from gesture.”
“Like trying to reconstruct religion from hand motions.”
Later, they opened the floor to questions.
A young woman stood. “Do you think people back then were... happy?”
Dr. Trenholm glanced at Vale.
“I think they were overstimulated,” he said. “I think they mistook stimulation for happiness.”
“But maybe that’s unfair,” Vale added. “They didn’t have context. They didn’t know what it was doing to them—how visual dominance rewired even their value systems. It wasn’t just personal. It was systemic.”
She paused.
“You can’t blame a match for starting a fire in a house made of paper.”
The final image onscreen was archival footage of a nightclub in 2022. Bodies pressed together, pulsing to bass. Someone whispering in someone’s ear. Sweat. Flashing lights.
To the audience, it looked more like a riot than a celebration.
Trenholm leaned toward the mic one last time.
“We call it the Great Estrangement,” he said. “Because it wasn’t just the loss of libido.”
“It was the loss of a whole language.”