The zombie as a device

“In 2006 nobody in Chile had heard of facebook, and very few used the internet. In 2008 it exploded; in less than two years most people had joined the social network. The technological capacity to create a world of zombies is in place. Thousands of hours online can lead us to a new kind of zombie, the gadget zombie, the device zombie, permanently connected to the computer, the zombie who believes he is part of something important, but is really only there to feed the servers that data-mine his behavior, to be redirected to consume new products.” (a world of zombies, on akarrú)

In “[a world of zombies]https://www.akarru.com/blog/2010/11/14/un-mundo-de-zombis/)”, I decided to explore the rise of the contemporary zombie myth. I’m not done with that concept; there is a lot more to cover. Every topic is a continent that deserves to be explored in depth.

In “You Are Not a Gadget”, Jaron Lanier’s central idea is that Web 2.0 is making us uniform, even reducing us to a plane of lower quality than we deserve as humans. Even the concept of friendship gets degraded:

“It depends on how you define yourself. An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in terms of the flow for it to be perceived as something worth reading. So here is another example of how people are able to diminish themselves in order to make the computer seem accurate. Am I accusing all those millions of users of social networking sites of lowering themselves in order to use their services? Well, yes, I am.” – Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, page 36.

Lanier’s ideas are interesting, and they lead me to think about this concept of a new kind of zombie, the device zombie, who follows the patterns imposed by the user interface, or follows the models of socialization defined in a wireframe, so that they fit the business model pitched to a venture capitalist.

For Lanier, Wikipedia seeks to eliminate point of view, facebook standardizes the way you define your identity, and twitter goes as far as limiting the length of your message. We are adjusted to the model of the social sites, to fit the needs of the algorithms programmed in PHP, so that our behavior makes it possible to display the ads that sustain the business model. In short, we turn into device zombies.