In which I apply for a job

A few years ago I did a blog bit where I’d publicly apply for jobs while determinedly misunderstanding the job description. I’d apply for jobs like “scrum master” and talk up my high school rugby experience. I also applied for a job at British American Tobacco by dressing as a giant cigarette and asking teenagers to take up smoking. It was fun, but after a few I got bored and doing things like dressing as a giant cigarette was intersecting uncomfortably with my need to actually apply for jobs. So I stopped.

Today, job applications are back on my mind. I am spending entire minutes in the mind-melting hell of LinkedIn before getting upset at the spectacle of endless employees praising the AI leopard that their employers have hired to eat their faces. There simply aren’t many jobs out there for anyone who isn’t willing to sing paens to a technology explicitly designed to replace people. In between, I see the world’s most confidently stupid business enthusiasts opining about things like how we must dig for more fossil fuels to maintain “energy independence” – evidently their feelings tell them fossil fuels aren’t finite – and blaming renewable energy for the current energy crisis, which is as close to a Bizarro World take that it’s possible to have outside of a comic book. (If you’re wondering, the crisis is because we depend on fossil fuels, which is in turn because oil companies worked very hard to make sure we didn’t switch to renewables.)

It was all very depressing. Then I saw the job ad for an “End of the World” library curator.

So I’m back to the public job application, except this one isn’t a bit. There might be the occasional joke here and there but I’ve never been more serious.

I sent the email a few minutes ago, and now I’m publishing it here. I really hope they take me on.

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Gidday!

I am writing to apply for the job of Curator – Private “End of the World” Library at Westhaven Estate.

This open cover letter is to demonstrate my extraordinary suitability for this unprecedented role. Firstly, you mention that you’re after someone intellectually curious. That’s me, to a T. I am so intellectually curious that I’m curious about what intellect even is. There’s a lot of that around at the moment with folks pretending that computer code is sentient: it’s become the world’s most boring sport on LinkedIn. Even more importantly, you want someone to “help design and build a private, long-term library on a remote coastal estate in New Zealand.”

I am so prepared for this it’s terrifying. I have spent on average at least one hour of each day of my life thinking about how to design an apocalypse library. I had always thought that these cumulative years were wasted, but now?

It seems like fate.

You say: “The project is to curate a high-conviction, enduring collection — a library that would remain meaningful and useful under extreme long-term scenarios.“

You guys! I am so here for this!

As I mentioned, I have given this some thought. So let’s get some assumptions out of the way, so we don’t make an ass out of u (or me). To avoid an ass-u-me scenario, I have a few questions for you, starting with:

What sort of end-of-the-world are you looking for your library to survive?

Robert Frost (good collection candidate imo) said that “some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.” I say: he would say ice is great and will suffice, with a name like Frost. But the nature of the world-ending event is very important to the nature of the library.

Let’s say you hold with those who favour fire. Nuclear war, maybe. It’s a good consideration! We do have all these city-burning weapons and an errant flock of geese or Tweet could easily kick off World War Three. It’s the most probable near-term apocalyptic scenario.

If this happens, your library will be invaluable. Paper, commonly used to make books, is a wonderfully extensible material. For one thing, it is flammable (c.f. The Day After Tomorrow, one for the End of the World DVD collection.) All those books will make great fuel for one lucky roaming band of irradiated miseries who will enjoy a useful supply of kindling after – assuming you didn’t already make an abrupt transition from biology to physics via a nuclear fireball in one of the world’s freshly obliterated cities – you have been killed and your supplies eaten. They’ll be very grateful to you! Your library will be fondly remembered for weeks to entire months until everyone is dead of acute radiation sickness, cancer, or starvation.

If you want knowledge to survive this scenario, into a future where radiation-proof Morlocks are reclaiming humanity’s lost wisdom, you’ll want something more permanent than paper. Your options include fired clay tablets (they’ve stood the test of time, which is why we know about crooked copper merchants from 1750 BC), stainless steel, or titanium. You’re going to need quite a few metric tons of it, and a lot of storage room. You might want to get to work hollowing out some local mountains, or digging a very extensive basement. You’ll also have to choose between print via embossing or debossing. My pick would be laser engraving; it’s the fastest method I can think of to get writing on to metal.

That does raise another important point.

How long into the end of the world are we talking here? Like, do your hypothetical post-apocalypserinos speak English? Are they even human? That’s an important question! An English library is no good in a far-flung future where language will almost certainly have evolved into something completely different: it’s why you struggle to read the original text of Beowulf (good inclusion imo). So if you’re wanting to include “essential knowledge, foundational literature, practical survival and technical domains, philosophy, history, and culture” you are better off not actually printing it in English. (Sure, have some English books kicking around, it can’t hurt – again, choice of medium is important, you’ll want to print on something durable like vellum as a modern hardback or paperback will crumple into moldy unreadable dust within a scant century or two given modern print materials and techniques unless you have very good humidity control and an excellent and implausibly long-lived air-conditioning system.) Instead of English writings, you’re going to want a codex with an included key. Think along the lines of the Golden Record, by Carl Sagan, which adorns the side of the Voyager probe and is currently somewhere in the vicinity of the heliopause. A lot of instructions and meaning can be conveyed this way; you’d be after something like the codex that the advanced aliens in Contact (also by Carl Sagan; definitely include Contact, great yarn) send in their Message to Earth.

Next point? Location, location location! I’m sure you know all about this in the real-estate sense: you have after all dropped twenty mil on a quite nice bach. But your library needs more in terms of location planning than stunning private coastal views and sea breezes. I hate to be a downer, but Westhaven might not be the best location for it. (Consider my town of Morrinsville instead: it is the closest thing this country has to a tectonically inert flood-and-tsunami-proof location and it could do with a tourist attraction that isn’t a giant fiberglass cow.) First, as the name would suggest, it’s on the West Coast of the South Island New Zealand. That means it’s within cooee of an Alpine Fault rupture which is more geologically overdue than a 12-month pregnancy. I checked the fault map and while there aren’t any known faults where you are, that doesn’t mean much: the whole country is essentially one large faultline and that’s especially true for the Alpine Fault. When that baby pops the entire Southern Alps are going to jolt upwards by several metres and every scenic hillside residence for a hundred kilometers or so on either side is going to be kicked into touch. Your library will come back with snow on it. Or, less poetically, just slide ungracefully into the ocean, like a prop forward scoring one of those boring British tries.

Speaking of the ocean: The west coast sea breezes are better described as a constant howling gale, and this incessant scream carries a lot of moisture. Unless you like mould more than JK Rowling, this is not ideal for a library. The ocean is important for other reasons. Take a look at the New Zealand map: see how the West Coast is all smooth and the East is all jagged? That’s becaus the ocean is eating the West Coast at a pretty brisk clip. Which brings us to climate change! Rising oceans, groundwater tables, and even faster erosion from extreme weather events will all nudge your library towards inundation, which is less than ideal. There are all sorts of potential locations for libraries but none of them are underwater.

Another issue I think you’ll face is that books are completely useless without stuff. You are going to need a fully-fledged workshop adjoining your library, with either some very long-life batteries, or instructions for setting up a lithium mine. In fact, this is going to be your greatest challenge. Knowledge is useless without an extant culture to produce the technology through which knowledge can be applied. A common post-apocalyptic fantasy is a bunch of sword-wielding barbarians stumbling on a surviving library (they are literate, of course) and re-inventing heavier-than-air powered flight shortly thereafter. That can’t actually happen. By way of example, there’s a bloke who – inspired by Douglas Adams, good inclusion imo – tried to make a toaster from scratch. It worked, eventually, with much cheating, and a total disregard for electrical safety.

If you want your post-apocalypse library to endure, you’re going to need people. And the best way to make sure there’s people is to make sure the apocalypse never happens in the first place.

Unfortunately, if we carry on the way we currently are, it’s going to!

I am not talking about AI. The odds of a future predictive text bot taking over the world are as good as they are for a current predictive text bot, which is to say, pretty much zero. But spending money on bullshit like AI instead of on more important things, like stopping climate change? Yes, that could actually kill us all! Climate change is a bomb that’s already detonated, and the slow-motion explosion is equivalent to five Hiroshima-sized atomic explosions per second, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (best get their bulletin in your library imo).

It gets worse. This following is more important than anything so I’ll give each bit its own line and sentence:

Growth.

Must.

End.

Why? If growth stays coupled to energy use – and, so far, it always has – then we are cooked. I mean that literally, not figuratively: if the economy continues growing at anything like the approximate current rate of three percent increase per year, within a scant 400 years we will be using “as much energy as the Sun provides to the entire surface of the Earth annually.” (Becker, Adam, More Everything Forever, 2025, definitely include imo.) Unfortunately that level of energy use will come with side effects, such as, uh, boiling the oceans.

Again, I am not being figurative. If growth doesn’t stop, no matter what energy source(s) we use, we are literally cooked. Do the maths, if you like: I’ll wait. (Good idea to include a few maths textbooks, maybe some physics too imo.) Looks like those that favour fire have it right.

My point is that your “end of the world library” won’t be up to much or last for long if the world does actually end within the next several centuries, and on our current trajectory, it absolutely will. To illustrate this last point point, I will take the liberty of quoting from a volume that should be in the audio-visual bit of your library, imo: James Cameron’s 1997 masterpiece Titanic.

“But this ship can’t sink!”

“She’s made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.”

You may feel my assertion (mathematical certainty) about our constantly escalating energy use turning the planet into a very large crematorium is hyperbolic, or unfair, or any number of things.

To this I say: the facts of physics do not care about your feelings.

They do not care about your library.

But there’s some good news.

It’s you!

You are rich. Luck, or fiscal enthusiasm bordering on pathology, has blessed you with more resources than 99 percent of the global population. If you can afford to shell out $20 million on a luxury lodge plus however much more on an apocalypse-proof book collection, you can put that money to good use, chiefly lobbying. Lobbying for what? The very opposite of what most rich, powerful people lobby for: armament reduction, fossil fuel reduction, climate change mitigation, and sustainability; the end of cancerously endless economic growth and its inevitably deadly energy use. You can help prevent the end of the world. You can be a force for good that ensures that in a few dozen or several hundred years or even later there will still be a need for libraries, because there will still be people to make use of them.

Maybe the real end-of-the-world library is the civilisation we made along the way.

I eagerly await your offer of employment.

Sincerely,

Joshua Drummond

P.S. My CV is attached

P.P.S. You can put this letter in the library if you like.

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