Hello!
One of the opportunities I had when at university was being able to study the concept of the zombie, I even wrote my dissertation on the role of the zombie in popular culture. So in a seasonal note I’ve decided to write about zombies in the workplace, but unlike the ghouls in pop-culture these things are very real and very dangerous.
In my career so far, I have encountered many zombies, be they leaders, teams, products, features or companies. Obviously these zombies don’t have a taste for flesh (as far as I’m aware) but they are a threat.
Instead of rehashing zombie-culture, I thought I’d share what zombies are by using some excerpts of my dissertation on zombies in politics (timely right?). So let’s move over to past Jason.
In the past hundred years popular culture has become increasingly relevant to everyday life and over time we can look back on the artefacts created during certain periods to understand contemporary mind-sets and ideologies. An enduringly popular theme within the last century is the end of the world. Since time began, man has been preoccupied with ways that the world, or at least society in its current state, will end and one of the most popular tales of the apocalypse is the rise of the zombie. Post 9/11, the spectre of the zombie has risen from the crypt, infecting public imagination like no other creature; from film to fashion, protest to partying, the zombie has infiltrated the public sphere with no signs of stopping. A unique creature in theory and within popular culture, the zombie and its surrounding politics must be analysed. Unlike other monsters within popular culture, zombies carry very little in mythos or logos for creators of zombie fictions. There are rules which zombie fictions follow, but unlike figures such as the vampire or werewolf, zombies do not have a definitive original literary text to which all subsequent sources adhere.
The zombie is not a being of consciousness; unaware of its condition, it’s guided solely by appetite and aversion. A reflection of humanity at base level, it’s a perfect metaphor to create and display a message about society. The word ‘zombie’ is etymologised in voodoo mythology but has developed into a pop culture phenomenon, present in many facets of the public sphere. Lacking agency and unconscious of its individual and wider political relevance, the zombie is naturally apolitical.
So, as we can see the zombie is a character without a core mythology behind it and is often used to illustrate a metaphor. Themes in zombie fiction are individuals going up against a tyrannical, mindless majority, the quick spread of disease/ideas and an overwhelming sense of dread.
As zombies in pop-culture have been lumbering around for around a century they’ve undergone some revisions in that that, back in 2012 I broke the zombies down into three core groups which I believe are still relevant.
Haitian/Possession (1930s)
Reanimation (1960s-70s)
Infection/Viral (early 2000s)
Let’s go through a quick canter through the differences of zombies, maybe you might already recognise some zombies in your workplace…
The Possession class is rooted in Haitian voodoo, the Reanimation class refers to the lumbering hordes of zombies popularised following Night of the Living Dead (1968) and the Infection/Viral class reflects the fast-moving hunters that developed prominence in the early 21st century. Although thematic classifications, there are also definite chronological influences shaping zombie fiction’s development. This illustrates the use of zombies as malleable socio-political metaphors, rising to prominence in certain time periods to convey various social messages.
The Haitian creature differs from zombies from the latter half of the 20th century. Whilst the individual is possessed by a paranormal entity and loses agency, it remains under direct control of a mortal master, thus changing the dynamic and concept of what the zombie can do. Instead of a flesh-craving mass, it becomes an unwilling, unknowing servant and the extraction of agency allows another individual control over its labour. The slave/master dynamic is entrenched as inherently wrong within public consciousness, but what makes the zombie’s relationship to its master tragic is the loss of the capacity for reason. The zombie is not necessarily evil; it may commit evil actions but it’s essentially a tragic character robbed of individuality. The theft of the individual’s agency, labour, liberty and ability to reason is represented by the removal of the soul. Bishop views the Haitian narrative as a “metaphorical manifestation of the Hegelian master/slave relationship”. Audiences with knowledge of the atrocities of slavery are greatly affected by this zombification; cultural echoes of the slave trade manifest themselves in the form of the zombie.
The classical Reanimation zombie is generally accepted as the most common depiction of the monster in popular culture. This class of zombie is considered unintelligent with the capacity to learn only basic tasks. Slow and lumbering, this image popularises a ghoul animated by compulsions to feast on human flesh (and brains, although this is debatable). This focuses on oppression, enabling the author to create a forced state of nature addressing ideas and opinions about society. The reanimation of the dead into flesh-eating hordes is often a MacGuffin to hold the plot together, mildly justifying the events, whether a curse, enchantment or radiation. The zombie fiction that developed in this period legitimised the zombie, establishing it in the public imagination alongside other creatures. The rising popularity and awareness of zombies during this period created a solid definition and understanding of ‘the zombie’, allowing it to be utilised by other media creators without need for explicit explanation. Like vampires and werewolves, zombies were now legitimate, recognised, identifiable monsters.
Zombies were now engrained in the public imagination, however their re-imagination and evolution during the early 21st century invoked new waves of fiction, re-establishing the zombie as a cultural icon. The zombie threat was given a previously absent sense of plausibility through transferring the cause of an uprising from superstition and paranormal activity to the result of genetic experimentation or biomedical weapons. Creating realistic scenarios for a zombie outbreak helped zombies transcend from metaphorical, expressionist art to a realistic threat, spawning widespread ‘what if’ mentalities. The threat has become so entrenched in public consciousness that the University of Ottawa published a study and mathematical model on dealing with zombie outbreaks, preventing the end of current society. Now no longer a by-product of nuclear war or God’s wrath, the zombie apocalypse could simply be the effect of an ill-fated science experiment (28 Days Later, 2002). The zombie metaphor’s discourse shifts from ‘the undead’ to ‘infected humans’, placing the figure of the zombie in a much more relatable lexical field. Replacing superstition with science allows the zombie to resemble humanity much more realistically. Whilst the Reanimation zombies rot and fall apart, the infected humans are agile, predatory, and more bestial in nature. The redesign of the zombie represents changed society; zombification is the result of a virus that quickly spreads, much like information spreads online. New tools such as social media unite people in previously impossible ways. Zombies reflect current society; now faster than ever before, the virus more infectious and widespread.
So there we have it - possessed zombies are motivated by actors against their will, reanimated zombies are lumbering wrecks motivated by base appetites and viral zombies are fast, infectious and can infiltrate spaces with speed, spreading the virus with them. In these terms you can see why the zombie is such a popular device for sharing ideas and how it has become such a rich political metaphor.
So, if we take that zombies are a given, currently roaming around product teams and organisations, how do you know if you’re in a zombie apocalypse? The crux of zombie fiction is the fight of the individual, or how individuals react against a mass group, be it a movement, an ideology or a culture.
A zombie kills to eat the flesh of the living and any bitten survivors of an attack will inevitably become zombies themselves. In these circumstances, the only way to defeat a zombie is by “removing the head or destroying the brain”. Why the brain you ask? You could say that the brain more than anything makes a person themselves, it’s their ideology, their personality, their thoughts, feelings and emotions. The only way to destroy what the person represents is to destroy that.
Conversely, that’s also why zombies eat brains, and if you’re not fully engorged by the ghouls, you yourself transform into one, you become infected by the conflicting ideology, they destroy what makes you you, and you become one of them.
So how are product teams, companies and products like zombies? You may already have a few ideas… How do you spot them? How do you stop them? I hope to share more in the next post.
Don’t forget, they’re coming to get you Barbara…