A **zombie** is a cultural trope describing "living dead" in which corpses are animated and feed upon the still living. The concept originates from the 1950s novel *I am Legend* and it’s subsequent film adaptation, *Night of the Living Dead,* and vaulted into popular understanding with the success of the television series *The Walking Dead*. Zombies are an image in [[New Mythology|contemporary mythology]]. They serve mainly as an allegory for nebulous qualities such as insatiability, single-mindedness, or to represent ideas whose presence extends beyond their natural life. David Chalmers has developed the idea of a [philosophical zombie](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie?wprov=sfti1#History) to discuss possibilities of when one might encounter animation without [[Consciousness]]. There is nothing it is like to be a zombie. As a component of contemporary mythology, *I am Legend* serves as an important crossover point between the traditional image of the vampire and the emerging one of the zombie, offering a pseudoscientific basis for much of vampire lore. Whereas vampires are undead, yet intelligent and conscious, zombies are undead and unconscious, animated by a bacterial infection, similar to how *[Orphiocordyceps unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis?wprov=sfti1)* controls ants. This naturalization of the vampire myth marks one of the turning points of [[New Mythology]], in which science becomes incorporated into the storytelling. #### Typologies - Zombie apocalypse: a metaphor for navigating a wicked world. - Ideological zombies: Political loyalists, *The Grand Inquisitor* - Enforcement programs RE *The Matrix* or institutions. - [Zombie Zionism](https://tarikcyrilamar.substack.com/p/zombie-zionism): A dead late-nineteenth-century ideology that died of its own addiction to unaccountable power, supremacist nationalism, [[Lying|lies]] and violence on which it overdosed. - [Neoliberalism](https://geopoliticaleconomy.substack.com/p/neoliberalism-dead-radhika-desai-michael-hudson) - [Gay zombies](https://overcast.fm/+E79gPz3ds/07:34) - [Bath salt zombies](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_cannibal_attack) - [Facebook](https://www.404media.co/email/24eb6cea-6fa6-4b98-a2d2-8c4ba33d6c04/): a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a website where there is little social connection at all. An example of [[Dead Internet Theory]] - [Zombie news brands](https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/): a form of site reputation abuse, where unreliable, automated bot accounts attach content to trusted sources of information as part of the publisher's revenue stream. - Philosophical ([p-zombies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie)): A person without conscious experience that behaves in every way like a normal person. #### “Zombie linguistics” This is concept [proposed](https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2012.694170) by Bernard C. Perley to describe the way in which academic experts contribute to the cycle of [[Language]] endangerment through the practice of "saving the language." The metaphor of preservation merely preserves the recording, not the language itself, which requires a more complex set of political and social responses. Thus the result is the disembodiment of voice, "zombie voices—undead voices that are disembodied and techno-mechanized," removed from its physical and cultural context, an undead but unliving representation of words that have been improperly stewarded. >[!quote] Bernard C. Perley >They become artefacts of technological interventions, as well as expert valorisations of linguistic codes. Expert rhetoric compounds the problem by the use of metaphoric frames such as death, endangerment and extinction. Metaphors not only frame discourses of language endangerment, but they also frame and influence actions and interventions.