Is Baudrillard's Idea of the 'End' of History Relevant in the 21st Century?

I would argue that while fears about the end of history have often arisen, especially in connection with religious beliefs, the threat is different at this stage in history because there is a major threat of mass destruction through nuclear warfare. Also, with climate change there is so much concern about the way humans have destroyed the planet and the view that the planet may be uninhabitable for future generations.

But, to what extent is it the end of history, as the end of civilisation. Or, is the idea of the 'end' a myth?

You seem to be equating the end of history and the end of the world. I thought they were different. 
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Was I wrong in my understanding?

He is emphasising an underlying thought about a potential end as understood as a cultural idea. He argued that it was bound up with a linear conception of history and assumptions about history as something which may finish. How does this connect with real threats in the world. But, to what extent is it the end of history, as the end of civilisation. Or, is the idea of the 'end' a myth?

Just speculating here: in a few centuries, science fiction will cease to be a genre; all of the possibilities explored in these books will either have been accomplished, or found to be impossible.

. To me the end of history has meant the end of the linear nature of life, i.e. progress.

I found myself, as an anarchist...uh...Libertarian, dismayed by the force of Fukuyama's reasoning, wondering if any serious challenge could ever be made to the democratic nation-state, or if any eventuality might break what I view as the soul-crushing monotonous security provided thereby.

I am definitely making a connection between Baudrillard's idea of the 'end' of history and the civilisation that has developed in many nations. How can civilisation go on in the way it has done? Climate change seems to be a warning sign, and the question is whether it is too late or not to avert it. Perhaps we are coming to the end of consumer materialism. I wonder if the pandemic and the scale to which so many lives were turned upside down will bring a wake up call for some big changes, but it is hard to know...

Baudrillard, Fragments, pg 25, translated by Emily Agar: We are in a society of icy intolerance, where the slightest diversion from, the mildest breach of, the reality principle is violently repressed. Realist Philistinism and Pharisaism are triumphant on all sides. All ideas are immediately cast in concrete. The anathema level is the equal of any religious or Stalinist society. Nothing has changed. The conspiracy of imbeciles is total.

These fashionable spots where everyone recognizes everyone else without ever having known them. The voracity of faces, each lit up by the anticipated mutual recognition. Yet perhaps they did know each other in another world. This is the impression you get from Left Bank cocktail parties. Everyone has an air of déjà vu about them, and they float like shadows over the waters of the Styx. Moreover, hell must be just this: compulsive remembrance of all you've been through without ever being able to put a name to a face.

Baudrillard explored the idea that the end of history in the 1990s, in a time when there were fears associated with the end of the millennium. 2000 passed and there were some fears and expectations of some grand drama in association with the Mayan calendar end date of 2012.

(Žižek's quip): "It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine an end to capitalism".

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
~Also Sprach Zarathustra

'Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? - Mark Fisher':Fukuyama’s position is in some ways a mirror image of Fredric Jameson’s. Jameson famously claimed that postmodernism is the ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’. He argued that the failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would become dominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist) capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What I’m calling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jameson’s heroic work of clarification, postmodernism remains a hugely contested term, its meanings, appropriately but unhelpfully, unsettled and multiple. More importantly, I would want to argue that some of the processes which Jameson described and analyzed have now become so aggravated and chronic that they have gone through a change in kind.

Ultimately, there are three reasons that I prefer the term capitalist realism to postmodernism. In the 1980s, when Jameson first advanced his thesis about postmodernism, there were still, in name at least“pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility. In the 80s, ‘Really Existing Socialism’ still persisted, albeit in its final phase of collapse. In Britain, the fault lines of class antagonism were fully exposed in an event like the Miners’ Strike of 1984-1985, and the defeat of the miners was an important moment in the development of capitalist realism, at least as significant in its symbolic dimension as in its practical effects. The closure of pits was defended precisely on the grounds that keeping them open was not ‘economically realistic’, and the miners were cast in the role of the last actors in a doomed proletarian romance. The 80s were the period when capitalist realism was fought for and established, when Margaret Thatcher’s doctrine that ‘there is no alternative’ – as succinct a slogan of capitalist realism as you could hope for – became a brutally self-fulfilling prophecy.

Secondly, postmodernism involved some relationship to modernism. Jameson’s work on postmodernism began with an interrogation of the idea, cherished by the likes of Adorno, that modernism possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture“(suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising). At the same time as particular modernist forms were absorbed and commodified, modernism’s credos – its supposed belief in elitism and its monological, top-down model of culture – were challenged and rejected in the name of ‘difference’, ‘diversity’ and ‘multiplicity’. Capitalist realism no longer stages this kind of confrontation with modernism. On the contrary, it takes the vanquishing of modernism for granted: modernism is now something that can periodically return, but only as a frozen aesthetic style, never as an ideal for living.

Thirdly, a whole generation has passed since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, capitalism had to face the problem of how to contain and absorb energies from outside. It now, in fact, has the opposite problem; having all-too successfully incorporated externality, how can it function without an outside it can colonize and appropriate? For most people under twenty in Europe and North America, the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable. Jameson used to report in horror about the ways that capitalism had seeped into the very unconscious; now, the fact that capitalism has colonized the dreaming life of the population is so taken for granted that it is no longer worthy of comment. It would be dangerous and misleading to imagine that the near past was some prelapsarian state rife with political potentials, so it’s as well to remember the role that commodification played in the production of culture throughout the twentieth century. Yet the old struggle between detournement and recuperation, between subversion and incorporation, seems to have been played out. What we are dealing with now is not the incorporation of materials that previously seemed to possess subversive potentials, but instead, their precorporation: the pre-emptive formatting and shaping of desires, aspirations and hopes by capitalist culture.

We find ourselves at the notorious ‘end of history’ trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Fukuyama’s thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious. It should be remembered, though, that even when Fukuyama advanced it, the “idea that history had reached a ‘terminal beach’ was not merely triumphalist. Fukuyama warned that his radiant city would be haunted, but he thought its specters would be Nietzschean rather than Marxian. Some of Nietzsche’s most prescient pages are those in which he describes the ‘oversaturation of an age with history’. ‘It leads an age into a dangerous mood of irony in regard to itself, he wrote in Untimely Meditations, ‘and subsequently into the even more dangerous mood of cynicism’, in which ‘cosmopolitan fingering’, a detached spectatorialism, replaces engagement and involvement. This is the condition of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who has seen everything, but is decadently enfeebled precisely by this excess of (self) awareness.

If some computers 'survived', it is possible that the survivors would be able to use information at some point to rebuild civilisation.

GWF Hegel:The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

I am still not convinced that it is equal to the 'end' of history which Baudrillard spoke about, although his ideas are fairly vague and ambiguous.