Zombies and the viral web

Abstract

Zombies are ubiquitous in twenty-first-century culture, and are generally read, as many monsters are, as metaphors for such anxieties as the horrors of mechanized labour, of unbridled consumerism, of global pandemics and on and on .... In this article, I argue that the zombie’s multiple and hybrid origins and metonymic associations make it a monster for the digital age. As posthuman fantasies of disembodiment become increasingly more possible, the corporeality of the zombie functions as a reminder of the fundamentally embodied nature of our experiences with and in cyberspace. In this sense, I argue, the zombie functions as a sign for the horrors of networked culture and its terrifying potential for monstrous replication.