I suspect that more of our culture than is immediately apparent is apocalyptic, or based on either an anticipation or desire for change. Even with the extremely cathartic election of Barack Obama, there is a sense that we are about to hit the trough of an economic
"long wave", which have tended to occur every fifty to sixty years. The Great Depression was the last such trough, although a case can be made for the late seventies (oil crises, stagflation, and the end of the post-war boom). President Obama brought up the idea of American decline rather early in his
inaugural address (at 5 minutes here), though he of course wishes to prevent it.
In any case, the past few decades have already seen communication and entertainment democratized and changed drastically by the Internet and the ubiquity of cellular phones. Technology appears to grow exponentially, which leads to the scenario of
technological singularity, in which we create computers that invent smarter computer ad infinitum. While this is not necessarily apocalyptic in the negative sense, it is likely that society would need to be radically altered. Much of Asimov's robot fiction can be seen as dealing with the tipping point of the singularity: the point where robots/computers are competitive with humans, but not completely superior.
WALL-E is probably the best recent depiction of post-scarcity humans -- fat and complacent through the simple fact of not having anything useful to do.
Because of this, a straightforward projection of the present system is not particularly comforting, even for those of us inclined -- sometimes feverishly so -- to the creation of "true" artificial intelligence. This of course leaves aside many valid reasons for discontent with society in the present tense. But it does seem that dystopian fiction -- wherein society is projected forward to an appalling but recognizable state -- has fallen out of favor since a peak in the 80s.
Blade Runner is the seminal work of film here, and
Neuromancer the literary touchstone.
What we have seen recently is the revival of zombie horror, and
zombie survivalism as a topic of speculation among young intellectuals. The revival of zombies (as a cultural rather than physical phenomenon) has been especially strong in video games, where zombies provide an inherent atmosphere and an opponent whose physical durability and mental shortcomings have obvious explanations. Post-apocalypticism also traces much of its popularity to the 80s of course, Terminator and Road Warrior being the prime examples. It must be noted, however, that Kevin Costner almost single-handedly killed the genre in the mid-90s with
Waterworld and
The Postman. Zombies in and of themselves have also been present in American culture since the 60s, most notably in the works of George Romero.
Dawn of the Dead is probably the first movie to address the concept of the "zombie apocalypse," though it does so with considerably more pessimism than the current trend, which has synthesized zombies and post-apocalypticism with zeal.
More substantial analyses can be made of zombies and apocalypticism in literature and film, but my immediate goal here has been simply to demonstrate that the downfall of society as we know it is the subject of heavy speculation in some circles. This suggests that a total collapse of the present socio-economic order is seen as either likely or desirable. But consider that in the present trend the agent of destruction is zombies, which are in principle non-existent and fantastical (setting aside "zombie realism", most notably the virus hypothesis and
28 Days Later). In the 80s, the culturally-anticipated apocalypse was the very real threat of nuclear war. Whether such a war was ever likely is dubious, but anyone looking possible causes of the downfall of humanity did not need to look very far. And while singular nuclear weapons remain alarming (see the nuking of Los Angeles in
24), large-scale nuclear war is no longer plausible. Ergo, zombie apocalypticism originates from a sense of discontent with the current course of society, or at least one's place therein.
...This was originally just going to be a lead-in for a post about discontent, but it got a little out of hand, so I'm going to do that another time.
Please comment if you find this interesting and/or think I am full of shit on this.
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