Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (32 page)

This is the difference between the networked sensibility and paranoia—between pattern recognition and full-fledged fractalnoia. The fractalnoid is developing the ability to see the connections between things but can only understand them as having something to do with himself. This is the very definition of paranoia. As the title of Gordon Bell’s best archived speech on the project explains it, “MyLifeBits: A Transaction Processing Database for Everything Personal.”

But that’s just it: in a fractal landscape,
nothing
is personal. This may be the hardest lesson for victims of present shock to accept: it’s not about you.

APOCALYPTO

A
s I saw it,
his big mistake was showing me the compound at all. But I suppose the numerous construction crews and contractors responsible for converting this former missile silo into an apocalypse bunker know its location as well. So does the documentary crew from History Channel who filmed him there a few weeks before my own visit. Still, a promise is a promise, so I won’t tell you in which Midwestern state (starts with
K
) “Dan” (not his real name) has built the bunker he believes will be capable of sustaining him and his family through the apocalypse.

“I don’t mean apocalypse in the religious way,” Dan explains as he escorts me down the single spiral metal staircase leading to the living quarters. (Hard to get out in a fire, I suppose, but easier to defend if attacked.) “I’m thinking
Contagion
,
Asteroid
, even
China Syndrome
,” he explains, using movie-title shorthand for global pandemic, collision with an asteroid, or nuclear meltdown. He is used to being interviewed.

“What about
The Day After Tomorrow
?” I suggest, bringing climate change into the mix.

“Not likely,” Dan says. “That’s been debunked.”

Dan is a former real estate assessor who now makes his living selling information online to “preppers” like himself, who have assumed that catastrophe is imminent and that the best way through is to prepare for the inevitable collapse of civilization as we know it. Even without an apocalypse, the bunker is about as nice as one could expect a windowless underground apartment to get. It has been built into the control rooms of a decommissioned nuclear missile silo that is surrounded by a dozen feet of concrete in all directions.

Still, the air is significantly cooler and more pollen-free than the summer-scorched fields aboveground, making the place feel more than livable. There’s a little kitchen done up in ’70s colors: lime green laminate countertops and orange vinyl chairs. It’s a bit like what you’d see in a nice trailer home or on a houseboat. There’s a door leading to a series of pantries I’m told contain a ten-year supply of food for six people. On the next level, three bedrooms and a media room with built-in monitors and a couch that looks like it time traveled from an
Avengers
episode. The whole place has been meticulously designed—not just its interior finishes but the solar-powered generators, the air-purification system, the radiation shielding, and the intrusion-deterrence system. It is as well thought-out as ten screenplays, with each doomsday scenario integrated into the layout or hardware.

I can’t help but imagine myself in this setting, having time to watch the entire Criterion Collection of DVDs, read the philosophy I’ve never had time for (most of whatever happened between Saint Thomas Aquinas and, say, Francis Bacon), or get to know my family without the pressures of homework, the Internet, or neighbors. Time for . . .

And then I realize I have been sucked in by the allure. This missile silo repurposed as a bomb shelter isn’t a Plan B at all, but a fantasy. Whether Dan ever has to—or
gets
to—live in this place, its mere creation may be its truest purpose. Where the basement model railroad once gave the underachiever a chance to build and run a world, the doomsday apartment gives the overwhelmed present-shock victim the chance to experience the relief of finality and a return to old-fashioned time.

Dan and thousands of other preppers and doomsdayers around the world (but particularly in the United States) expect a complete societal breakdown in their own lifetimes. Their visions are confirmed by media such as History Channel’s
Armageddon
week or ads on Christian and right-wing radio for MREs (meals, ready to eat, used by soldiers) and silver coins (to use after the collapse of the banking system). A company named Vivos is selling reservations for apartments in a Walmart-sized bunker in Nebraska. An initial down payment of $25,000 earns you a place in an underground community where they have thought of everything, from a beauty salon to a small prison for those who might get out of control after the world is gone.

Sales of Vivos and similar bunkers increase tenfold during well-covered disasters such as nuclear accidents, pandemic scares, and terrorist events. But there’s more than rational self-preservation at work here. Apocalyptic headlines give justification to a deeper urge. Any natural or man-made disaster simply provides the pretense to succumb to what we will call
apocalypto—
a belief in the imminent shift of humanity into an unrecognizably different form.

At least the annihilation of the human race—or its transmogrification into silicon—resolves the precarious uncertainty of present shock. So far in our journey, we have seen the human story collapse from a narrative into an endless occupation or infinite game. We have seen how digital technology continually challenges our coherence and connection to the natural rhythms that used to define our biology and psychology alike. We have watched banks and businesses compress time into time, leveraging the moment like an overwound spring. And we have seen identity itself devolve into a nonlocal pattern in a depersonalized fractal. Apocalypto gives us a way out. A line in the sand. An us and a them. And, more important, a before and an after.

That’s why it’s important that we distinguish between valid concerns about the survival of our species and these more fantastic wishes for reversal and recognition—the story elements at the end of all heroic journeys. If anything, the common conflation of so many apocalypse scenarios—bird flu, asteroid, terrorist attack—camouflages ones that may actually be in progress, such as climate change or the slow poisoning of the oceans. In their book
The Last Myth
, Mathew Barrett and Mel Gilles put it this way:

By allowing the challenges of the 21st century to be hijacked by the apocalyptic storyline, we find ourselves awaiting a moment of clarity when the problems we must confront will become apparent to all—or when those challenges will magically disappear, like other failed prophecies about the end of the world. Yet the real challenges we must face are not future events that we imagine or dismiss through apocalyptic scenarios of collapse—they are existing trends. The evidence suggests that much of what we fear in the future—the collapse of the economy, the arrival of peak oil and global warming and resource wars—has already begun. We can wait forever, while the world unravels before our very eyes, for an apocalypse that won’t come.
¹

For many, it’s easier, or at least more comforting, to approach these problems as intractable. They’re just too complex and would involve levels of agreement, cooperation, and coordination that seem beyond the capacity of humans at this stage in our cultural evolution, anyway. So in lieu of doing the actual hard work of fixing these problems in the present, we fantasize instead about life afterward. The crisis of global warming morphs into the fantasy of living off the grid. The threat of a terrorist attack on our office tower leads us to purchase an emergency personal parachute for easy egress, and to wonder how far up the org chart we might be promoted once everyone else is gone. The collapse of civilization due to nuclear accident, peak oil, or SARS epidemic finally ends the ever-present barrage of media, tax forms, toxic spills, and mortgage payments, opening the way to a simpler life of farming, maintaining shelter, and maybe defending one’s family.

The hardest part of living in present shock is that there’s no end and, for that matter, no beginning. It’s a chronic plateau of interminable stresses that seem to have always been there. There’s no original source to blame and no end in sight. This is why the return to simplicity offered by the most extreme scenarios is proving so alluring to so many of us.

I, ZOMBIE

Even those of us who aren’t storing up on survival shelter supplies at Costco (yes, they now sell MREs and other apocalypse goods) are nonetheless anxious to fantasize about the coming Armageddon. In popular culture, this wish fulfillment takes the form of zombie movies and television shows, suddenly resurrected in the twenty-first century after decades of entombment. AMC’s
The Walking Dead
, in which a ragtag group of fairly regular folks attempts to survive a total zombie apocalypse, is the highest-rated basic-cable drama of all time.

Like any great action drama, a zombie show gives its viewers the opportunity to strategize, vicariously, on a very simple playing field. Scenario: two people are running from a horde of flesh-eating zombies and losing ground. If one person shoots the other, will this attract enough zombies to the victim to allow the shooter to get away? Is such a sacrifice ethical? What if it allows the shooter to return to the camp with medical supplies that save a dying child? This was the climax of just one episode of
The Walking Dead
, which—like many others—spawned countless pages of online discussion.

The Prisoner’s Dilemma–like clarity of the scenario reassures modern audiences the way Cain and Abel simplified reality for our ancestors. But in our case, there’s no God in judgment; rather, it’s the zero-sum game of people with none of civilization’s trappings to mask the stark selfishness of every choice, and no holy narrative to justify those choices.

The zombie legend originated in the spiritual practices of Afro-Caribbean sects that believed a person could be robbed of his soul by supernatural or shamanic means and forced to work as an uncomplaining slave. Canadian ethnobotanist Wade Davis studied Haitian voodoo rituals in the 1980s and determined that a kind of “zombie” state can be induced with powerful naturally derived drugs. In horror films, people become zombies by whatever process is deemed scariest by the filmmaker of the era—magic, possession, viral infection—but the result is the same. The victim becomes a walking corpse, a human without a soul.

Indeed, zombies are the perfect horror creations for a media-saturated age in which we are overloaded with reports of terrorism, famine, disease, and warfare. Zombies tap into our primal fear of being consumed and force us to come up with something—anything—to distinguish ourselves from the ever-hungry, animated corpses traipsing about the countryside and eating flesh. Deep down, these schlocky horror flicks are asking profound questions: What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning? How will it all end?

The way in which zombie movies pose these questions has changed significantly over time, telling us more about ourselves, and about what we most fear, in the process. Zombies have been a staple of American filmmaking since the indie flick
White Zombie
(1932), best remembered for its eerie shots of undead slaves staring into the night. In that movie, Bela Lugosi plays an evil sorcerer who promises to turn a woman into a zombie so that her spurned lover can control her forever, presumably as a mindless sex servant. Perfect fare for a nation finally reckoning with its own population of former slaves, as well as one of preliberated females just beginning to find their own voices. Back then, though, the big questions seemed to have more to do with whether a walking dead servant or wife could fully satisfy a man’s needs. (Given the outcome, apparently not.) By 1968 George Romero’s low-budget classic
Night of the Living Dead
had reversed this dynamic. Now it was up to the film’s human protagonists to distinguish themselves from the marauding bands of flesh eaters—and to keep from being eaten. Racial conflicts among the film’s living characters end up costing them valuable time and resources; against the backdrop of attacking zombies, the racial tension of the late 1960s seems positively ludicrous. The film’s African American hero survives the night but is mistaken for a zombie and shot dead the next morning.

The film’s sequels had survivors holing up in places like shopping malls, through which zombies would wander aimlessly all day as if retracing the steps of their former lives as consumers. Of course, the real consumption begins when the zombies find humans on whom to feast—an irony not lost on one tough guy who, as his intestines are being eaten, has enough wit to shout, “Choke on ’em!” What makes the humans for whom we’re rooting any different from the zombies by whom we’re repulsed? Not much, except maybe cannibalism, and the technical distinction that our humans are living while the zombies are “living dead.”

State-of-the-art zombie films—most notably
28 Days Later
(2002) and its sequel,
28 Weeks Later
(2007)—use the undead to explore today’s hazier ethical climate. Instead of fearing magic or consumerism, we are scared of the unintended consequences of science and technology. Perhaps that’s why rather than reaching zombification through magic or rampant consumerism, the undead in this film series have been infected by a man-made virus called “rage.” Playing to current apocalyptic fears, the zombies in
28 Days Later
wipe out the entirety of England, which has been quarantined by the rest of the world in a rather heartless but necessary act of self-preservation. Like the hilarious but unironically fashioned book
The Zombie Survival Guide
(2003), here’s a zombie tale for the 9/11 era, when fantasies of urban chaos and duct tape–sealed apartment windows are no longer relegated to horror films; these paranoid scenarios became regular fare on CNN.