The Rise of Zombie Media

How Do We Get Out of the Worst Era of Media in Decades?

(from The King of Comedy)

What do I mean by “zombie media”? Like a zombie, today’s media is brainless. Without opinions. The reboots and remakes are particularly zombie-like in that they might have the body of the original franchise, but the spirit is long gone. Before, musicians had lyrics. Now they are mindless zombies that bite TikTok users just to turn them into mindless zombies repeating the same dreary refrain as the zombie that bit them.

Of course all this has been going on for years. But this is newsworthy because, up until the AI-pocalypse, the Internet gave us hope for grassroots media that, while algorithmically controlled, at least had moments of quirkiness and weirdness. But, finally, the media sees the writing on the wall for 2.0. The Atlantic has a much-celebrated article about the textpocalypse of the Internet. How the web will ultimately devolve into bot-generated gray goo. The Verge, even more ominously, sees semi-automated social media in its crystal ball. A particularly disturbing possibility is heaven-banning:

It’s not hard to imagine how a semiautomated social network might operate. Other than serving users AI-generated content, you might create fake users in the form of AI chatbots to needle, encourage, and coddle your user base. Maybe, to begin with, you only deploy bots to contain problematic users: an idea known as heavenbanning, in which trolls can only interact with chatbots who mollify them by agreeing with everything they say. (The concept was invented by Twitter user @nearcyan.) But then, maybe, when your monthly user numbers start dropping and the quarterly earnings aren’t looking so good either, you decide to let more bots connect to the general populace. “It’s a proven way to increase positive interactions among users!” you write in your press release. “We’re giving people what they want: quality personalized content at scale. Never be bored in our AI playpen.”

A virtual audience that soothes your ego. That doesn’t have the heart to tell you that you’ve been banned because you’re talentless and mean (best case scenario of course) but also doesn’t want to lose your eyeballs (I mean come on even Nazi eyeballs can be used in an attention economy). Times are bad when you are actually worried about the fate of online loudmouths on either side of the culture war. At least they were humans with passionate opinions. This Black Mirror dystopia, of solitary confinement without any of the benefits of solitude, is dispiriting. A zombie audience that laughs at your off-color jokes. Was this the takeaway from Martin Scorcese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy? That Rupert Pupkin was a pathetic schmuck because he was doing comedy in front of a cardboard audience? If only they were digital and difficult to distinguish from a real crowd!

The Internet is about to become a graveyard crawling with zombie content. Movies are either cynical cash-grab reboots or franchises without end. Zombie franchises that come back undead every time. With Disney Plus, this is now the fate of TV as well. Shows and movies never end, They are part of the same cinematic universe. There’s no end in sight and that, of course, is the problem, according to Ted Gioia. If shows are successful, they go on into spin-off after spin-off. If they are not, like many of them on Netflix are not, then they get cancelled with no narrative closure whatsoever. This is of course only one aspect of our current era of Trough TV. Most of today’s hits are either recycled true-crime podcasts or are lowest-of-the-low reality trash like MILF Manor (look it up. Then call your mother and cry).

The TikTofication of the Internet has been a truly disheartening development, but the recent announcement that Spotify would have a TikTok-like home feed hits particularly hard. Ryan Broderick nails the problem: TikTok leads to viral music trends because it is built for virality. Spotify was built before music had to be viral or else. But the Spotify we know and love does not lend itself to virality. And it won’t either, even with its new redesign. But that won’t stop the race to the bottom for mindless viral zombie music.

This isn’t the first time when entertainment media became a vast, vacant parking lot wasteland. In the early ‘60s, Hollywood movies were either turgid swords-and-sandals epics or they were vapid musicals. Even Westerns were declining in quality, eventually being outsourced to TV and Italy. Television shows, moving away from video to film, were escapist and often silly. Less Playhouse 90 productions that attracted talents like James Dean, more brain-dead rural comedies like The Beverly Hillbillies. Music, now with less jazz as well as less rock and roll because of Elvis in the military and 1959 plane crash, devolved into saccharine, sub-Tin Pan Alley pop.

How did we escape last time? We have the hippies to thank as well as The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones and soul music. The growing youth counterculture was hostile to all forms of media, especially ad-driven broadcast media. Early ‘60s media was like a zombie of mindless ‘50s conformity. The ‘50s would not die. And with rock dead and bebop out of the cultural conversation, it had no spirit. Folk music was one alternative, but Bob Dylan’s turn to electric in 1965 was the catalyst that the hippies needed to take over culture. The Beatles and Stones heeded the call and expanded music with innovation and attitude respectively. Soul musicians like Otis Redding and James Brown, seeing that saccharine Johnny Mathis was filling the black pop void that jazz used to fill, brought passion and grit to the airwaves.

But this was not an easy fix. AM radio kept fighting back with bowdlerized rock that threw Nehru jackets over the same hack pablum. By 1967 though FM rock radio made a home for the real crazy, colorful rock that was coming from San Francisco and other similar planets. Also in 1967, Hollywood finally caught up with Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate. Although television was not truly great until the early ‘70s, 1967 also saw the premiere of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, the very first show to bring political satire to prime time (and the last one in broadcast TV history).

So there’s hope for us too right? We have a fringe subculture in downtown Manhattan don’t we? Yes, but the fringers are too extremely online to be effective, chasing clout like Sonic chasing gold rings. We need to barricade ourselves from the zombies before we strike.