Summary: Two artifacts of mass media, launched one

after another more than four decades gone: Star Trek in 1967 and The Night of the Living Dead in 1968, enjoy continued popularity in this summer's blockbuster roster. They embody two contradictory poles in Americas current and ongoing psychic dilemma. On one hand is our love affair with technology (and progress) and our earnest desire to merge ourselves with it. On the other is a mortal fear that we will lose our individuality and identity to the vast machinery of the faceless collective.

We Have Been Assimilated

"...in fact, science fiction in this sense is no longer anywhere, and it is everywhere..." - Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams. - William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2 *** Americans are famous for talking and arguing about something they call freedom. What we actually mean most of the time is control. We have this obsessive need to be in control of our lives all the way to the moment of death and hopefully beyond and this we manage, at least in a virtual sense, through our fetishistic approach to technology.

Oddly, the concept of control and that of freedom are opposing functions in the real world, and our obsession with technology has lead us to a world where the human animal is trained to serve the machine rather than the other way around. Im a dweller in cities, as most of us are. Cities are the human container. While the natural realm functions as a place of refuge and renewal, much like an elaborately predictable theme park, the real wilderness is a function of cities, where defined boundaries and limited visibility foster an environment filled with mystery. There the human animal, aware that control is nothing but illusion, continually strains against the limits of the maze with unpredictable explosions of novelty. Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village to describe the environment created by electronic telecommunication that would render physical distance less relevant to our interactions than tribal affinity. What has evolved isnt really a village at all, anymore than Los Angeles or New York or Tokyo are villages. The Internet is an urban space, differentiated into diverse neighborhoods, each with their respective gangs, territories and exclusive languages. The political dialogue going on these days amounts to a gang fight between factions defending opposing versions of the past. We hear overheated rhetoric espousing theoretical positions over hypothetical circumstances

while little effective action is taken in the present. Most of us arent asked to contribute to solutions, only to take sides. While politics becomes a spectator sport an ongoing revolutions takes place in realms of culture, design and the arts. When we step away from the political chatter we see that nothing remains static and everything evolves. While we point accusing fingers at one another every new idea and innovation alters our environment and the way we live. While we fight wars over race and religion the definition of what it means to be human is undergoing constant change. When we address our problems in terms of left and right, Democrat and Republican, conservative and liberal, we confuse symptoms with the disease. While we grow more and more enmeshed in a world where every human interaction is mediated through machines, a deep sense of unease infects the whole world. Our greatest fear is that what defines us as individuals with a sense of purpose is being threatened by something outside of ourselves. All of our tradition, religion, and moral and ethical behavior is called into question by the requirements of advancing technologies. In the name of progress we reduce our world to chaotic wreckage made up of conflicting slogans and unsubstantiated beliefs. Among these voices and artifacts we roam like refugees in a junkyard of found objects. When we look with eyes wide open we find that the most pressing existential questions are addressed in the mediums in which we most urgently

look for escape. In unguarded moments, when listening to music or viewing movies and television we are opened to novel possibilities. In the fanciful stories we tell to one another we find the most accurate reflection of the truth about where we are and where we may be heading. Our lives, after all, are made of stories. Like archeologists or anthropologists we dig to discover the truth in threads that weave through our fictions. In the dreamworld we step back from the dense layers of event and information constantly swirling around us in our waking life. There we may discover the designs of our future before bringing them to the light of day. *** "...and now the machines are flying us." - Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise On the screen a group of actors sit in comfy looking chairs or stand facing a screen on which images of things taking place in the universe outside the room are projected. We journey with these characters through a series of moral and ethical dilemmas encountered as adventures that take place in virtual space. The boundaries of the Final Frontier extend beyond the screen we are watching to include the space in which we are watching it. This is perfect television.

It doesn't matter that the sets and costumes are cheesy or obviously made of plywood and cardboard against painted backdrops, no more than it mattered to us as children playing with sticks in our own backyards. When the onscreen fantasy ends and we leave the room to continue in our lives we become the away team proceeding on a mission into alien worlds. Those of us whod grown up in big cities were accustomed to watching heroes sort out good and evil in the exotic landscapes of the western or the familiar perky environments of sitcoms. The heroes went up against the bad guys and those comedic moms and dads were almost always wise and good natured and calmly protective. While it was entertaining and provided models we could measure our own lives against, these still felt like somebody elses lives and someone elses adventures. Star Trek made us feel like we were part of the crew of the Enterprise, along for the ride. The show spoke in an imaginative language that dreamers could readily understand. Most important, it provided us with an organizing center from which we made sense of the confusing age we grew up in, where change came so fast that the world appeared always perched on the verge of chaos. The show made its initial run in 1967 and was cancelled after only one season. It was about ten years ahead of its time and couldnt find a ready fit among the eras cowboy

dramas and family sitcoms. Of course, we who were ready for the future wouldnt let it die, so we pounded on the studio doors until it was eventually brought back, again and again. Over forty years later the books, movies, comics and television series still feed a subculture that thrives across at least three generations. As the first television generation we rode a gigantic wave of innovation that began more than a century earlier, when the first photographic image was burned into a metal plate and our relationship to time and space was forever warped by the image. Or maybe the wave actually begins in the 13th century when the first factory looms were constructed, or maybe even earlier, when the first books were reproduced with moveable print. From those times machinery became increasingly the vehicle for our imaginations. We drew our dreams out of our heads and reproduced them to be cast out into the world. Ever since there were storytellers we've used fiction to make sense of the waking world. Fiction takes a stream of events and gives them continuity in the form of narrative or plot. The fiction of Star Trek organized itself around our fondest dreams of progress in a time of raging conflict. In its fanciful world the issues of civil rights and foreign intervention were all located in the distant past. The crew of the Enterprise functioned seamlessly, like a hive of bees, totally self-contained in the belly of a huge machine. St. Augustines trinitarian scheme of memory, intellect and will was embodied in McCoy, Spock and Kirk. Their

authority was unquestioned by the creator, Gene Rodenberrys decree that there be no significant dissension amongst the crew. Like the branches of government the principal actors balanced one another and everyone knew their place and function (displayed by color coded uniforms) and problem solving capabilities. It now appears strange that a generation swept up in so much resistance to authority would accept and even embrace such a militaristic model of the perfect society. Perhaps it was our longing for order in a time of disorder. Still, it was a prophetic foreshadowing of the world in which weve come to live, where almost every activity is mediated through technology and the dictates of the machine reshapes every aspect of our lives. One almost has to wonder if it was the machine itself that was dreaming. While Star Trek embodied our living room love affair with technology, another parallel genre emerged at the same moment in the dark chthonic realm of the midnight drivein. It concretized our deepest dread of a dystopian future, and like Star Trek it spawned a genre has continued to thrive over the decades. George Romeros movie about a zombie apocalypse, Night of the Living Dead premiered in 1968 and spawned numberless spinoffs and reincarnations that proliferate with ever greater frequency as we continue to plunge into the technological future.

Where Rodenberrys universe envisioned a life of perfect harmony encapsulated within highly regimented machine culture, Romeros nightmare is one in which the machinery of social order is rendered useless, and humans themselves loose all sense of aspiration and affection, becoming machinelike incarnations of pure appetite. Successive portrayals of the Zombie Fear have incorporated environmental collapse, worldwide epidemic, the fall of the social order. I believe that beneath all of these is a deeper fear, that of being absorbed by the collective itself. In the latest contribution to the genre based on the bestselling novel by Max Brooks, World War Z, initial 'zombie fear' of humans being transformed into mindless automatons of appetite has been upgraded to a merging of the automatons into a singular collective nightmare. To traditional cultures, bound by history, ritual, human affection and common belief the implacable advance of technological civilization appears like a plague, threatening to destroy all that gives life purpose. From a different perspective the technocratic mind fears most of all a collapse of rational order and an abandonment of the social compact to the demands of selfish individuals. The zombie fear manages to incorporate both extremes in a common terror of being swept up into nihilistic oblivion. Here is the real World War Z, where a hopeful vision of a universe run by benevolent uniformed geeks or one

determined by the rhythmic rituals and cycles based in tradition and relationship to the natural world are both obliterated by the needs of the machinery weve created. The majority of humanity now lives in cities where life is no longer governed by the sun and the moon and the passage of the seasons. The dissonance between lives we live in manmade environments governed by the clock and the demands of our bodies as parts of nature continue to generate dreams and nightmares. Thus our summers are increasingly filled with apocalyptic scenarios that depict a world beset by zombies, robots, aliens and supernatural beings. In our collective fantasies the earth erupts or is bombarded by objects from space. Epidemics rage across the globe. Our imaginations are alight with fascination with our own impending doom, but within our nightmares are the seeds of resistance. The zombies of World War Z are modeled on the behavior of ants, a suitable representation for the fear on both sides of the political divide that we are being overrun by something less than human, like a virus, driven by a mindless will. We certainly cant change the world or redraw the bargains weve made when lost in a world of dreams, but maybe in our dreams can summon a possibility of change. In the meanwhile the zombies will return again and again, the monsters will continue to rise from the deep, cosmic villainy will prevail and the world will appear to hang on

the brink. Godlike heroes will manifest to save the day. Maybe one day well come to conscious terms with our creations and the Star Trek vision of benevolent and compassionate societies dedicated to exploration and service will come to be. After all, our actions and designs for living are first born in the imagination and even in our most vivid nightmares we plant the seeds of possibility.

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Ralph Melcher is a writer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He has published in the areas of media theory, psychology and literature. The Arclist began in 2001 as a group email list to which I've posted essays, poetry and occasional fictions ever since. To receive all postings, including those that do not appear on the Web send me an email note at melcher@nets.com.