> And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do /not/ generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.
But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse.
The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment.
I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people.
After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.
Person 151 is not a non-person, they're just a member of another group, who's leadership will include the other groups within the 150 monkey-sphere hence the basis of hierarchical human societies.
The dumbest thing about most "preppers" is that they invariably develop absurd ideas about how their fortress will beat back the hordes they imagine to descend (sound familiar?) yet pay basically no attention to their local council, who would be the nearest level of organization and planning continuance which would allow a practical response if the larger systems failed.
This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.
> This isn't even speculative: the current the COVID-19 response in America has required local councils and city boards to coordinate, particularly in the absence of any clear direction at a Federal and frequently State level.
Yes. And so far the local responses have been better, or at least did less damage, than most of the more centralized actions. Like the FDA banning almost all tests.
Reminds me of the Subgenius advice for the faithful. In the end times don't be a sap holed up waiting for defend yourself against marauding gangs. Join a marauding gang as soon as possible.
I guess creating an apocalypse simulator game where you could play it very differently would be very hard to create (agent simulation) and might not be fun at all to play...
This is an interesting take on what zombie fiction is about:
> The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.
Contrast this to Christian Thorne [0], who writes:
> Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds. People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength. What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start, because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of multitudes.
I've watched/read a fair bit of zombie stuff, and I think Thorne is more on the mark about modern zombie movies. -- lots of scenes of zombies breaking down barricades or tearing people out of their cars (America's favorite refuge against crowds!). But movies that try harder to have a point, like the original Day of the Dead, lay it on pretty thick that we are the zombies (who, even after death, return to the mall to amble around). Which is, I think, more in-keeping with a 'zombies are slaves doomed to eternal toil' reading.
Colson Whitehead's 'Zone One' flips the slave/master dynamic by having a mediocre black protagonist advance in post-zombie society way more than he was ever going to pre-outbreak, because the C student who survives in a low-effort way is more resilient than traditional high-achievers.
I would say it's possible that the zombie myth has been independently reinvented in multiple places. I don't think it's necessarily been "appropriated". Though there is an obvious parallel in that both myths are about lack of freedom.
IMO, zombie movies symbolize a desire that people have to be free from the usual norms of society. More broadly, there is some part of us that desires chaos, and sees it as freeing. In a post-apocalyptic zombie world, there are no jobs, no rent to pay, no worrying about grooming yourself or fancy clothes, etc. Zombies are irredeemable, unsalvageable enemies. It's kill or be killed. In some ways, you could say that's simpler than modern society, with its many parallel games, hierarchies and rigid structures. In zombieland, there are no rules.
Beyond that, zombie movies are also an outlet for people to channel that pent up rage. They like to fantasize that they would be the badass survivor, shooting zombies in the head with a shotgun and chopping them up with axes, in some kind of ultimate "fuck you" to society. But hey, it's okay to kill people now, in that world, it's completely legit, they're no longer people.
Personally, I don't watch zombie movies because I feel like there's enough real drama in the world that I don't need to worry about gross imaginary drama. I also don't think it's the healthiest thing to cultivate violent fantasies where you kill everyone. Your life, your real life, may have its share of problems, but this definitely isn't how you're going to escape them.
The "faceless horde" angle is still in line with the "other uprising" allegory. Day of the Dead's predecessor, and the origin of the modern zombie in pop culture, had fairly overt racial undertones, and its sequel, in its concern with barrier-breaching ghouls, made plain the nationalistic undercurrents by setting the action in a military bunker.
There's really no getting around the influence of real-world race and class attitudes in shaping zombie fiction.
I just don't get the multiple people saying "Zombie epidemics as a topic are over because of COVID-19". They might be over just because there's been a glut of them, but in no way, shape, or form does the current pandemic resemble a zombie pandemic.
He's not saying that zombie epidemics as a topic are over, just that his take on it has been rendered obsolete by current events. It's sort of like a short short (either written by or edited by Isaac Asimov, I don't remember—I read it forty years ago) that proposed that Everest would never be summited because it had been colonized by Martians. Between acceptance and publication, Everest was summited.
Another similar instance just popped into my brain—in college a friend wrote a piece for the college paper in which, writing about political changes in Eastern Europe, he wrote, "but don't expect the Berlin Wall to come down any time soon."
As you might have guessed, the Berlin Wall came down between the writing and the publication.
I stumbled upon a paper I wrote in high school in 1987 about European unification. I came to the same conclusion; thankfully no one but my teacher ever read it, and I doubt she remembered it 2 years later.
He states in the article that the themes he wanted to explore in this novel aren’t worth exploring now that COVID-19 is making us deal with them right now. I wouldn’t say this is a “all zombie literature is over” post as much as a “my zombie literature project is over” post.
> I was very disappointed that Game of Thrones veered into just another zombie show.
It wasn't a veer. The show was always about the seven kingdoms bickering among themselves instead of facing the actual threat that they could have unified against.
(Or at least it was until the last few seasons were written by someone other than the original author, said author having not even come close to finishing the book series.)
Just look at the first episode. It doesn't start in Winterfell or King's Landing. It starts north of the wall.
FTR the show runners and the author had a lot of creative differences throughout the show (and especially in the later seasons) [1]
> "It can be... traumatic. Because sometimes their creative vision and your creative vision don't match, and you get the famous creative differences thing — that leads to a lot of conflict," he told Fast Company.
It started out as a zombie show, in the very first scene you had a Nightswatch patrol being killed by Zombies. The reason the Wildlings massed and marched on the wall was because they were being savaged by zombies.
I’m not, in the end, a fan; but to me, that was the entire point. In the face of this crisis, their petty wants and desires, and even the more pressing matters of who and how they should govern themselves were irrelevant in the face of an ultimate threat, no matter how important they felt to those people or to the audience. The one person who held out against letting those lesser things go even temporarily was completely destroyed.
To me that's like setting up a complex and interesting WW2 story, and then just smiting the earth with an asteroid. Lazy and boring. Never mind recycling all the usual zombie tropes. Oh, and throw in the usual Star Wars trope of the mass enemy has a single weak spot that one person can attack to wipe it all out. Zzzzzz.....
Is the asteroid something that's known to the audience and characters involved from the beginning of the story? Is the asteroid something they could unify against and push back if they'd just get over their differences? Is the asteroid something that experts are claiming is coming but laypeople deny first as a fairy tale, then as not as big a deal as people claim, right up until it meaningfully affects their own lives?
It's an important story to tell, and I think your dismissals are indicative of the same flaw as the characters: thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species.
> thinking the petty struggles they face are more important than the survival of the species
It's a flaw of these characters, and also of the contemporary society. There's a kind of distance towards "petty struggles" of everyday life that I'd consider a part of being mature.
Related: this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.
> this is why I like science-fiction, especially the older one that's written/directed by people who focus on ideas, and not people. I hate the modern critique of sci-fi that characters are "flat". If I wanted to read about character development, petty squabbles and love affairs, I'd pick literally any other genre.
I don't think that they're mutually exclusive. Much of the sci‑fi and fantasy I've enjoyed over the years does both.
Certainly there's more tolerance for flat characters in sci‑fi than in other genres because you can focus on ideas, I agree with that.
But if all the characters in your story are flat, it does impact the quality. You can have good sci‑fi with flat characters, but great sci‑fi requires both interesting ideas and interesting characters. (And that's not quite enough either, but that's a tangent we don't need to get into)
I think the real issue was that they got out in front of GRRM, at which point the show was essentially mediocre fan fiction.
GRRM's novels will deal with the same undead hoard, but I highly doubt they will read like 'just another zombie book'. That's what separates legendary artists from the nameless commercial hacks--the ability to take something that has been done to death and make it feel fresh and exciting.
>The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.
Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite.
This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.
His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.”
Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.
Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the rabble.
The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.
The truly elite use that fear. They aren’t afraid themselves.
> In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over.
Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these rules as 'laws'.
This happens because every gang eventually understands that in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.
The classic example of this on a massive scale is, of course, medieval Europe. All Roman-imposed centralized order broke down in a slow apocalypse and control reverted to local armed gangs... which then formed alliances and feudal pecking orders and gradually recentralized into kingdoms and empires.
I read a book in which the author related the nature of new societies after a breakdown to invasive plants - both being nasty and difficult to deal with, while extracting a lot of resources from a fairly tough environment, but in so doing making those resources bioavailable for more diverse future ecosystems.
It seems to apply pretty well to Mexico. Every time the cartels reach an equilibrium of violence where there’s a clear chain of command and territories violence drops. Then the Mexican state decides that having para-states on its territory is unacceptable, smashes them and violence increases. You see the same dynamic though not on the same scale in US organized crime history; the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now. The Mafia used violence less often because they were organized. People knew where they stood. Pay your protection money, don’t talk to the police unless they’re our police and you’re done.
No crime is better than organized crime is better than widespread disorganized crime.
I agree with you 100%, just wanted to add as an extra data point that after reading some of Max Weber's works I realised that he was the one that best described how society works in modern times (not saying that his observations were perfect, just closer to the perceived truth). He is of course the one that re-popularised the "monopoly on violence" [1] term that describes (among other, countless things) Italian Mafia's tactics (which I think Weber even mentions) and today's Mexican cartels' way of doing things.
As such, I highly recommend Weber's "Economy and Society" [2].
I was actually thinking about centuries, not just decades, referring, mostly, to the early formation of ancient societies. It is not a fast process by any means.
In modern times the process is, of course, can go much faster than in 2000BC, because everyone can see a template of a working system before their eyes in the form of existing countries, so they can just copy-paste the basic law / organizational structure instead of slowly inventing them.
> Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on.
Sounds to me that the need to move behind walls is a pretty strong indicator of the elite panic concept you are criticizing.
After all, if they didn't panicked then why did they felt the need to coward behind those walls and man them with armed minions?
And by the way, "fear the walking dead" is packed with seasons where the protagonists find themselves in a gated community where armed guards and passive protection measures are extensively used to keep the menacing zombies at Bay while living a pretty comfy life. Sounds a bit like Venezuela, doesn't it?
Because lots of people actually do want to kill them, and the walls keep those people out. It's the same phenomenon you see in South Africa - everyone who can afford it builds high walls and private security, because everyone who can afford it is a target.
Possibly not the best example - the people who can afford high walls and private security are usually white. South Africa was run for decades by a minority elite (racist) government that brutally subjugated the majority black population. The exact situation that the article talks about.
The article defines elite panic as a false panic; a "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans. If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for taking steps to avoid being murdered.
> The article defines elite panic as a false panic; a "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans.
Yes. It's a belief based on pseudo-morality, where those who are not privileged are portrayed as being rude uncultured barbarians who, without resorting to extreme violence and oppression, would represent a threat to their pure and pristine existence and social order.
It's the same argument that slave owners used to justify beating slaves to death.
>If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for taking steps to avoid being murdered.
You somehow left out the part where these elites resort to extreme violence and oppression to deprive their neighbors from fulfilling basic needs and instead of helping the community they outright represent a very real and very violent threat to them.
And then, as a feat of cognitive dissonance, these elites cowarding behind their castle walls try to fabricate a moral basis for the violence and oppression they inflict on the very society that permitted their life of privilege.
History strongly suggests that, in periods of disorder, even elites who did not resort to extreme violence and oppression will get murdered. ISIS didn't grant any leniency to nice elites who were well-loved by their local community.
That’s simply false. The aftermath of the American civil war for example worked out fine for large swaths of southern elites compared to the general population. Social disorder generally is bad for everyone, but the elites often recover faster with fewer problems.
Looking at say the fall of the USSR it was well connected elites that ended up making vast fortunes.
>If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them
This is akin to saying "well if some wifes cheat, being a paranoid, jealous husband is perfectly reasonable". It's not that bad things never happen to elites, it's a cognitive disorder because the paranoia is structural, regardless of what actually happens.
It's a disorder because the panic is a function of their social status and their position in society that they know is to a degree unearned (in particular in countries like South Africa or wheverever else the elite is a hereditary class), so in a sense they anticipate the resentment that is rightfully coming their way.
It's like, if you're a habitual liar and thief you also tend to think everyone else is as opportunistic as you are, and sometimes you're right, but that's not why you believe it in the first place.
You are making the same mistake as the elites who are panicking: someone is trying to kill them (Or, more likely, use the capabilities they have in order to improve their situation, at the expense of the elites. Killing people is usually less an end goal than kidnapping or theft.), therefore everyone who is not a similar elite is a "violent hooligan".
A lot of things are being described as a panic at the moment, and a lot of it is really just rational risk mitigation behaviour. The factors the influence risk management decisions are all pretty straightforward. You’ve got an assessment on the likelihood of the risk causing an impact, as assessment of the potential magnitude of that impact, a judgement about how much risk you’re willing to accept, and decision about how much resource you’re willing to commit to managing the risk. The way these panic discussions tend to go is first, ignore the fact that different people/organisations have different resources available to commit to risk management, then if you disagree with any of the judgements they make, describe it as a ‘panic’, rather than what it actually is, a rational decision that you might disagree with for some reason.
Therefore, the sane person lives inside a secured enclosure with military-grade defenses, with the potential threats making of their important decisions for them.
That's the default. For most of history that was how it worked; anyone who could afford to do so built a secured enclosure and hired military-grade defenses. We've managed to establish more peaceful norms, where most people's threat models don't need to include roving bands of soldiers or brigands on the highways. But these norms aren't infinitely resilient, and can be broken by sustained periods of disorder, as we've seen in many places around the world.
If you mean 'anyone who has exploited the community around them to the point that they themselves come off as a predator and danger to the community', this would very likely explain why they could 'afford' to build a castle, but might also shed some light on WHY they might practically require a castle, or soldiers.
If you mean 'anyone who has exploited the community around them to the point that they themselves come off as a predator and danger to the community'
This is the basic trope. Many of the Kulaks were simply peasants who knew how to farm better than their neighbors.
Funny, but the same justification is used against (often non-white) store owners in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where their only "crime" was simply running a store in that neighborhood. Some genuinely good people who create value are genuinely creating value. That also doesn't mean they're exempt from receiving delusional accusations of exploitation. By the same token, there are some exploiters as well. However such judgments can only be just on the basis of individual actions.
As always, we should be on the look out for those who use overly simplistic and reductionist prejudicial assumptions to make accusations. Over time, they often turn out to be history's villains.
> The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.
Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the travel restrictions across countries [0].
> The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.
And to drive the point home even more: many high-status politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19 and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.
Many high-status politicians are clueless fools with no idea how to avoid infection, or how to minimise the risk of contagion within their immediate circle.
Most won't die unless they're in a vulnerable age group. But they will spread the infection to friends, family, and colleagues, some of whom will die.
The median age in the House of Lords is 70.
As for elite panic - armed gangs are already a thing in the UK and US. The suggestion they wouldn't move into a power vacuum left by the police/military when they're already battling for turf with violence, extortion, and intimidation is hard to take seriously.
Yes, there are plenty of people who will help others, especially in nice middle class enclaves. But you only need a small minority of dark triad types willing to use violence to create an immediate problem for everyone.
>Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.
My father was a high-ranking US diplomat stationed in Taiwan during the early White Terror years. You have no idea how hard the people on the ground were working to stop Taiwan from tipping over in to a full dictatorship. It may seem hard to believe nowadays, but this was the era of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan- US foreign policy was strongly focused on building allies' infrastructure, both civil and legal.
The term "elite panic" is a very real thing based in actual historical events.
It traces its roots to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Maoist Revolution, where the rich/elite were slaughtered and imprisoned by mobs of peasants.
By comparison, the middle class didn't exist when these revolutions took place. The "middle class" is a very new construct that is only a few decades old, dating back to the post WWII economic boom.
That's not entirely true. The middle class used to be known as the bourgeoisie, and before that they were traders, merchants, and sometimes small-scale artisans, who were below the local aristocracy, but above the peasants, serfs, and cannon fodder.
The US has a peculiar definition which includes workers who would normally be considered working class. The true middle classes are usually professionals with advanced specialisms that require above-average intellect and education, and typically include some element of management and administration. They have some political leverage, but typically less than they think.
This version of the middle classes emerged as the administrative, technical, scientific, medical, and legal support for company owners and speculators during the Industrial Revolution. This is still recognisable today. (It was a huge problem during the Maoist revolution, and Mao went out of his way to destroy and "reeducate" this class - because they were capable of resisting him.)
The upper classes rely on inherited wealth and power, make their money from property, land, share ownership and other forms of rent seeking, have direct personal connections to networks that shape policy and power, and don't need to work unless they choose to.
> His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.”
And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American plantation class was so terrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
'deserved' has nothing to do with it. The American South elites deserved it almost as much as the Haitian planters did; and they were likely correct to fear it, contrary to Stross's glib dismissal of their fears as irrational.
I think I realised what strikes me as untrue about the 'elite panic' idea - that 'pulling together in emergencies' Stross referred to is typical to temporary emergencies. I don't think the Elite's fear is anywhere near as irrational as he paints it.
There's one unsettling fact I keep thinking about in regards to this topic - before everything went to hell, Rwanda and Afghanistan both had higher literacy rates than was typical for their respective regions. I think Stross's very middle class values are out of touch with the reality of the human condition in a way that both the very rich and the poor aren't.
I say this as a fan of the Laundry files, I think he might be having trouble imagining realistic near-future settings because realistic depictions of the near future don't have a middle class, and that is not something Stross can quite envision.
Agreed, and the author (whose work I generally love) seems to also set up a straw man, considering cases where a small, single-digit percentage of humanity is affected. Sure, in that case, there won't be much social upheaval, as most institutions of "civilization" will remain intact.
If you consider a zombie story in the vein of The Walking Dead, we're confronted with a world where something like 90-99% of humanity is dead or zombified. Governments are gone, militaries are gone, industry is gone. I expect we'd see a pretty violent world where people try to protect their immediate family and are naturally distrustful of all but small groups of people. I don't think this has anything to do with so-called "elite panic"; if you reduce people to constantly struggling to fulfill basic survival needs, and remove any kind of laws or consequences, people will do whatever they need to do, and resorting to violence will end up quite common.
Many societies with turmoil have managed to resolve the situation and went back to normal. Surely that depends on the attitudes of people, and especially leadership, on how to deal with the situation.
Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do.
In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
> "In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other."
That's starkly contradicted by the absence of toilet paper and other staples on store shelves at the individual level and the ongoing profiteering on and commandeering of medical protective gear and other medical supplies at the international level.
The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs.
Also note, that many (though not all) of the "aristos" executed in the French Revolution were people lower down on the hierarchy. These were the people more easily visible and accessible to the mob.
The panic strikes the middle group the most, because the danger is the most real for them!
Here's a contemporary example of elite panic cynically deployed to sway an election.
Georgia Rep. Paul Broun released an ad warning that "in uncertain times like these," it’s important to protect yourself against "looting hordes from Atlanta" along with video of him carrying a rifle.
Yeah, I lost a bit of respect for Stross' intelligence when I read that part about elite panic. Stross also doesn't seem to understand that just because a person prepares for the possibility that the masses might become violent doesn't mean that the person necessarily thinks that outcome to be the most likely one - it's just better to be safe than sorry.
>The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.
Only if the disaster is relatively manageable. History has many examples of elites being killed during political upheaval.
Interesting, can you share the name a book, preferably rife with examples, where I can learn about the "In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over." thesis?
There is no name-calling in my comment, which is merely an expression of my (rather obvious) view that the analytical framework Stross employs to critique zombie literature is drawn from Marxist literary theory, rather than, say, New Criticism, formalism, romanticism, structuralism, or any of the other analytical frameworks he might have adopted.
I like formalism! My favorite was Shklovsky. The falling stone.
Sorry, but "pre-Pomo Marxist literary criticism" counts as name-calling on an internet forum, unless you do something to make it clear you don't intend it that way—and you did just the opposite. Also, while I don't know anything about cstross really, I strongly doubt that he's a Marxist. The odds of an internet commenter spuriously spouting "Marxist!" are much higher. At a minimum, you'd have to make a serious case, which you didn't, hence the epithet "unsubstantive".
Look at it this way: if you reduce someone's post to a theory you regard as stupid, as a reductio ad absurdum, you're narrowing the discussion rather than expanding it. We want curious conversation here. That's a different mentality. We all have it in us to do both—close down or open further—but unfortunately the default is closing down. On this forum, the idea is to go against the default for great good.
The original paper is pretty interesting, and much more nuanced than Stross’s summary.
“Our claim is most controversial,and tenuous, regarding the idea of elite panic.We believe that elites panic just as non-elites do. Because the positions they occupy command the power to move resources, elite panic is more consequential than public panic.”
The paper overall references the fact that that historically, people in authority assume the public will panic, and most data suggests that they don’t. And ‘elites’ in this context means those in authority, not “rich and/or privileged people”.
They actually discus three possibilities: that
1) elites fear panic
2) elites cause panic
3) elites themselves panic
However, the paper certainly doesn’t suggest that ‘elites’ are somehow more prone to panic than the rest of society.
“Elites and Panic : more to fear than fear itself”
Clarke and Chess
Most of the media zombie scenarios create very hostile environments and rapid breakdown of society. They're essentially engineered to create this situation. The zombies spread the disease actively. Near 100% conversion rate (immunities or asymptomatic cases are extremely rare). Incubating individuals will turn on those around them. And of course there often is a lack of genre awareness, the very concept of a zombie apocalypse is unknown.
This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie horde. So there's a huge selection bias.
This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of society are still working and the infected are not going out of their way to infect more people. And even now we're already seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-themselves attitude around medical equipment.
Most of the infected aren't going out of their way and infecting people. A small number of the infected are acting with, at least, reckless disregard for the possibility of infecting others.
That was a small evo-psych study (38 people) and it wasn’t a study of the flu but rather the vaccine so there are other possibilities. It’s certainly possible but I’d avoid giving it much weight without more data.
Yesterday I read an article that claims an opposite of elite panic -- working class denial? -- of the virus is happening in my city [0].
The thesis is that a community (euphemistically termed a "subculture") of older African Americans in Philadelphia refuse to participate in the quarantine due to their skepticism of the federal government's public health directives due to previous medical conspiracies, namely the Tuskegee Experiments.
You're missing an adjective in there. It takes a special kind of mind to cite a case of government disregarding the health of African-Americans, as rationale for the thesis there is no health risk.
As someone who grew up outside of the USA, I feel like the problem in America is the diametrically opposite one.
People have too much faith in "normality", rule of law and relative stability and don't realize that stuff like that breaks down and stops working very easily, with even minor disruptions. Power plants are suddenly not supplied with oil, being stopped by a cop can be scarier than being stopped by a robber, and if you confront someone trying to break down a building door in the middle of the day their response is "so what are you going to do? go away before you get in trouble". etc. Or as some guy from Argentina described, if someone steps in front of your car you hit the gas, not the break. Heck, the order broke down in NO after Katrina - and it was a small, short-lived, localized inconvenience by developing world standards.
The "elite panic" is spot on and should not be confined to the elites, especially given the non-existent safety net, and the widespread accessibility of firearms.
> It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite.
This really hit home for me. It has always struck me as supremely odd, the civilization-breakdown fantasies that people have when I suggest that everyone in a society, not just the police, have easy and unrestrained access to arms, as advocated by many throughout history. This seems to be their worldview: without the threat of cop (with superior firepower than any random person), that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict.
It’s plainly wrong on its face, even without invoking the reality that there are many peaceful and prosperous places in the US wherein the private arms significantly outnumber those of the state.
I have tried for a long time to understand this view, and Charlie just dropped in the missing puzzle piece. This almost makes up for how wrong he’s been about bitcoin.
The easy access to arms doesn't destabilise, if anything it stabilises. It does, however, result in a constant tick-over of domestic murders, suicides, accidents, people shot dead by toddlers, and (in the US) seemingly purposeless mass murder-suicides.
Coronavirus has only just overtaken the US's normal firearms death toll.
> ... that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict.
To provide context, here is some data on that:
"cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014."
That doesn't amount to "civilization-breakdown", but whether it's a level that's worth worrying about is something different people will feel differently about. I suspect it is a higher number of cases (per capita) than many other countries with stricter gun laws.
How many of those were would-be fistfights that were de-escalated to nonviolence by brandishing (literally: holding a weapon) by a victim? A lot of casually violent people become a lot more polite when they realize they don’t get to punch or beat whomever they like. That’s a good outcome, to me, but that figure lumps it in with violence where people get shot, mixing good gun-related outcomes with bad ones, as if brandishing is an end in itself to be prevented.
You can’t really stop road ragers from getting out of their car with the intent to hit someone. You can indeed convince them that attacking armed strangers is a bad idea—without anyone being hurt.
Providing context means, well, providing context, not just tossing out a composite figure without background or breakdown. A good actual context for that would be the not-gun-related road rage assault figures before and after, and what percentage of that increase is brandished (no one injured) vs shot/shot at (violence that should be prevented/reduced).
Yeah, gun brandishing incidents is a really weird thing to get worked up about. Gun homicides, sure - but those have been going down in the US since the 90s. (Despite the assault weapons ban expiring. Funny, that)
Homicides aren't normally committed by people who would need an assault rifle, and most are probably not using an assault rifle to kill themselves, either.
Also, I wouldn't exactly feel good if someone cut me off for driving a little too slow for them and they waved a gun at me. Somehow these arguments make that OK as if it isn't an escalation or is "oh well gee at least we didn't fist fight."
I can't comprehend a 1 in a million per year event (brandishing, not even necessarily firing) being anywhere the top of anyone's list of things to worry about.
Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!) and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here: https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/
While I've never seen The Walking Dead, I'm a little puzzled why someone would balk at a post-apocalyptic "nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out". Without civilization and culture this is what human beings are like. It's the "state of nature" Hobbes wrote about, and much of it fits with observed behavior of hunter-gatherers as well as chimpanzees.
I'm not saying you and me and all the nice friendly people you know are like this, deep down. I mean, some of us probably are and are just good at hiding it, but many of us aren't. But in a Malthusian scenario where survival is at a premium and the material abundance of modern civilization is no longer here, who do you think is going to survive?
"I am Legend" not only portrayed surviving humans as more sympathetic toward each other, but even humanized the infected zombies (to a degree). The zombies had a leader, and he was motivated not by a desire to kill humans, but by what appeared to be desperate love of someone taken from him.
I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.
In the US there is the well-known phenomenon that during big catastrophes the media will concentrate on looting, as if this was a big problem and not the reasonable response to closed stores, full of products that people need.
>> To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence.
I was surprised when a lot of people started expressing concerns about lawlessness recently, because it wasn't obvious to me why this crisis should lead to that.
It’s so emotionally compressed into one vibe and hyper stylized visually how anyone can sit down with the intent of making real sense of it is bizarre.
It’s highly customized to satisfy a target audience. Not generalized like so much other media.
Go interact with real people, or create your own.
I’ve been curating a space opera for a decade. 3,000+ typed pages.
I have no desire to give it up to the public and find it almost meditative. Haven’t seen any of the new SW movies, or sci fi in the last decade. I borrow ideas as Lucas, etc did. It all just flows.
I don’t really owe society a financial return on my endeavors either.
Grew up this way though. I honestly don’t care if anyone ever finds value in my efforts.
Putting in work to satisfy others isn’t why I get up in the morning.
Let go of market economics and free yourself to be a multi disciplinarian.
What always bugged me about zombie movies is that no one seems to figure out a way to take advantage of it beyond total anarchy.
I would expect enterprising individuals to see zombies as a potential tool. Like maybe figure out what makes them tick (they never seem to possess intelligent thought) and leverage them for a labour force or army. What are they fuelled by? Can they be taught to perform complex tasks through reward / punishment?
Seems like the next logical distopian step to take, and brings up all sorts of complicated mechanics, economics, and morality questions.
It's not really the point of a zombie movie, or any movie or story containing magical, free-energy beings/things/spells/doodads for that matter. It's just an accidental consequence of the magic/fantasy.
For zombies the point (and the plot) should always revolve around the existential dread of relentless, never-ending hordes of beings who want to eat your brains.
It's like the old story about the very best thing superman could do is simply turn a crank powering the world's energy. All that flying around saving people is actually a massive, inefficient, effectively people-killing, waste of time.
Try writing many series of comics about that though!
I'm really not sure what zombie movies you're referring to, but any zombie movie that goes far enough time-wise after the zombies rise, pretty much always comes to a point where people start using zombies. Movies usually don't because it's hard to fit the long game into 120 minutes, but any series of books or TV show I've come across does exactly that.
I think it's pretty reasonable that early on in a zombie apocalypse, "enterprising individuals" would be just trying to figure out how to stay alive.
Zombies also seem to just keep moving without any energy input. Figure out how to keep them moving where you want them and you have a generator that runs as long as the zombie is solid enough to move it. If you're dealing with Walking Dead rules where everyone turns after death, and it's a renewing resource.
The Alien series, while not being precisely zombies, have as a major subplot the desire to weaponise something that eats humans. And this inevitably turns on those who think they can control the aliens.
the early zombie movies covered this too. It was a major plot point of the research of living with the virus (and training them) via intelligence vs eliminating it via brute strength
> this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising
I think it's a pretty fair to say the modern zombie story starts with Night of the Living Dead, and this viewpoint couldn't possibly be any further from how Romero handles themes of race, class, and authority.
I mean, maybe it's because I don't watch Walking Dead, but I've never seen a zombie film where I thought I was supposed to empathize with the protagonists. Except maybe Shaun of the Dead!
Also used by Stanislaw Lem in "A Perfect Vacuum" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Perfect_Vacuum The last review in that book anticipates much of the premise of Cixin Liu's "Remembrance of Earth's Past".
Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read, and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a newspaper review when it was released.
Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun.
You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from:
For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
Merchant Princess started off as "secret royal heritage" fantasy - the first 3 books (which were later recombined into one larger book, IIRC) were closer to alternate-universe fantasy than the subsequent books, which are more sci-fi/[rot13-spoiler]nygreangr-uvfgbel[/rot13-spoiler]/wormhole-opera? Also, I need to catch up on the series
Stross's blog posts on the series are fascinating reads. The short badly paraphrased tale is that Stross wanted to diversify his publishers but was contractually obligated to give sci-fi books to his first publisher, so he pitched a "fantasy" book. Stross being Stross though, he can't actually write a fantasy novel so it was stealth sci-fi, because of course it was.
He wrote the first book in the 1000+ page "door stop" form common to a lot of "high fantasy" mega-authors like Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, GRRM, Robert Jordan, et al, because Stross wrongly assumed that was the intended form factor of a fantasy novel (because it wasn't his native genre and when you do look at bookshelves they are rather dominated by the mega-books), and the publisher did exactly what JRR Tolkien's publisher did for Lord of the Rings and said it was way too long for a first book in a new series, as that would be expensive if it didn't sell well, and chopped it (somewhat roughly) into three books. (So the combination of the first three books was actually recombination into something more resembling their original manuscript form.)
I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
> The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered.
> That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.
> This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived.
Pet peeve: An expatriate isn't like an ex-skier, it comes from "to expatriate", ie to drive out of one's country, like "excommunicate" or "excise". Something that has been excised wasn't formerly cised.
I thought that was pretty obviously tongue-in-cheek: ex-zombie...ex-skier...ex-patriate. And this was disclaimed as a very rough first draft - I'm guessing the author (in subsequent drafts),an editor or a test-reader would have caught it & have it revised (it's pretty low-effort wordplay - but that's more than OK for a first draft as disclaimed, and the author could even keep it if they feel strongly about it)
There are some science fiction tropes that become really obvious when you start looking for them. For one, check out Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Heinlein's Puppet Masters: that's "the Commies are among us", and it's not surprising that it became a significant thing in the 1950s. Although the idea that there are a group of people out there who look and act completely normal but who are actually out to destroy everything that decent people hold dear is a pretty common fear; demonic possession and all.
The Zombie 'Pocalypse is another. Charlie's right, it is the same fear as that of the owners of an antebellum Southern plantation at the mention of a slave uprising. The idea that all of the people you live with every day might suddenly turn into degenerate, savage monsters yearning to snack on your favorite nervous system is pretty scary, though. But it doesn't really have anything to do with infection or disease, and he is wrong to try to tie the two together. The infection isn't the important part.
Oh, and let's wait until the next time something like the current pandemic happens before we pass too much judgement on how people react. Consider the difference between the Northeast blackout of 1965 and the New York City blackout of 1977.
His previous novels had many tropes. In fact, most stories do, and it should probably not stop one from writing them. You will be hard-pressed to find stories without numerous familiar tropes.
In rhetoric, the revolutionary slogan is "we're going to take money from the rich", but what happens in reality is more like "we're going to take the money from the rich and then murder them".
Also: The Kulaks in the Ukraine. Various persons during various Maoist upheavals in China.
Everyone has the same illusions to different degrees: "Our side doesn't do these bad things." Then, when the facts come out, "It was justified!"
I don't think it works like that at all. I think the cognitive process is more like
"they have all the stuff, and we have nothing. They have it because they're stealing it from us. And they know we're starving and they don't care, so they're existential enemies to us, and they deserve to die".
Thus the process is completely one-sided, and there is very little the other side can do.
I can see how someone on the other side would view things this way, deaf as they are to the protest of the lower half of the wealth pyramid. However, if the conversation is one-sided, it's not because poor people are quiet, but because they've been rendered voiceless by the inattention and apathy of the upper classes.
They'll still be surprised when the people who have been posting guillotine memes for half a decade start killing rich people. There was always an explicit, if ignored, desire to avoid that by having the system change before it was necessary.
And also saying that it was Jewish elites that were killed. I’m sorry, no definition of ‘elite’ includes six million people. Grotesque and offensive on every level.
The vast majority of Jewish people who died in the Holocaust were not elites - however, it is true that German resentment against rich and influential Jewish people in politics, business, the media, and arts played a huge role in leading to the Holocaust. Anti-Jewish sentiment in pre-WW2 Germany was not very different from anti-Jewish sentiment today. Already back then, as still is the case now, antisemites tended to target their ire against Jewish people's disproportionate influence over politics, the economy, media, the arts and so on. The fact that most Jewish people are not rich and influential does not dissuade those types. For many or most antisemites, resentment against rich and influential Jewish people soon swells into a generalized resentment against almost all or all Jewish people. So, for example, the Nazis ended up killing huge numbers of poor Eastern European Jews who could not be described in any way, shape, or form as elites. But this does not mean that the resentment did not originally largely stem from resentment against well-off and influential Jewish people.
In my experience, most antisemites are fairly stupid* and it is hard for them to understand the logic which says "just because a small subset of a certain ethnic/cultural group has disproportionate influence over the society in which they live does not mean that every member of that ethnic/cultural group has disproportionate influence over that society".
This fallacy is sort of like thinking that, because most NBA players are African-American, it means that most or all African-Americans must be really good at basketball. Rather obviously flawed logic.
*Certainly not all, though - the more intelligent ones probably contribute the bulk of antisemitic literature.
While I don't agree with the gp's vehemence, saying that a certain statement is "almost literally equivalent to Holocaust denial" doesn't mean accusing someone of Holocaust denial- but of something similar.
Btw, accusing someone of something should or should not be a bannable offence independently from the accused ethnicity or religion. You don't want to have classes of people who can or cannot be accused of something on a "racial" basis, do you?
But that's not the standard zombie scenario. Having 1% of the population being somehow sick and dying or a strain on the medical resources doesn't make society collapse.
The zombie scenario is that only 1% of the population is unaffected and society breaks down and disappears and modern humans, humans living after the Enlightement, have to survive in a hostile environment.
I agree with Charles Stross that people don't just bash their heads in a crisis but that they start to look after their own community. But this probably stops after we reach the magical number of 150 people.
After that, other people are not friends anymore and how we deal with them when resources are scarce, well, I'm not as optimistic as he is. Just look at the current mediterranean situation and that's when resources aren't actually scarce.