Stranger Than Fiction – Why Zombies are Our Future
November 8, 2015 https://decryptedmatrix.com/stranger-than-fiction-why-zombies-are-our-future/
From its humble folkloric beginnings to the release George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead in 1968, today’s current Walking Dead craze has taken zombie culture
in America to new heights. And now that Halloween has arrived, our
taste for adventures involving hordes of the undead has doubled. Whether
you’re searching for candy treats or goodies of a fleshier variety,
it’s the ideal time of year to dig a little deeper into the zombie
phenomenon as it continues to fill up our film screens, televisions, and
literature.
The zombie myth is timeless, with
references to the dead rising up again found throughout the histories of
various cultures. However, the actual term “zombie” has more specific
roots in Haitian Creole traditions and African religious customs,
where the zombies were simply mindless slaves rather than the
insatiable, flesh-eating monsters they would become in the hands of
American pop culture creators.
Regardless of origin, there’s no denying the zombie has come into its own in the last few decades, serving as a metaphor
for everything from the danger of mindless consumerism to economic
disasters and epidemics on an international scale. And while zombies
still operate effectively as metaphors for large scale disasters,
global, environmental, and otherwise, there’s are also more immediate
messages in shows like The Walking Dead. As we as a society find
ourselves relying more and more on automation and less and less on our
own intellect, we’re in danger of becoming just as mindless as the
monsters we fear.
We’re increasingly producing devices and systems designed to make our lives easier and safer, but at what cost? Automated home security systems
that are designed to do our thinking for us in case of a threat to our
family members or property are a prime example of the double-edged sword
. By allowing an “intelligent” machine system to do the thinking, we
decrease the possibility that we’d be able to respond appropriately to a
threat should the system no longer operate.
The risk is also inherent in other types of so-called advanced technology, such as increasingly automated features
on the vehicles we drive and labor saving machines replacing the humans
in our factories. By allowing the machines to think for us, we run the
risk of decreasing our own capacity for innovation and creative thinking
and thus our ability to operate without technology. We’re in danger of
becoming slaves to the technologies that were intended to serve us
instead.
On some subtle level, we seem to be aware
of and fear the dangers of our overreliance on automation, as witnessed
by the popularity of television shows like The Walking Dead, a
show supposedly about zombies but that focuses instead on the survivors
of the global apocalypse rather than the cause of it. The main
characters, although always in danger, nonetheless present a message
that the more willing they are to adapt to a world without the
technologies and creature comforts they no doubt relied on prior to the world disaster,
the more likely they are to be able to survive the new reality. And
it’s no accident that the ones most able to survive from the beginning
are the Daryl Dixons and Glenn Rhees of the show, those willing to think
creatively and who had lived life prior to the apocalypse without an
over-reliance on technology.
While the newest zombie-based show on the
scene has only aired its first six-episode season thus far, there’s
likely an even stronger possibility of exploring the characteristics
required to survive a global loss of technology that accompanies a
zombie apocalypse. Fear the Walking Dead is set in the same universe as the original The Walking Dead
but with a backed-up timeline meant to show the first days of the
epidemic. So, while technology had begun to fail by the end of the first
season, characters were not yet completely cut off.
There’s no doubt that advances in
technology have numerous benefits for mankind, but when the technology
is capable of more advanced thinking than we ourselves are, the dangers
may just outweigh some of the benefits. If we want to avoid becoming mindless zombie slaves to technology, we have to be able to do our own thinking.
via Branden Engel
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