The Horror Apocalypse is Already Here: Tech Zombies, Smart Phones, and

A disoriented teenager boards a subway car in New York City. She is sweaty, appears somewhat ill: she’s pale, weak, drawn. She sits down amongst a bunch of other people, catching her breath for a second. Soon she notices something about everyone around her. Their heads are tipped downward, almost like they’re asleep, but their eyes are open, fixed, and glazed. None of them look at each other, almost as if they have some kind of sensory compromise, like they can’t even feel the presence of other people around them. No one on the train wears any discernible facial expression; they look blank, half-dead. But the girl doesn’t panic or scream, or try to get off the subway car. Instead, takes out her smart phone, and joins them.

The Smart Phone Era is a new zombie age, and we all know it. People crash into each other like mindless revenants while walking down the sidewalk; people crash their cars willy nilly, from staring at screens while they should be looking at the road. Our devices have newly made us into zombies and, in the aggregate, we’re seemingly pretty ok with that. That’s what makes this particular form of zombism so bizarre and—at least to me—so disquieting: there’s not much protest. No one is running for the hills, taking over a mall as HQ and trying to survive on analog tech along. Well, I mean, there are some preppers, some traditionalists, and—particularly in the past few years—some prominent scholars and journalists (for example, Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price)* who are strongly, persuasively advocating for trying to purge as much of Tech Zombism as we can from our lives. But, compared to the groaning hordes of billions of human beings who are addicted to their screens, voices like Haidt’s and Price’s can only contribute a frighteningly quiet response to a dehumanizing threat the likes of which the world hasn’t really seen before. (If you haven’t read The Anxious Generation, get on it; same for How to Break up with your Phone.)

Responding to the surge of tech zombism in American (and global) culture, there has been a parallel surge in tech-zombie horror in the past few years. The surprisingly wonderful and provocative Netflix series Black Mirror has taken on tech-zombism a number of times, with shocking and often painful acuity. The first episode of the third season—one of my personal favorites—is called Nosedive, and it’s about a world where a person’s entire social standing is determined by the number of likes and unlikes they receive on an ultra powerful series of social media apps. The main character manages to wend her way up the social hierarchy to attend the wedding of a major socialite; it turns out, alas, that the whole think was a hazing ritual, and our desperate heroine winds up literally incarcerated for being so socially disgraced in her online presence that she can’t be out in the world anymore.

Is this science fiction horror, or barely veiled allegory for the reality of teenagerdom in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? You tell me.

Also in season three, the episode Playtest has a video game tester explore a super realistic AI and adaptive version of a game—there’s an implant surgically placed in his neck that allows him to participate in the game. The game takes place at a huge mansion in a remote area. He’s told that he’ll be wearing an earpiece and that he can end the simulation at will. “Nothing you’ll see can physically harm you…but if it does get too intense, we can pull you out at any time.” Sounds good, but it starts to ring false, because the game is terrifying—a horror game, of course—and becomes more and more real as the player plays through. The escalation of fear happens as the chip implanted in the player’s body works out what he’s afraid of through his neural circuitry, and adapts in concert with his fears. The computer-brain interface “mines” the player’s mind for real, deep fears. Quickly, the interface begins dredging up his, traumatic memories and pastiching them, too, into the game. His trauma from the death of his father begins surging up into the horror interface, as does his profound guilt at having “abandoned” his mother to process her grief alone. He can’t escape any of his own prior selves: not the wounded child of a demented father; not the abandoning son of a desperate mother.

There is, in this horror video game, nothing from the past that can’t spontaneously intrude upon the present. Everything is animatable at any time, to come lunging at the player’s present self with merciless vengeance. He is everything he has ever been—or feared to be—all at once. Time collapses in on itself, and with it, his sense of self collapses, too. “I don’t know who I am,” he confesses in agony, when the video game designers come to physically retrieve him and deprogram him, having realized the gaming interface has gotten out of hand and taken over his mind.

Even that, though, isn’t the end of the regressions of self that this episode stages: eventually, we discover that he was only “in” the game for .04 seconds and that his phone rang during the test, causing an interference that crashed his whole brain. His long, excruciating experience in the “mansion” was only .04 seconds of real-time life; time is nothing and everything in the gaming world, because in that world, the soul is trapped in the game, while the body goes on separately.

In these episodes, the main character is somehow in thrall to an outsourced reality—be it the “reality” of social media or the “reality” of gaming. (These, by the way, are the two forms of tech danger that Jonathan Haidt most squarely focuses on in The Anxious Generation; interestingly, Haidt focuses on the dangers of social media for girls and video games for boys, just like in Black Mirror.) In these episodes, and, really, throughout the series, there is a recurring dynamic in which the self is somehow debased, enslaved, imprisoned, and reduced; the body is made into a vehicle for the will of someone else—be it one’s “friends” on social media, an anonymous blackmailer, or a “computer-brain interface” that reaches its “tendrils” too deep into the brains of VR video game players. Zombification: the soul is entrapped in a container, while the body is made slave to the will of some kind of sorcerer, or witch. Really does sound quite a lot like how our devices work.

So, just to make it crystal clear: we are the monsters in these shows. We are the zombies. Ultimately, we should be scared both of the social media and the games, but also—perhaps more so—of ourselves, and our capacity to become monsters. Of our capacity to decide to allow ourselves to be converted into monsters.

In more recent seasons, Black Mirror has turned its attention specifically to Artificial Intelligence, and to the idea that we, as users of technology, could unwittingly lose ourselves to artificial replacements. The first episode of season six, Joan is Awful, stars Annie Murphy playing Joan, a self-described middle manager who’s engaged to a nice, but slightly boring man named Krish. She misses the “constant sex and craziness” of her prior boyfriend—her past self isn’t letting her go anymore than the game-tester’s past selves were letting him go in Playtest. Or maybe here it’s that she’s not letting go of her own past. She winds up meeting that ex for dinner, and they kiss. But that’s it. She returns home and decides to watch a streaming service with Krish. They find a show called Joan is Awful. The title character, Joan, is dressed like our Joan—our own main character—down to the distinctive hair style she wears. But she’s played on the streaming service by Salma Hayek. Perplexed and more than a little unnerved, Joan and Krish decide to watch Joan is Awful.

The show starts replaying Joan’s actual day: she had to fire a coworker; she goes to therapy and trashes Krish, reminiscing about her ex and their “imaginative constant sex”; she meets up with her ex for dinner and kisses him. In real life, Krish walks out on Joan, convinced that what he’s seeing on TV is real and true—which, of course, we know it basically is. After Krish leaves, Joan goes back inside to watch the rest of the show, where she sees a reenactment of Krish leaving her, only a few minutes after it had happened in real time.

It turns out that Joan had inadvertently signed a licensing agreement with the streaming service to give them exclusive rights to everything that happened in her life. So she’s been made into a TV personality—played by Salma Hayek—and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Eventually, Joan discovers that she is not real; she is playing the real Joan on “fictive level 1.” The Joan is Awful show is recursive: there is, somewhere out there, a real, actual Joan. Annie Murphy plays her in “fictive level 1.” Salma Hayek plays Annie Murphy playing Joan in fictive level 2. The regressions go on and on forever, becoming ever more distant from “the real Joan.” Annie Murphy-Joan decides to destroy the master computer that’s creating all of these recursive, fictive universes, but the CEO of the company shows up in “fictive level 1” to tell her she’ll be killing “billions” of other clones of Joan, on and on up the chain of unreality. Killing all the zombie avatars of one original person. Annie Murphy-Joan hesitates: she doesn’t want to die, and she doesn’t want to kill anyone. But the original Joan—“source Joan”—really, really wants to end this shit. She wants all her avatars to die, so she can take back her life. So she destroys the computer, which destroys ever level more removed from reality than her own. Source-Joan winds up living a normal human life, running a coffee shop. She seems happy.

The show, manifestly, is horror-comedy that turns to fantasy: the conclusion of the show puts us in an imaginative realm in which we really could destroy all the embarrassing knock-offs we’ve made of ourselves online, all the bad videos, all the stupid ideas.

But of course, we can’t. There is no final, decisive death on the internet. It’s all the realm of zombies, of revenance, of eternal return and the undead. Even if you post content to a website that allows you to take things down “for real,” some random other person who is looking at the site for the split second your content is up can take a screenshot of it, and then circulate that forever. Nothing that happens on the internet can truly, absolutely, decisively be said to die. Every misstep, every indiscretion, all can be made into a zombie version of us, of ourselves. We would love, perhaps, to live in a world where there is one single computer somewhere that, once destroyed, frees us from the shackles of our homuncular selves, but, alas, no such computer exists. The avataring, the recursion, the simulation, the dilution of reality will all continue apace, particularly as AI becomes more and more a part of our day-to-day lives, and as the streaming services we use and, frankly, depend upon become more and more tightly tailored to us, to our desires, and to who we truly are.

Think I’m being paranoid? Well, if I am, I have super good company, and lots of it. Naomi Klein’s recent and terrifying book Doppelganger is precisely about this idea. Klein, for years, has been getting confused with another prominent intellectual feminist, named Naomi Wolf. This drives Klein bonkers, because Wolf has become—over the years since she gained fame for writing the feminist manifesto The Beauty Myth—a right-leaning, vaccine-denying, conspiracist. This is not the kind of person that Naomi Klein wants to be confused with: Klein is a leftist activist and author of numerous books critiquing capitalism and current socio-political trends, including the wildly successful book No Logo. Wolf is Klein’s doppelganger, a shadowy other, or avatar, or image, whom people widely confuse with Klein herself. Nothing Klein does can full shake this association people have between her and Wolf; people’s phones sometimes autocorrect Klein’s name to Wolf, she notes. And the greatest irony of Klein’s magnificent book is that, precisely by writing a book that attempts to dispel or dislodge the Wolvish Doppelganger from her tail, Klein has only more deeply linked the two of them together. I, for one, had absolutely no confusion about which Naomi I was a fan of: Klein all the way for me. But now that I’ve read her book, and I’ve seen the internet collapsibility of Klein with Wolf, I find that I have to check myself every single time I write down Klein’s name, to make sure I’m not writing “Wolf” by mistake, even though I’ve never read a single one of Wolf’s books, nor was I familiar with anything about her, prior to reading Klein’s own powerful and also somewhat despairing attempt to release herself from the shackle of her internet twin.

Still don’t believe me that we’re losing ourselves like zombies to our screens? Ask literally any teenaged human being you know—who has a smart phone—how they feel about their phone, about the internet, and about their social lives that take place there. Ask them whether they know anyone who’s been bullied through smart phone and social media usage. Ask them how they’d feel if their deepest secrets were broadcast on the internet. Watch them turn very, very pale. Ask them how they’d feel if someone hijacked their accounts, and started posting anonymous, adverse content about them. Ask them how many underage people they know who have posted illicit photographs of themselves online; ask them how those people feel now about those choices. The horrible, terrifying reality—at least as much for parents as for young people—is that teenagers and tweens are living in a zombie horror apocalypse already. It is already upon them, and they know it. Their addictions to their devices notwithstanding, they know that they have outsourced their selfhood to these devices and these social media platforms. And no matter how committed they may be to continuing to do that, on some level, most of them are aware of all that they’ve lost: the autonomy, the control, the glorious envelope of privacy that I grew up with, as did everyone else of my generation. And every prior generation in human history. All gone.

So like I said: the horror apocalpyse is already here.

Happy Independence Day.

*Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation is a great primer on this, especially directed at parents; Catherine Price’s book How to Break Up With Your Phone is another, aimed more squarely at adults who have realized their tech lives are out of control, and want to do something about it. It is also my understanding that Haidt and Price are currently collaborating on a book for tweens about the dangers of losing ourselves to screens, so stay tuned for that!