Zombies at Work

What comes after work life? Retirement and death? A chance for personal regrowth after years of decay? What if retirement remains eternally postponed, so that the worker is stuck in unrelenting toll? What if the release of death never came, and for the undead, work is never-ending?

“The myth of the zombie, of the living dead”, write Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “is a work myth”. Mark Fisher echoes, stating that “[t]he most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.” Mark Fisher is known for his concept that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism. The myth of the zombie shows that even at the end of the world there are workers. The fear of zombies is the fear of being turned into one among many, repeating the same incessant, insignificant routines. Labor itself zombifies, making us mindless, hardly living, yet incessantly twitching, shifting and laboring masses.

In the series The Last of US, the zombie-apocalypse is caused by the parasitic fungi cordyceps. Cordyceps are fungi that otherwise zombify only ants and other insects, capturing their brains with their spores. The fungi then sends ants back into their colonies to infect others, before blossoming grotesquely beautifully from their bodies. The fictional zombies of The Last of Us prey on our fears of intrusion, of loss of cognitive and bodily control. When the series released someone tweeted that it felt anti-fungus, reactionary against our bodily (and I would add, political) possibilities.

Disintegration of the human might not be horrific. Mycologist Merlin Sheldrake describes the growth of fungi as “speculation in bodily form” in the sense that instead of selecting one path over the other, fungi move in both direction at the same time. Donna Haraway unearths the foundational concept of the earthling, which develops etymologically in one path into the word human and in another to humus. Haraway suggests moving in both directions concurrently, conceiving the “human as humus”. Jobs (bullshit or otherwise) may make us forget that we are compost, living and rotting together as earthlings.

The end of the world might not be the be-all end-all if it led to the end of capitalism. There are certainly worse businesses around than those spreading spores. There are good reasons to make company with others than the companies destroying our planet.

I started working in what I initially thought was an abandoned office space. But its emptiness had invited others in. It invited others to take control and decide the direction of this company. Such overgrown buildings should be our new offices. This is where we work now. This is where we play, dance and become undead. Come, keep us Company.