Category: Culture

Online, antique, digital, analog, organic, synthetic culture.

What causes zombie outbreaks in pop culture?

Since the canonical 1968 zombie film, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” pop cultural zombieism outbreaks have come and gone in waves. Why do the undead ebb and flow so? The prevalence of zombieism has been linked to periods of political change, hysteria over HIV and other contagions, knowledge worker economic insecurity, and virtually all social disruptions.

Without directly disputing the validity of those theories, I have another hypothesis to add to the mix.

Zombieism is an expression of a very specific fear: becoming unemployed.

Zombieism is a collective emotional projection by employed persons terrified of their losing their work, income, and identity. For those who fear loss of livelihoods, the ranks of the laid-off, dismissed, underemployed, and never-hired are all too similar to a growing outbreak of zombies.

Fear

By one study at least, it appears that 47% of U.S. employment could be replaced by automation in the next ten years. Coupled with Great Recessionary catastophes, that brutal fact can instill abject terror. Seemingly secure workers could at any moment join the shuffling hordes of the unemployed. Their incomes are at risk, yes. But, perhaps more importantly, their idenitities are threatened: their social positions, their family’s esteem, and their investment (both psychological and financial) in the current social order. The illusions and pretensions of the upper middle class would seem especially vulnerable to this gnawing, flesh-rending fear.

Pity & Revulsion

Zombies were once human. Most disturbingly, they can be people we knew in life. Like a recognizable corpse, the unemployed can be both repulsive and heartbreaking. The unlucky creature may be family member, a former colleague, or a desperate acquaintance pinging plaintively for introductions on LinkedIn. They are consigned to the life without life of the long-term unemployed… to join the desperate clawing of middle aged professionals begging for an interview, as their friendships, business contacts, professional networks, their homes, clothing, and even their bodies decay and fall apart.

Zombieism spreads by proximity and feeding. Is unemployment contagious? Will the jobless devour? Will they sink their teeth in to extract emotional or financial nourishment when the employed are clinging to their own diminishing networks and resources? Stay away from the losers. Don’t be infected by their poor decisions, bad luck, unworthiness for life.

THE DATA

How do we prove this interchangeability of fears? What would establish a link between fear of unemployment and the cultural prevalence of zombieism?

Why data, of course.

Not since the Washington Post’s “President Obama and the horse mask person” investigation has there been a data-driven news story of this importance.

Through impeccable proprietary scientific processes, I have developed a Cultural Index of Zombieism™ (or CIZ™) derived from mentions of “zombies” in the New York Times, the word appearing in books in English scanned by Google, and the number of zombie films released each year.

The graph below charts the CIZ from 1968 through 2013 along with the percentage of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they feared it was “likely” they would soon lose their jobs. For reference, the federal government’s annual unemployment rate is charted on the same graph. Behold the resulting infographic:

zombies and unemployment

It sure looks like something’s going on here. To find out, we sought a professional statistical analysis of the raw data by a Johns Hopkins University faculty member. The results were decisive:

THERE IS A CORRELATION!

When the percentage of people fearing job loss increases, there is a statistically significant increase in the CIZ. Based on the 1968–2013 statistics, the CIZ is predicted to increase by 1.2 for every one percent increase in Americans’ fear of job loss.

Because there is a correlation, there must be causation, right?

Fear of job loss drives our pop culture fixation on zombies.

Q.E.D.

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Sources:

Are you sick of TED too?

Guys, pat yourselves on the back right now… That pat on the back is for saving the world.

Best TED talk EVER!!!!!!!!

Actually, this talk may be the best summation of the absurdity of the TED ideology: Compost-Fueled Cars: Wouldn’t That Be Great?

Yeah, yeah, I know. TED talks can stir the imagination. They can also provoke exploration that goes deeper than the streamed microlectures. If I had anything important to say, I too would love to address that overclass audience, win favor, and join the retinue of some latter-day Medici.

Still, take a look at Benjamin Bratton’s anti-TED TEDx talk. He captures some problematic aspects of TED, such as “placebo politics,” and “middlebrow megachurch infotainment.”

Episcopalians in decline, Hindus on the rise

For armchair sociologists, haters of the NY Times, and the flat out envious, the Times’ wedding announcements is a revealing projection and a finely-tuned barometer of what high status people think is high status. Of course the results are often unintentionally funny, irritating, or depressing, but what has changed over the years?

WASPs and debutantes have declined precipitously (Whit Stillman was right) and “bourgeois bohemian” values have made an appearance, but here are the trends over time as documented by word frequency analysis:

ATodd – When Harvard Met Sally: N-gram Analysis of the New York Times Weddings Section
The New York Times’s wedding section is a perfect natural experiment designed to answer the question: What do the world’s most self-important people think is important

Plea of the introvert

A plea on behalf of introverts in an era of triumphant extroverts. I find this analysis clarifying and downright therapeutic. via +John Hagel

Caring for Your Introvert

The habits and needs of a little-understood group

…Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world.

French incursion may be saving Mali’s cultural heritage

The presence of French troops in Mali may help to protect a priceless cultural legacy which has been under siege by Islamist fighters. The BBC reports on the fate of the ancient city of Timbuktu:

The historic city is a World Heritage site, renowned for its architecture, manuscript libraries and centuries-old shrines to Islamic saints – revered by Sufi Muslims but which the Salafi militants consider idolatrous.

Many of these shrines, mausoleums, and other treasures have been destroyed just as the Taliban waged war against Afghanistan’s Buddhist monuments.

Mali crisis: ‘Timbuktu joy after life of fear’
Following France’s intervention in Mali last week, a Timbuktu resident, who asked to remain anonymous, tells the BBC about reaction in the city to the Islamist fighters’ apparent withdrawal.

Sadly, in other areas they control, Islamists continue to silence Mali’s vibrant musical culture.

————-

Update:

Sounds like a lot more damage has already been done: Timbuktu mayor says Islamists burned texts (AP)

There will be no return to normal

Goodbye to “normal” — Excellent insight from Stowe Boyd on our economic leaders’ “comforting myth of ‘returning to normal’” – I think it exists in many conversations outside the business world too.

The Biggest If Of All
I continue to see the comforting myth of ‘returning to normal’ show up in all sorts of discussions. Today, in a NY Times piece on where investment fund managers are finding good opportunities to invest the central point was that fund managers can’t find good investment opportunities, because high uncertainty. But — don’t worry! — everything will be fine as soon as we get back to normal. 

…What I am interested in is the deep story, never examined or questioned: we are in a downturn like other downturns, and we will return to postmodern growth patterns: the typical boom/bust cycle that defined the past few hundred years of the modern and post modern economies. 

[Please read on]

 

Brian Eno says farewell to the uncool

It almost sounds as though Brian Eno has been reading Ted Gioia.  Here’s Eno on “the death of uncool”:

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news.

Read more from Brian Eno at Prospect.

Ted Gioia on the Birth and Death of the Cool

The end of "cool"?
The end of "cool"?

Has coolness runs its course?  Are we living in a post-“cool” culture?

Musician and writer Ted Gioia talks about his new book, The Birth and Death of the Cool in episode 102 of The New Modern podcast.  You can listen using the embedded player above or via iTunes.  Please consider leaving a review and subscribing (for free) to future New Modern podcasts in the iTunes store.

Renowned for his important books about music, especially his History of Jazz, Ted Gioia is a prolific culture writer and literary critic.

Scott Timberg, the Los Angeles writer (and a pretty cool guy), recently posted a Q&A with Gioia on his new book.  Though many will find much to disagree with in Gioia’s arguments, there’s a unquestionably a new fashion for authenticity and sincerity.

Whether that spirit marks the death of “cool” in the sense that Ted Gioia means it, remains to be seen.  Listen to our interview, read the book, and decide for yourself.

[Watch this space for additional links and a full transcript.]

Tyler Cowen: Information Revolution, Autism, Digital Fragmentation, and the New Cultural Order

[powerpress]
Tyler Cowen Create Your Own Economy

Huffduff it [huh?]

Episode 101 of The New Modern podcast is an interview with Tyler Cowen about his fascinating new book Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World.

In addition to his renown as a professor of economics at George Mason University, Tyler Cowen is familiar to many habitual web surfers through his always absorbing blog Marginal Revolution.

A behavioral economist, Tyler is also deeply interested in culture, technology, and the arts.  His latest book combines all these subjects in one absorbing read.

Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World is loaded with provocative ideas and surprising claims.  I still haven’t wrapped my mind around a number of Cowen’s big ideas and insights, but (like it or not) I think he has identified some profound truths about our increasingly fragmented culture.  Continue reading Tyler Cowen: Information Revolution, Autism, Digital Fragmentation, and the New Cultural Order