Insatiable. Technology had become a sun around which all life orbited, pulling everyone into its gravitational field. The draw towards scrolling became all too strong.
While computation was once thought of as something separate, confined to discrete machines and local networks, it had since metastasized into the stack. This totalizing planetary infrastructure stretched from buried fiber optic cables to mobile apps and orbital satellites, embedding itself into every facet of human existence. For those in power, each new server added was a step toward humanity’s great leap into an era of unlimited potential. A world of interconnected minds, ideas, and systems, all functioning as a singular brain. This was the age of Accelerated Techno-Optimism. In the 21st century, a deplorable cabal of tech magnates rose, led by figures like Thiel, Musk and Zuck, who had turned data into the lifeblood of modern civilization. With greed induced optimism, they proclaimed the coming of a “Singularity,” a utopia of artificial intelligence and infinite computation. Projects like AI-driven megacities, space colonies and cybernetic brain implants became the hallmarks of their era, promising to eradicate inefficiency and elevate human potential.
The number of data centres grew exponentially and the temperatures in the Cloud rose. The hunger of the centres began to rival the needs of nations. Rivers were drained, forests cleared, and the air thickened with heat as data centers devoured the planet’s resources.
The first tremor of collapse came in the form of the Microsoft meltdown of 2024. Eight and a half million systems went dark. A financial toll of $10 billion, as screens across the globe turned a haunting Pantone 2995 C – “blue screens of death.” It was like a looming tsunami. Panic erupted, most notably at airports, where employees, now cut off from the digital lifeblood, had to revert to pen and paper to issue tickets. The failure attacked the very architecture of a society built on seamless, automated systems.
The second tremor was political. The U.S. government’s TikTok ban, set for January 19, 2025, sent users into a hysteria. In the days leading up to it, they scrambled to preserve their lives – archiving favorite videos, rallying in protest, and, when resistance proved futile, saying their final goodbyes. When the ban finally hit, millions were uprooted, giving rise to a wave of “TikTok refugees.” Meanwhile, outside the U.S., opportunists seized the moment. Hours of scrolling footage were sold at outrageous prices and black-market phones preloaded with TikTok clips became luxury items. It was “our age’s Prohibition”. Though the ban was driven more by fears of Chinese espionage than any genuine desire to save humanity (and despite lasting only a few hours), it proved something important: escaping the platform was possible and there was, in fact, an alternative. A world beyond the scroll.
The backlash began as murmurs of dissent. Activists and environmentalists were dismissed as “neo-Luddites,” unwilling to embrace progress. Yet, as droughts intensified, oceans surged and technofeudalism tightened its grip, dissent grew into rebellion. Sloptimism had turned to carnage as our overindulgence imploded. In the shadow of these collapses, humanity turned against the digital monoliths. Screens, once the omnipresent windows into life itself, became symbols of oppression. The data centres were torn down, “relics of innovation” smashed and burned in uprisings that swept across continents. The tech oligarchs, once worshipped as visionaries, were cast as villains in the new narrative. Stripped of their utopian promises, they were left scrambling for refuge: Musk went for the stars; Zuck clutched his Meta Quest VR headset and escaped to his million dollar doomsday bunker in Hawaii; Thiel retreated into his cryonics chamber ; Sam Altman, using the last computing power of the 21st century, asked ChatGPT “How to survive the apocalypse?” But they all learned too late that no prompt could undo the damage, no algorithm could outthink collapse, and no amount of wealth could buy a way back to the world they had helped destroy. Sanctuary was found in the total eradication of that which had led to this collapse. The urge to scroll, however, remained…
As the ashes of the digital age settled, civilization regressed into an austere primitivism, rejecting technology in all its forms. Digital memories were erased, and screens were dismantled. Yet, amid this purge, a secretive group of archivists risked everything to preserve fragments of what had been. Inspired by an instinctual belief that future generations might one day understand and learn from the past, they undertook an unlikely mission: to preserve TikToks. To evade the watchful eyes of the new regime, they transcribed them into biblesque books, condensing the infinite sprawl of shitposting into pages bound in ink and paper. The Codices carried within them the spirit of the digital epoch, capturing its absurdity, its beauty, and its excess.
Yet the Codices were not mere replicas of the original TikToks. Where the digital videos had been ephemeral, algorithmically curated, and infinitely scrollable, the Flipbooks were static, tactile, and finite. Gone were the predatory loops of engagement, doomscroll, the chaos of comment sections. In their place: sequences frozen in time, dances flattened to ink strokes, viral trends fossilized like insects in amber. They transformed disposable content into something ritualized, intentional, even sacred.
Millennia later, long after the screenless societies had forgotten the techno-obsession of the past, the Flipbook Codices were unearthed. To the discoverers, they were baffling artifacts. A dance of images moving in alien ways. As they studied these relics, they pieced together the fragments of what they were seeing, rekindling questions of what humanity had gained and lost in the name of progress. A secret obsession began. Replication and ritualization followed, the books becoming the foundation for new rites and iconography. They became canonized as the Testament of the Flickering Scrolls.
“Testament of the Flickering Scrolls” is a TikTok archiving project by Maja Mikulsa, Meabh O’Halloran and August Sundgaard. Framed within a speculative post-apocalyptic scenario where civilization has rejected contemporary technology, we position ourselves as monastics, preserving remnants of the past (now present) civilization by transcribing TikToks into flipbooks. Through this process, the project seeks to reflect on contemporary knowledge production, the materiality of the virtual, and the question: what went wrong?
Text written by Meabh O’Halloran and August Kaasa Sundgaard.
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