The Walking Dead (and its not unique in this regard) has as one of its basic tenets that it is not the zombies of its fictional apocalypse that represent the true danger to the survivors but other humans.
At the risk of sounding ridiculous, how realistic is this though? Groups coalesce when faced with shared hostilities. Zombies represent a genuine existential threat to humanity and possess no common social structures. They are the ultimate "other". No human can find common cause with a zombie. A zombie regards humans purely as food, we have more empathy for wolves or tigers.
While it is true that humans require the same resources of energy and food as one another the desire to co-operate to maximise the availability of those resources seems to be the historic norm. We don't routinely steal food from our neighbours and we never have.
In addition the zombies have no interest in the resources that humans desire. They have no need for food, shelter or comfort. Destroying zombies to reclaim resources seems more sensible than attacking other humans. Violence between groups of humans negatively affects all humans but violence directed towards zombies has no negative effects on human survivors and if effectively applied then humans benefit.
There seems to be no real reason why humans would not find it easy to find common cause with other survivors in a zombie apocalypse. Normal power relationships and dysfunctions would of course continue but the conventional boundaries of politics and nationality would dissolve.
But zombies are not really zombies. They are amongst the most symbolic of monsters. In the Walking Dead with its gothic backdrop of Georgia forests and southern heat you feel that the spectre that truly haunts the survivors are not the undead but instead the rotten issue of race.
It is not zombies that want to burst inside our barricades and undo all that we have made. Only other people have the capacity to do that.
Any zombie fiction that features the "humans are the real monsters" trope seem to me to be essentially reactionary. Seeing zombies as the masses who fail to share in a dream of, often, idealised American masculinity makes you realise that the zombies are less the Others than simply others.
The friction between the bands of survivors makes more sense as a portrayal of the fratricide of fringe movements be they left, right or those of feminism or animal rights.
You can trust no-one but yourself is their badge. Individuality is their shibboleth.
The survivors are not the heroic holdouts of a better time but instead the bitterenders spitting their defiance in the face of history and indifference with a hail of bullets and a stockade.
I am a pretty heavy consumer of print media but even as a fan I know that ultimately that is not how people are going to read the majority of their news, analysis and reviews in future. The interesting thing is that as a "loyal" subscriber I am getting all kinds of interesting and weird offers.
PC Gamer UK for example offered me the chance to subscribe for three years while paying just two. On the face of that its not a bad deal given that I've been a subscriber for years. However ironically the offer made me wonder how well the magazine is doing financially and whether the upfront money would just disappear if it folded.
While I dithered I got a reminder about the offer and a coupon to further reduce the price. The cost was high but something that I could shrug off after a couple of months and the magazine isn't going to fold in that time. I've gone for it.
My father in law is a subscriber to the London Review of Books and their offer to him was even crazier. Essentially I am get a two year free subscription to the LRB just because he is a subscriber. I can only assume that this is some crazy subscriber number deal to increase the value of the advertising they are carrying.
Two political journals Le Monde Diplomatique and Foreign Affairs are struggling to make the transition from print. Foreign Affairs has a relatively no-nonsense electronic subscription (which makes financial sense for an international sub). However the electronic copy is distributed as a PDF of the print edition, one that includes screen unfriendly two column layout and the print adverts as massive image files. Collectively the result is such a disaster that you would be better off picking up a paper copy from the newsagent.
LMD is even stranger, subscribing to the website or an electronic edition is such a pain that I just went for the paper edition and then got given access to the website for free as part of the paper sub.
Virtually none of this makes sense to me except that all these publications are desperately trying to find some way to survive in a rapidly changing environment.
There was an interesting Moral Maze the other night which featured a discussion of whether young children should only learn chronology and the location of dates and people within that chronology. The idea being that a grounding in facts is required as basis for later doing the demanding act of historical analysis and interpretation.
My problem with this is that immediately you have to enter the world of value judgements just to be able to form a chronology with any kind of periods and groupings. The traditional reigns of kings and queens grouped by dynasties fails to map onto meaningful changes in society. The classic example of how bad this can be is the concept of "Victorian" England. The country ruled over by Victoria was substantial different at the start, end and middle of the queen's reign and to construct the concept of "Victorian" society we actually take a segment of the later part of her reign and project it earlier and later than the historical facts allow to produce a homogeneous concept. Not to mention radically simplifying imperial and labour politics to give the impression of consistency.
Even the broad categorisation of history into things like the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages is an awkward construct as global transitions in staple material construction simply didn't happen in lockstep. Essentially when you use these periods you tend to be referring to Western Europe and the Mediterranean and even then you are using a gross simplification.
I think the best analogy is with science teaching on the subject of the atom. Several simplified models of the atom are used until finally you get to the point where there has to be an admission that the "adult" world is continuing to work on understanding how the atom actually works.
The balance has to be in explaining that the model is a simplification while still teaching the benefits of the simplified system. No-one expects the majority of people to truly understand relativity after all, Newtonian physics is good for a lot of things.
If we choose periods, dates and "facts" as the way that children learn about history we also have to teach them that these chronologies are constructs and what the rules are that are used to construct them.
Press regulation in the UK is a difficult thing, its hard not to be queasy about the limitation of a free press but the trouble is that that right has been abused by a small section of the press beyond all reason. I would have preferred to see the problems dealt with through criminal prosecutions of those actually responsible but there is no denying that press self-regulation completely failed to deal with a blatant and endemic problem. Giving unreformed self-regulation a second chance was just never going to work.
However the legislation that got pushed through yesterday seems to be just a tactical patch to deal with newspapers as they are currently constituted. The failure to adequately deal with the internet means we opening a massive amount of legal uncertainty for all forms of news media and there is no final settlement but just something that is going to be kicked around for years for the sake of saving the legislative agenda in this parliament.
Leveson isn't irrelevant but all the discussion of where on a front page an apology could appear indicates where all the thinking has gone in this regulation.
Europe seems to have taken a remarkably short-sighted view of its interests in imposing a tax on Cypriot savers. While it is tempting to coerce a contribution to a country's bail-out the effects of effectively taking money from insured savers should be fairly obvious. After all the insurance schema exists because governments fear the effect of bank runs and the harmonisation of the scheme across Europe was to stop the contagion of confidence from one bank to another.
It may seem pretty easy to impose a penalty on a small island nation but really this about shoring up confidence in the Spanish and Italian banks. It is already too late for Greece, why would anyone keep their money in a Greek bank?
The whole situation seems to be yet another effect of the creeping incrementalism that marks European solutions. I wouldn't be surprised if this part of the package is undone later but only after the damage to confidence in the system has been done.
The reason I wanted to give Posthaven a go (not having ever really used Posterous) was the admirably simple pitch for the business. To be able to claim to offer a permanent repository for your posts there has to be some way to pay for the servers and the storage. Paying to post makes simple sense.
I was also intrigued by the idea of having to stake a small amount of money to enter the beta rather than comparatively stale idea of simply registering an email address.
I see Posthaven and App.net as real tests of whether people truly want to be customers or in fact they are happy to be the product.