Doomsday preppers and the architecture of dread

Prepping is a practice of anticipating and adaptating to impending conditions of calamity, ranging from low-level crises to extinction-level events. The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which preppers consider a 'mid-level' event, and which many of them were well-prepared for, makes clear that scholarly attention to prepper's motivations and methods is both timely and valuable. Drawing from a three-year ethnographic research project with preppers, this paper traces the activity of a single bunker builder who has constructed a technically sophisticated private underground community. Supplemented by additional fieldwork, the paper argues that the boltholes preppers are building in closed communities built to survive the collapse of society, order, and even the environment itself, refract the seemingly irresolvable problems we are failing to address as a species. In the prepper ideology, faith in adaptation has supplanted hope of mitigation, making contemporary bunkers more speculative than reactionary and more temporal than spatial. The bunkers preppers build are an ark to cross through a likely (but often unspecified) catastrophe; they are a chrysalis from which to be reborn - potentially even into an improved milieu.