Here’s a little taste of the next What’s Next report out soon….

You may not have noticed this but we are becoming increasingly fascinated with the undead. Over the past few years, TV shows and computer games about Zombies have been invading movie theatres, living rooms and computers.

So what’s going on here? Why are we so interested in something that can’t talk and doesn’t mind getting shot? Perhaps it’s not what these creatures are but rather what they represent. Maybe zombies (and vampires) represent a subconscious fear about the consequences of untethered scientific research? Or maybe it’s to do with a fear of disease (vampires equals HIV/Aids, SARS or perhaps a loss of purity and innocence).

Better still, what if our fascination with the undead is rather related to how we feel about everyday life? Maybe Night of the Living Dead is analogous with working late at the office? You might even draw parallels between blasting 200 zombies with an automatic rifle and rapidly deleting hundreds of emails in the office on a Monday morning. You can spend all day doing either, but like tweets and Facebook updates they just keep on coming.

I think that’s it. On a superficial level there is pleasure in just destroying things, but at a deeper level what these things represent is the Internet.

We are fearful about the Internet – and perhaps machines in general – consuming us rather than the other way around. It is about having our life (our souls)  taken away from us by things that cannot be deleted, cannot be paused and cannot be ignored.

Things that won’t talk to us and don’t seem to understand what it means to be human.