Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,29

from the Nando’s ten minutes’ walk from my house in Dublin, a restaurant I would by no means have walked ten minutes to eat at.

I was waiting for my flame-grilled chicken thighs and spicy rice to materialize, groping the while toward some vague insight about how globalization was continuing the old colonial pursuit of flattening and assimilation, when I became aware of a small bird perched on the back of the seat opposite me. At first I thought I might have been imagining it, that the jet-lag fugue state had now progressed to outright visual hallucination, but then this small bird, perhaps a thrush or a sparrow, took to the air and in the course of its flight caused a young woman at a nearby table to duck slightly, which seemed evidence enough that my senses did not deceive me. Presently, another bird flew in off the street and took its ease briefly on a napkin dispenser at an empty table before taking flight and circling the restaurant in the wake of its companion. Nobody seemed to be paying the least bit of attention to these birds treating the inside of a Nando’s like some kind of aviary. It occurred to me then that New Zealand was the last country in the world to be settled by humans, that until the Māori arrived here in the thirteenth century no mammal of any sort had ever existed on this land, and that in the absence of large predators the whole place had been until then essentially a giant bird sanctuary.

This was something I noticed on numerous occasions in Auckland. I would be sitting in a restaurant or café, and there would be birds just flying around, alighting more or less unobtrusively on the backs of people’s chairs, pecking at crumbs beneath their tables, and no one else would seem to notice. It was strange, but also strangely wonderful. One evening, over dinner with Anthony and his wife, Kyra, at their house, I mentioned this business of birds just flying into restaurants and cafés like they owned the place, and they both seemed at a loss, as though they had not themselves paid it much notice, or were unaware that it was a uniquely Kiwi phenomenon, and I found this touching in a way I couldn’t quite articulate. It had to do, I think, with a sense of New Zealand not just as a place of extraordinary natural beauty, but also as retaining some quality of original innocence (a perception of the place that, when I reflected on it, seemed to me tainted by a colonialist view of the world). It hadn’t in the scheme of things been that long since the birds had indeed owned the place, and it was as though they still hadn’t quite adjusted to the new arrangement. I was beginning already to see how New Zealand could create in the newly arrived traveler a sense of having arrived in a place that was both recognizably of the Anglophone West and at the same time somehow prelapsarian. A place where you could eat at Nando’s while small birds alighted on your table, harmless and unafraid.

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The following day, I went to a gallery in downtown Auckland to take a look at a new work by the artist Simon Denny. Anthony and I had talked a lot about this exhibition, because it touched on many of our shared fascinations, and because it was a project he himself had been involved in from its inception. (He had written some enthusiastic criticism on Denny’s work, and the two had started a correspondence, which eventually opened out onto the prospect of some kind of collaboration. Anthony characterized his own role in the project as an amalgamation of researcher, journalist, and “investigative philosopher, following the trail of ideas and ideologies.”) The exhibition was called The Founder’s Paradox, a name that came from the title of one of the chapters of Peter Thiel’s 2014 book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Together with the long and intricately detailed catalog essay Anthony was writing to accompany it, the show was a reckoning with the future that Silicon Valley techno-libertarians like Thiel wanted to build, and with New Zealand’s place in that future. The Sovereign Individual, too, was a central element of the show.

When I got to the gallery, Simon Denny, whom Anthony had described to me as “kind of a genius” and “the poster-boy for