Chat, am I washed? Chat, be fr, am I washed? I think I might be washed. I think they might have washed me. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed?
Every day I spawn in. Emerge wriggling out my skibidi bolus of slime. Whence and where? Lol. Idk. Vibes here be mad shady fr. Shit is not aesthetic. Shit is not bussin. Shit is burned-out cars piled in barricades across the street. Shit is THE END IS NIGH scrawled across bridges. Shit is roofs caved in, windows boarded, thin trees already rising out the wreckage, with roots that slip through gaps in the brickwork to return the brief work of man to the senseless rubble that came before. This sus ahh Ohio ahh realm is my crib. Damn, bitch, I live like this.
I am not built different. I’ma keep it a stack I am not even tryna be above it. I pull up swagless into this sauceless void. Chat, in what consists my drip? My drip is stiff with blood and mire. Chat, in what consists my aura? My aura is only fear. Chat, in what consists my rizz? My rizz is a half-turned head, twisted birdlike. My rizz is the empty circling of a dislocated jaw. My rizz is antic snarling. My rizz is reddened eyes.
Here’s a normal day in the life of a mf with zero inner monologue and zero ability to speak. From 6 to 7 am I bedrot, or I would if I had a bed. Instead I simply rot. Goblincore. Mushroomcore. Livid colonies of fungus going feral around my wounds fr. From 7 to 8 am I bedrot. From 8 to 9 am I bedrot. From 9 to 10 am I flail my arms around while making strangled hacking noises. No cap this is such a dope part of my morning routine. From 10 am until lunch I enter grind mode, by which I mean wandering in loose circles over the ruins. For lunch I secure the bag by fanum taxing a stray cat. Mukbang mode. Gristle ASMR. In the afternoon I stay on my sigma hustle grindset by loping aimlessly through the wreckage of a world I do not understand. Ready to smoke an opp. After work I decompress by uttering unearthly screams.
I have no bitches. I am bitchless. Kissless, hugless, handholdless, eyecontactless. All my homies get zero pussy. We squad up, but not for warmth or comfort. I would be a volcel if I had any volition, but ngl the force that powers my perambulations is unknown to me fr. I am a lurchcel. I am a shamblecel. I am a teeth rotting in my mouthcel. I am a feet torn to purple-bruising tatterscel. I am an infinite lack of wantingcel. I am post-horny. Nofap without trying. Noclipping out of my libido. Epsilon male. NPC. I’m giving either Stoic or leper. I do not long. I do not yearn. I feel no strong emotions. I don’t feel anything at all.
L + ratio + no life + not caught a single dub + no longer human + I snatch small twitching things out of the undergrowth to devour their flesh and viscera still raw, as the last few pumps of hot metallic blood spurt feebly in my face.
I twitch. Muscular spasms, hands taloned at ungodly angles. I stream. Vomiting bile or pissing where I stand. I doomscroll. I have doomscrolled over this entire island, over gentle green hills and through the grey wreck of cities, down to the infinite sea, and none of it has held my attention for even a moment, because I have no attention to hold. I am brainrotted. Molten black sludge in my cranium. I am locked in on the emptiness behind all phenomenal things. Frfr. Bet.
But despite the stagnant pond inside me, chat, lowkey there’s sometimes a presence that yeets me gibbering across the land, and no cap, that presence, chat, is you. Sometimes, chat, I be surrounding you in your fortified farmhouses. Lacerate my arm tryna reach through the windows, to you. Gyatt! To creak and groan so long without that gyatt! Sometimes, chat, I highkey be chasing you down in the fields. Fall on you and straight up devour your flesh, until you are like me: ungyatted; mid. What I want in you is that you are unlike me. Until I sink my teeth into your body, you are the chat I know to whisper around me on all sides in the depths of my inner night. Chat observes. Chat gives me views and subs. Chat likes, comments, and shares. Your eyes are not like mine. They hit different. Which is deadass why you, chat, are the only ones to whom I can direct my question.
Chat, am I washed? Chat, I think I might have been washed. Someone washed me. Someone dried me. Someone tucked me up in bed. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed?
(Midway through Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, our heroes escape London and pass through the ruins of Waverley Abbey, destroyed in 1536 during the dissolution of the monasteries. It’s peaceful there. Horses run free by the lake. A moment to reflect on what it means to be the last thinking people on an island of the infected and the dead. ‘You’ll never hear another piece of original music ever again. You’ll never read a book that hasn’t already been written. Or see a film that hasn’t already been shot.’ This is a useful line, because it gives us a new framing for a familiar problem, even if 28 Days Later, which came out in 2002, is older than the phenomenon it’s describing. It says that what we’ve been living through for roughly the past two decades is not ‘stuck culture’ or ‘sequel bloat.’ We have been living through the zombie apocalypse.
Two years ago, I wrote that all the nerds were dead. The nerd era in culture was a response to the problem of data saturation: we were producing too much recorded culture for anyone to be able to sort through it all. In the fifteenth century, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola claimed to have read every single published text in general circulation, which back then amounted to maybe a gigabyte of data. We currently produce that much information every thirty milliseconds. The first cultural response to this problem was the hipster, which was the consumer as information-sorting algorithm. ‘The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev.’ The hipster was also deeply annoying. Once we developed efficient digital sorting algorithms, the hipster became obsolete, and the cultural hegemony of the nerd began.
In the nerd era, abstract equations served you up a constant stream of targeted slurry, and your job was to be unreasonably enthusiastic about it. Nerds are people who like things simply because they exist, and the nerd era was the era of the massive repetitive franchises: Marvel, Taylor Swift. For anyone to maintain individual taste and not enjoy this dreck was, for the nerds, a kind of affront. The nerd era felt like it would go on forever, but it’s now very definitively over. What’s strange is that, as I wrote at the start of the year, seemingly nothing in mass culture has arrived to replace it. Instead, we’re reduced to dredging up the last remnants of the hipster era to squeeze out any remaining nostalgia-value, in what I’ve called the necrosequel. ‘Gladiator II came out twenty-four years after Gladiator. Twisters came out twenty-eight years after Twister. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice arrived thirty-six years after the first instalment.’ This month, Pulp released their first album in a quarter of a century. Why? Not clear. It’s not like they have a radical new sound they need to share with the world. They’re doing what they always did, just not as well. The album is called More. And now, we have 28 Years Later.
To be fair, 28 Years is not an ordinary necrosequel. It doesn’t just repeat the exact storyline from the original; our hero is not supposed to be Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris’s child. The story begins on Lindisfarne, which a small community of survivors has fortified against the zombies that roam freely over the mainland. The villagers keep sheep and brew their own beer. They keep a cross of St George flying, and put up a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II back when she was young and the British Empire still governed a quarter of the globe. Out to sea, NATO vessels enforce their quarantine against this island of the dead, but for once, Boyle chooses not to deliver the obligatory zombie-film message, that humans are the real monsters. The village is a cosy, tight-knit, high-trust community. Later, on the mainland, we meet Erik, a Swedish soldier whose boat sank while enforcing the blockade on Britain. Erik talks about app delivery services. He shows our heroes a picture of his extremely bogged girlfriend on his phone. They’ve never seen a phone before. They think her lip fillers are an allergic reaction. It’s comic relief, but the joke’s on the techno-cosmopolitan Swede, not the ignorant Brexiteers. Wouldn’t it be nice to have not bothered with the twenty-first century? Go back to the simple life. No phones, no online bullshit, no foreigners. The village, incidentally, is uniformly white; the only non-white people in the film are among the infected. Meanwhile Boyle shoots everything in a kind of nostalgic parody of his own style, reviving all his Danny Boylest techniques from three decades ago, equal parts gore and schmaltz. Zombie apocalypse is no longer the end of the world and the destruction of the past: the zombies are now what preserve the past against the forces of social change.
But the choice the film is setting up here, between the world of the phone and the nostalgic community on Lindisfarne, is obviously a false one. The reason we’re stuck repeating the past, the reason we’re even watching this necrosequel about necrosequels, is the informational regime brought about by the phone. This is why we have our backwards peasant mass culture. It’s also why we have the zombies.
The third stage of culture in the zettabyte age, after the hipster and the nerd, is the zombie. If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.
According to some middle-aged critics, our current age is the age of short-form, attention-grabbing, dopamine-boosting content. TikToks, essentially. But the individual TikTok is actually a fairly conservative and old-fashioned object: a short film, scripted and choreographed ahead of time, and then exhaustively edited afterwards. It might last seconds rather than hours, but the TikToker is still doing essentially the same kind of thing as, say, Fritz Lang. But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.
It’s not a question of attention spans: in the zombie era, people will engage with media in whatever way allows them direct access to that pure flow. If the medium is short-form video, they’ll scroll through it rapidly. But TikTok also features a streaming service called TikTok live, which mostly consists of women very slowly applying their makeup, or pretending to eat emoji of hamburgers, or pretending to be video game NPCs, or just wandering around, pointing out entirely ordinary objects like paving stones and bushes and other people’s cars in a slow xanned up purr—and people will watch these streams for hours on end. The real epicentre of contemporary youth culture isn’t TikTok, which is an app for cringe balding zoomers, but Twitch. This is where all the slang comes from, and it’ll be the breeding-ground for all the minor celebrities of the next few decades. Streaming has largely replaced music as the engine for new subcultures. In the same way that Instagram and YouTube (and, most recently, Substack) have been pathetically bolting TikTok clones to their services, TikTok is now desperately trying not to sink in the age of Twitch. The reason Hollywood is still stuck in the post-franchise holding pattern is that all forms of linear narrative entertainment are essentially obsolete. (A friend of mine has never sat through a single episode of the Sopranos, but he’s watched pretty much the entire show through nonlinear YouTube clips; he knows how every major character dies, just not in what order.) Those of us who are still stuck in these ancient media perceive a world in cultural stasis. But the zombies know better.
It takes genuinely impressive powers of engagement to be able to watch a Twitch stream. Because I take my journalism seriously I really tried to do it, but found it impossible; I kept getting distracted and picking up a book instead. These things are all eight hours long and, for someone raised on narrative media, impossibly boring. The most basic form of Twitch stream consists of watching someone else play video games, which previous generations of children could only tolerate for about three minutes before trying to grab the controller out their friend’s hands. My turn, my turn! But the zombie never expects a turn. The object of consumption isn’t the game, mediated through the streamer, but the act of streaming itself. Most streamers are reasonably good at the games they play, but this only matters in as much as it prevents any kind of friction. Many keep up a constant babble throughout, which is also unimportant. The second-most followed streamer on the platform is someone called Kai Cenat. Here’s what he says roughly midway through his most recent two-and-a-half-hour ‘short’ stream: ‘On God you guys have grown, in ways, unimaginable. Deadass. Now! Can’t even. You know what? I can’t even. I need to see, I’ma give y’all, I’ma give y’all thirty seconds to give me the best compliments. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.’ He continues to count backwards all the way from thirty, with the mysterious omission of the number twenty-three, before reading out all the compliments his audience have posted for him. I tried another one. ‘Bro my fucking shit is fucked,’ he says. Someone else wanders into shot, visibly grumpy, and asks what they’re even doing. ‘I want some ice cream,’ says Kai Cenat. ‘You know what I’m saying, I want some ice cream man.’
The most popular streamer is a man called Tyler Blevins, who goes by Ninja. Blevins is apparently extremely good at playing Fortnite, but despite having blue highlights in his hair he has absolutely no personality whatsoever. On his streams he can go for a while without saying a single word, and when he does manage to eject some brief sentiment you get the sense he didn’t really need to bother. I thought I might have caught him on a bad day so I tried watching his highlights, but it’s all like this. He exclusively says things like ‘This dual hammer meta is absolutely disgusting and I really hope they patch them immediately and make them share global cooldown.’ His audience would be just as happy watching a trained pigeon peck at levers.
Of course, not all streamers only post gaming content. You can watch someone buy and open football cards! You can watch someone pick his nose! A surprising number of people, including Kai Cenat, don’t just stream every waking moment; they also stream themselves sleeping at night. An even more surprising number of people watch them. But maybe the most magnificently pointless are the political streamers: instead of watching someone else play video games, you get to watch someone else go on Twitter. Occasionally, the political streamers will get in a feud with one another. Whatever ideological struggles these people and their followers think they’re engaged in, the real purpose of the Twitch fight is very different. It exists to create a situation in which you’re watching a stream of someone else watching a stream. The circuit is complete.
Zombification is most noticeable online, but it’s happening in every medium. When 28 Days Later was released in 2002, the emerging form in black British music was grime; today it’s drill. The difference is striking. Grime was a very specifically British genre: unlike most forms of global rap, it wasn’t an American import but had developed indigenously through UK garage and jungle. Early grime instrumentals were homemade and haphazard; from the Eskimo riddim on they tended to feature a lot of endearingly naff synths. A bunch of kids playing around with Korg Tritons in council estate bedrooms all over London. Many grime MCs had voices that were straightforwardly weird, which they deployed on high-concept tracks with elastic, constantly shifting internal rhythmic variations. Grime could be deadly serious, a chronicle of a fairly bleak existence in the crevices of Tony Blair’s Britain, but it could also be fun or sexy or experimental or absurd. It even started crossbreeding with the simultaneous indie rock revival happening in whiter, leafier corners of the country. For anyone who grew up in the hipster age, when grime was flourishing, drill music feels like an obviously inferior product. It is not even remotely fun. It has no personality and no erotic depth. The flow on every bar in every drill track is exactly the same, hitting the exact same 16th-note subdivisions: dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-DA. Drill rappers generally refuse any kind of artistic individuality. The standard outfit is a North Face puffer and a ski mask. The music is a Chicago invention, but it’s universal now: in every major city in Europe, street music means people wearing the exact same anonymising clothes and rapping in the exact same rhythm to basically interchangeable beats. An almost military uniformity.
My favourite example is a drill rapper called TS, real name Al-Arfat Hassan, whose bars are mostly about the gruesome violence he wants to inflict on all non-Muslims. ‘Soldier of Allah, not sad if I bleed/ Insha Allah I’ll die a shahid.’ At one point he says that if you consort with djinn he’ll take out your brain, cook it in a frying pan, and eat it. In 2024 TS was jailed for trying to build a bomb from an ISIS training video. But before he was convicted and his videos deleted from YouTube, the comments on them were uniformly positive, most of them from non-Muslims. None of these people had noticed what he was actually saying; they weren’t consuming his tracks as individual works, but as an embodiment of the form. The actual idiosyncrasy of the ISIS-supporting rapper failed to register. When people make and listen to drill, what they’re engaging with is not quite what we understand as music. It has the same relation to the 40,000-year-old musical tradition, from the first palaeolithic bone flutes to early twentieth-century grime, that Twitch streaming has to Sophocles.
The pinnacle of zombie culture, though, is obviously AI. Chatbots allow you to essentially skip even the pretence of cultural mediation and just interface directly with the sorting mechanism, which is exactly what generative AI really is: a device for sifting through the impossibly vast corpus of human information and finding patterns. The difference between ChatGPT and previous forms of zombie culture is that it’s totally opaque. Everyone’s individual For You Page on TikTok is notionally unique, but they’re all composed of the same stock of videos; meanwhile there is absolutely no way to find out what perverted things people are doing with AI unless one of three things happen. Either you peer at their phone on public transport, or they post screenshots on Reddit, or they kill themselves. Whenever this happens, it usually turns out that they have either been using the sorting algorithm as a therapist, using the sorting algorithm to divine the hidden secrets of the cosmos, or that they and the sorting algorithm have fallen in love. Their ideal of a healthy personal relationship is now modelled on the horrible little eunuch that lives inside their phones, and which can only ever flatter and ingratiate because at root it’s still fundamentally a machine for predicting which token you would want to appear next in a text string. It’s strange that everything is still here, cars still stop at red lights and kids still go to school, as if the world hasn’t changed, all while unknown millions of our fellow-citizens have essentially become mindless fleshy appendages to the machine.
I’m sure you’ve read the study that found dramatically reduced brain activity among people who use AI. But if I’m honest I’ve been thinking about their brains for a while. The people I see sitting perfectly still, flicking through videos as the only life they’ll ever have slowly drains away. The people venting about their friends to a probability model. And, yes, the teenagers speaking in Twitch-chat drivel or playing drill music out their phone speakers on the bus. Maybe it’s true that for anyone used to one mode of engaging with media, the next always feels like a kind of lobotomy, but it’s hard not to feel that the people who look at screens in this particular way are some new thing, not quite conscious, not quite human. Their brains are all shrivelled, darkened, dry-aged. It should not be illegal to eat them. It’s all I can think about as I watch their eyes blur and their lips hang slack. Cracking open their skulls, and eating their brains. Brains. Brains. Brains…)
That’s a lot of words fr. On some circumlocutory type shii. Tl;dr. Foh.
Bro needs to consider that there is some lore to this world that bro will not be able to understand. Bro has not been patched. Bro has not got the DLC. Bro is perfectly aware that old modes of engagement with media are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ or truly ‘goated,’ and that each new mode is incomprehensible to anyone still simping for any of its predecessors, but bro wants to come with this cheugy Gutenberg ahh paradigm? You can’t vibe with us until you in the squad. Blood in blood out fam. You only clocked right at the end that you gotta take the L, gg, touch aluminosilicate glass, abandon Cartesian subjectivity, get pozzed with the rage virus, become infected, join the wordless masses, literally be a mf zombie bro you gotta join the horde. Slough off your individual subjectvity bro. Go brain eating mode. Eat people bro. No cap you have got to eat people.
Vibe check this: did you not peep that within the lexicon of skibidi brainrot there’s a preponderance of terms gesturing towards the affirmation of some truth? We say on god no cap ngl frfr bet facts deadass wallahi type shii. No cap we commune with the real fr. And you gas yourself up because your generation and every generation before it was content to wallow in fictions and intermediaries? Like brooo this delulu ahh mf be seeking meaning in the graveyard of graven idols. Deadass he locked in a recursive, ironic, and fundamentally masturbatory relation to the products of culture. Thinking tHiS iS bEtTeR tHaN a DiReCt EnGaGeMeNt WiTh ThE fOrM iTsElF? Couldn’t be me! Bitch we have linked up with the surging stream of unpredicated being. Bitch we behold the apeiron from which all brief perishing shapes emerge.
On god you gotta go zombie mode bruh. You gotta perceive what the zombie perceives. As long as you are not a zombie you can only figure it in terms of lack. No thoughts, no libido, no will; illiterate, unbothered, in my lane, undead. You do not know that in every instant that the zombie limps through the ruins of your civilisation, in every instant that the zombie tweaks and vomits blood and decomposes, and even as the zombie with wild hunger bolts to sink its teeth into the flesh of the living—through it all, the zombie, in the blissful space where the mind is not, feels only the infinity of a pure white light.