Tag: zombies

Anti-Capitalist Meet-Up: 30 June 2013 A Ghost in a Machine walks the Globe by Annieli

If one can claim that a virtual economy offers increased possibility for revolutionary political change, that change should be measured against more material forms of analysis rather than treating information commodities as epiphenomenal. The tenuous connection between correlation and causation much like the meme of “Voodoo Economics” was treated more lightly and less seriously in a 2010 Bruce Watson piece on zombies and vampires as seasonally or cyclically symptomatic of a national economy:

there appears to be a loose connection between recession cycles and monster movies: zombie films tend to be more popular during boom times, while vampire flicks are ascendant when the economy is bad. As I wrote at the time, this makes a certain sort of symbolic sense: after all, as unthinking consumers, zombies reflect the tone of high-consumption boom times. The more melancholic vampires, on the other hand, suggest buyer’s remorse. While the zombie/vampire recession cycle didn’t always hold true, I found that it had a few interesting connections to the economy. For example, for most of the Reagan spend-till-you-drop 1980’s, zombie films dominated movie theaters. In fact, vampire movies’ only brief moment of ascendence in the decade was in 1987-1988, when a stock market tumble sent the economy into recession. Similarly, in 1991 and 2001, vampire films spiked and zombie films fell behind as recessions struck.

Aside from the doomsday preppers and faux survivalists in Dollywood and Hollywood invoking the fear of a zombie apocalypse as signs of an impending breakdown of urban society double-coded as racism, vampires and zombies can be differentiated by information while serving as cultural commodities in mass media. Vampires are asymmetric information commodities since in media narratives their representations appear conventional at first, whereas zombies are symmetric in that we know them instantly by their appearance. In either case they represent a pathological tipping point where fear trumps rationality and wooden stakes, garlic, holy water and shotguns make their appearance in contemporary film.

In a material context, such contemporary monsters represent the same class fears represented by European revolution in the Nineteenth Century not unlike the colonizers’ fears of the colonized or the contemporary anti-immigrant discourse where Americans ignore the labor history of the bracero and the coolie as invisible, informal Gastarbeiter.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre

Marx’s invocation becomes more or less ironic in the post-Soviet period

Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale is a 1993 book by French philosopher Jacques Derrida The title Spectres of Marx is an allusion to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ statement at the beginning of The Communist Manifesto that a “spectre [is] haunting Europe.” For Derrida, the spirit of Marx is even more relevant now since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of communism. With its death the spectre of communism begins to make visits on the earth. Derrida seeks to do the work of inheriting from Marx, that is, not communism, but of the philosophy of responsibility, and of Marx’s spirit of radical critique.

The philosophy of responsibility may be best represented in the problematic role of information and national security in a virtual surveillance state where Ed Snowden may be a vampire presently in the undead transit lounge of a Russian airport, avoiding the cleansing hot light of sunshine law. The disclosure of information asymmetrically held by a democratic state committed to a public sphere operates in contradiction to its multinational, geopolitical obligations.

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. [4] If the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist Link

Virtuality has conditioned all forms of labour to some degree, creating different classes of worker, set against each other, not conscious of the web of virtuality that links them all into a single multitude. That unity is virtual in one sense – a potential that could be activated by virtuality in another sense, the resources of the net.

Come below the squiggle for more “mysterious forces or powers that govern the world and the lives of those who reside within it, but also a range of artistic forms that function in conjunction with these vodun (sic) energies.”

If you’re a zombie, and you know it, clap your hands!

Ha ha.  That’s a joke.  Zombies can clap, but by definition, do not have conscious awareness.

Now that [Health Care is] done, Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents. It’s always possible of course that, like LBJ, he’ll get involved in some unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation.

Yglesias giving some tongue action

Suffering succotash: The Punchline.

What zombie banksters learned from destroying capitalism.

First, they learned that financial markets are hyper-sensitive to steroids, lack of law enforcement, and time-tested shock doctrine principles, and that they can profit mightily from destroying capitalism.


Insert a shitload of obscene charts about here.

Second, they learned that they “own the place,” “the place” meaning “the potemkin government,” “no longer applicable laws,” “the future wealth of all dispossessed generations of slaves, thralls, and hostages;” and “owning” meaning “complete mastery of all worldly possessions unto the end of the earth and beyond.”  Third, they learned that no lies are too big to tell.  Fourth, they now keenly understand that the religion of financial growth is the most powerful Kool-Aid invented, and now it’s just a matter of getting everyone on the plane to Jonestown.

Overnight Caption Contest

No Brains For Oil: Zombie Nation Strikes Again!

Sometimes I can be impulsive with my camera, and yesterday was one of those days.  Someone at FaceBook let me know that in a few minutes, a bunch of zombies would be assembling at “The Troll” that lives under the Aurora Bridge in Fremont (“Center of the Universe”) in Seattle.  I headed out.

Why zombies?  It’s Halloween season and there are new horror films out.  That’s not all though.  Zombies are also party a manifestation of a healthy “question authority” attitude spawned in San Francisco with the guerilla “occupation” of straight bars by gays and lesbians.  It has mushroomed into groups of marauding zombies, hordes of Santas who last year rode the carousel downtown and infiltrated a fetish convention, and legions of brides of both genders who will marry promient “phallic” monuments (such as the Space Needle and Hammering Man), come spring.

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(more photos & discussion at http://www.silencedm…)