Today's post is about connecting three points of reference in popular culture today: the cultish interest in zombies and zombie memes, the widespread embracing of "geek" culture, and the ironic detachment that is essential to both of these phenomena.
I love making fun of people who are really into zombies and zombie films in an "ironic" way. This is perhaps the filmic equivalent of embracing the "ugly Christmas sweater": an ironic celebration of something known and accepted as corny and uninteresting simply for the sake of irony itself. And this is supposed to generate humor, viz.: "HAHA, this is funny because it's so BAD. I am funny because know its BAD but I STILL LIKE IT!" In a few minutes of brainstorming I'm sure we could come up with dozens of such examples of ironically elevating something to high desirability status precisely because it's so undesirable.
The "geek shall inherit the Earth" mentality similarly relies on a certain kind of irony: "geek chic" means embracing the awkwardness and social ineptitude stereotypically associated with geekdom as manifestations of a higher order of thinking. Geeks laud themselves as too preoccupied with more important things to sufficiently bother with personal hygiene, friendliness, or meaningful human contact. Being removed in this way excuses the geek to revel in technological advancement.
In each of these cases ironic detachment stands in as a way of refusing the questions of whether to pursue or aspire to something better, and how to judge what is deserving of our attention. Embracing crappy art might have started out as a laudable attempt at tearing down antiquated hierarchies of taste, but at this point it's become a way of constructing a new hierarchy with the ass end at the top. Similarly, embracing disconnectedness and antisocial behavior may have started as an admirable attempt to reclaim a derogatory word--"geek"--from the mouths of dumb jocks and bullies who wrongly deride people with technical or scholarly interests, but today it has become simply an excuse for the fetishization of technology and esoteric personal interests at the expense of meaningful human interaction.
Irony is the culprit here. Generally deployed with puerile thoughtlessness and (memes being exhibit A) an appeal to tribal thinking, today's tactless, diluted irony is a shell of its former self. Irony should have the power to make our hair stand on its ends; instead it makes expressionless people staring at computer screens and smartphones type LOL in silence.
What is deliciously ironic, however, is the way in which people walking about town staring into their smartphone screens actually resemble zombies. These are the new zombies, and I write this with sincerity. They amble around in zigzags bumping into things, feeding off the insipid e-content of other malnourished brains. Inside their heads there are no thoughts of their own; in fact, to be left without some kind of numbing stimulation--Facebook and Twitter updates, a news feed, a low-skill video game, etc.--I wonder whether these zombies are capable of achieving a single original thought, or whether they'd simply keel over or fall asleep if forced to live for a matter of seconds with nothing but the low buzz of their central nervous systems to distract them from living.
We need less irony, more sincerity today. We need to learn not merely to throw technological solutions at real problems, nor to duck them with ironic remove, but how to figure out which things we should sincerely care about. New Zombies are the sort who can't even figure out which things they themselves care about, or to abandon the idea of caring altogether. How can we take these people seriously? And how can we ever progress as a society that's too ironic to believe in progress?
