The Monsters of the Future: Part 2

until we finished talking about monsters. Wonder do you want to briefly introduce yourself again? Oh yeah, yeah, if you missed miss b introduction on the last episode. I am a co host of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast and I blog It's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. And we also do some videos here and there, um, including the monster Science series that goes up on the house Stuff Works YouTube page and uh and on stuff

to Blow your Mind dot com. And that's all about unnatural creatures, monsters, the natural world of biology and science and where those two kind of crossover and what we can learn by comparing them. Yeah, it's furthermore stars, Mr or doctor. I'm sorry Anton Jessup, who is who is one of my favorite humans who has ever in the

respect dumped a lot of blood on me. So yeah, that happened, and you know, and of course you helped out with the most recent season if yeah, yeah, so far you have to kind of look closely to see the artifacts, but you are are resident oh VHS specter. Yeah yeah, so so if you want to see me being creepy in the background of some videos, then ah, then I mean, that's not the only reason you should watch them. They're they're very excellent in their own rights.

As long as they watch them, I don't care if you go there for that sole reason. Keep it on you even, Alright, So I'm gonna be frank and admit that we initially just planned to do one podcast with Robert about the future of Monster but we got to talking about monsters and realized we had way too much to say about them. Yeah. Yeah, we have like ten pages of notes here. Um, so we so we got

through about half of it last time. Um. And during that last podcast, we covered what monsters are and what they mean in our culture, and and a little bit of the history of how we have I mean, not the three of us sitting here, but humans in general have explored their their fears and anxieties through monsters throughout the ages. Right, So today we're actually going to speculate a little bit about what the monsters of the future are,

what is going to terrify our our future generations. But I think first we should do it just a real quick refresher on what we talked about last time. And I'd say the driving point of our last episode was that monsters are not arbitrary, and they don't exist in a vacuum. There are product of culture and especially of social change and anxiety and of technology. Would you all say this, right? Oh? Indeed? I mean they're symbolically powerful entities, even if even if one is just creating a monster

on the fly for the World's Chiefest Tara film. Uh. You know, with little or no philosophical intent, you're still playing on traditions of monsters, monsters that have built up in our in our varying cultures over the over thousands of years, in folklore and myth and in in fiction, and uh, and here we are today still making them up over and over again. Yeah. And so last time we talked about the seven theses about the meaning of monsters from the English professor Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and what

were some of the more important to those. I think one of them was the idea of the mixing of categories. That a monster very often occurs at a boundary of classification. It's a confusion or mixing of different classes that shouldn't be together. And you see that all the time and monsters. So you see the beast man, you know it's half animal half human, or you see the living dead that crosses the boundary of life and death, or you see the human machine, uh, and all kinds of strange creatures

like this. We also mentioned the xenomorph. It seems part biological, part mechanical. Y. It's like what orange Julius, right, is it orange juice or is it milk? I know how to treat orange juice. I know how to treat milk. But that's unholy combination of the two throws me for a loop. Together it is monster, right. And so because we can't apply our usual categorical system of treatment to these things, we don't know how to deal with them, and they're frightening. One of the other things was that

the monster polices the borders of the possible. It's sort of guards the boundaries right right. It is both a transgressor it it's doing things that that we cannot do as polite members of society. And it's furthermore punishing human transgressors. It's saying stay on the path, like like, don't go out into the woods, don't feed something after midnight, you know.

And yeah, it could be any kind of violation. It could punish too much intellectual curiosity or physically going to a place you're not supposed to go, crossing taboos, anything like that. Very often, like ritual taboos. You know, you

do the wrong ritual and oh, here finds demon. One of the other thess is that very often the monster sort of represents the other, that it's difference embodied, and that this can play a metaphorical relationship with others in society, both the treatment of the other and the fear of being the other. And then finally, I would say an important one is that the monster has something to do

with desire. It's not just scary, but it's also attractive because it's associated with the forbidden and the not allowed that's probably the same thing as forbidden. Huh, it's a it's a good rephrase. I like that idea as an alternate harm movie title because I think the forbidden has been taken, but the not allowed zone. Yeah, well, because it's associated with that, it's also associated as with I think we say said less time, the no no pleasures,

right exactly. And so there's a there's a desire associated with the monster, and it's sort of a desire to be the monster. Yeah, I mean, you see the I was just thinking, you know, about the outsider monsters that often kind of make you know, kind of make weapons out of their their imperfections in their flaws. It's it's kind of like, I'm the things that make me feel weak and beat up and and outside of society, and

the monster becomes an elevation and uh, you know. So so they're they're desirable characters from from a number of different ways. Their freedom or there. I mean, I think a lot of times it is about freedom, sure, sure, And I think that especially starting with things like like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and and getting into all of the the youth culture monster television shows that are happening

right now. There's there's a whole lot of these monsters being very sexy and in not a forbidden way, but in a like like superpower kind of way. There's a power in in having that freedom, right absolutely, Yeah, that's interesting. And so one of the last things we talked about in the last episode was we just looked a little bit at the history of monster trends, and so we looked at Frankenstein perhaps being a reaction to enlightenment science and philosophy of fear that we were going too far

with intellectual curiosity and experimentation. Maybe Lovecraft representing a response to new science in the early twentieth century, to relativity, to UH, to of course the First World War, and

to quantum theory. We looked at the atomic age, where we had all these giant mutated bugs and stuff that are a reaction very much obviously to nuclear testing and the power of the atom, the social upheavals of the sixties and seventies and how they manifested in horror and then finally this kind of e horror phase UH that it's a direct response to the new technologies that were coming that we have been coming out in this our internet age, right, the angry ghost is in the telephone.

It's going to get you through the wires. The wires will not save you. Okay, But now we want to make the shift and talk about what we think the future of monsters really will be. What what is the scariest thing to the next generation in thirty or fifty years. What will the horror movies be about? And I think the place we got to start, because it's the most

obvious one is robots and artificial intelligence. Yes, definitely, artificial intelligence, whether that's embodied in a robot body or separate in some kind of machine the cloud. Yea, indeed, I mean there are are technological children, right, and and so like like actual children, they're they're terrifying because there there are future We've put a certain amount into them, uh you know,

either either via nurture or nature. And then it's the same way with with technology basically, and uh yeah, so you can't help it. Have a have a bit of apprehension about where it's going, right, And one of Gerome's thesis is actually one of the ones we didn't just mentioned, was the idea that monsters are very much our offspring. There there are children, and much like our real children, they sort of look back at us and ask why

they were created. They want to know. They want us to give them a purpose and a lot We don't necessarily have anything good to tell them sometimes, and so this makes a lot of sense to me, is the future of monsters. But I do want to raise a strange objection that I think we can maybe rectify, which is that robots killer robots, no matter how menacing they are, aren't all that immediately scary to me for some reason. So we've seen it a million times. Science fiction is

full of dangerous and threatening artificial intelligence. You've got how in two thousand one, you've got sky Ned and the Terminator series. You've got the big machine complex in the Matrix. I guess it would be the Matrix. Uh, none of this really frightens me, and so I want to make a kind of distinction, And if you all want to offer alternative terminology, please do. I this is probably not the best way to phrase it, but I'm just trying to explain an idea. There's a difference between a merely

conceivable monster and a plausible monster. So a conceivable monster is basically any monster. Any monster you can picture in place in a scenario, and and the evil artificial intelligence would fit this, So it could be a terminator, could be whatever. But by contrast, a plausible monster is not necessarily one I find scientifically or physically plausible, but it feels relevant to my life, so it actually scares me.

It follows me home from the theater. I might be alone in my house at night and worry about this monster. And one of the strange things is it almost sometimes seems inversely related to the amount of plausibility of the monster. For example, I don't personally believe in ghosts. I don't think they exist, but ghosts are a very plausible monster to me in my house at night, Yeah, there might

be a ghost there. I find terminators, at least in theory, quite possible, as you could build a cybernetic creature that's designed to kill. That idea doesn't really frighten me that much, and I wonder why that is. Well, and this is this will probably just be as much as a sort of ambiguous way of looking at it, But it it kind of comes down to to the question, um, is

there room in the shadows for this particular monster? You know, it's kind of and not the necessarily the actual optical shadows, but you know it is there is there enough mystery in your life or in the world to accommodate, uh, that creature at least at two in the morning, or at least on that dark street or when you're walking through the woods, and it's it's kind of hard to nail down exactly you know which ones fit into that category?

Oh yeah, yeah, No. I do think that this fear of of yours, and I think it's a pretty common way of looking at different categories of horror movies goes back to the fear of the unknown, which is one of those very basic ones, um, because you can understand basically how a terminator would be put together and how a sufficient advanced artificial intelligence could totally go like a global hannibal lector on all of us, because you know,

we all have those days, so we get it. Um. But but ghosts are are are that unknown factor, that that thing that is in the shadows, especially if you don't believe in them, because they're just completely inexplicable. That's really interesting. I like that you'll both brought up the

shadows because that might be part of it. And I wonder if as we move further down the road towards cybernetics and towards artificial intelligence and really powerful, adaptable, all purpose robotics, that's something like that actually would become scarier, not just because it's more pervasive, but because there are places in the shadows where it could plausibly hide. I mean, if you imagine a world in which there is tons of private research into artificial intelligence and robotics, you don't

know what that weird lab down the street is ting. Sure? Sure, And as that kind of technology becomes more ubiquitous, I mean, not that's not already bordering unubiquity given the I mean, how many of us have cell phones in our pockets or or fitness trackers on our risks or etcetera. Um, I mean how many electronic devices do you own in your home right now? Can you even count them? Um? And when they're all speaking to each other, maybe that will become or you know, like the more advance that

they've become, perhaps it will become more shadowy. The less that the average consumer is able to understand about those objects. Yeah, yeah, I mean at some point where we find ourselves in our kitchen with our robotic kitchen robot. And it's not so much the fear of the killer robot, but maybe the fear of what if this killer robot catches some sort of killer virus off of the ubiquitous Internet, you know, I mean, yeah, the mystery becomes the inner psyche of

the robot. As the robot's mind becomes more and more complex and difficult for us to understand, it becomes more and more like an animal, like a human, like a monster that might have strange motivations that you can't grapple.

What remind to be of a line in uh in William Gibson's Neuromancer, where he uh, he makes the comparison and one of the characters, of course makes a deal essentially with a really powerful AI and uh and it's of somebody comments that that essentially it's a deal with the devil, and it's something that that was impossible for for centuries and centuries. It was purely a human creation, but then eventually technology came around and made it possible,

uh in reality. So I'm not sure how that where that lays into it, because you can still, of course be afraid of the of the devil in the night you can be afraid of the ghost. Uh, that's just outside of the shadow of your night light. But then the idea of reaching a point technologically where we can manifest those things in reality, Yeah, yeah, I can very plausibly see that becoming the new the new ghost, and

also consciousness is is certainly mysterious. So definitely, and that ties into the next point I want to make about artificial intelligence, which is that this could relate to another one of Cohen's theses. We talked about the idea that sometimes the monster is a thing that is persecuted or oppressed and looks back on us in judgment. And so I want to bring up something we've talked about on this podcast before, which is the idea of artificial intelligence

becoming sentient. I think we'll always be haunted by this question, right, if you design something that seems to be intelligent according to the the idea lingering behind the Turing test, you know, Alan Turing's original question, should you basically have to assume that this thing actually is sentient, that it possesses a subjective experience, that it's something is happening inside the mind of this computer you've created that's not just external it's

not just coming out to you. It's not just behavior. There's such a thing as what it's like to be this computer and you are now enslaving it. Yeah. Yeah. It raises the question that once we have this fabulous internet of things, like is my toaster really happy making toast? Should I force it into toastitude? Well, I mean, we

have such a problem understanding human consciousness. So I mean the mind body problem comes basically down to the situation that you you look at the organic brain and you say, all right, and I see how I see how it works and see what's going on there, more or less. And then you have the mind and you can look at the mind and say, all right, I can sort of see what's going on there. But then when you try and compare the two, you say, well, this doesn't

match up with this. This does not seem like it's not one to one, right, it's not a one to one match. So if we can't even identify that that connection with our own mind and brain, then what chance do we have in looking at circuitry in the future and saying, oh, well, that's consciousness right there. Because we can't even really point to our own heads and say that right, it's really hard. I mean, if you can't find a piece of tissue in the brain, then you

could you realize is magic. Then what says a computer can't accomplish that same subjective experience? It it's a little terrifying. Oh yeah, yeah, no, no one, no one wants to be that guy. So yeah, and and uh and it is interesting in the in the way that it's you know, it turns the camera back on ourselves too. You know, it's like the fear of the other kind of becomes the fear of of ourselves. Um one robot human conflict that that I always think about in the in these situations.

Uh comes around to the book Doom, of course, where you have in the backstory the whole um Butalerrian Jijihad, where humans and machines had this you know, this big conflict. And and I've read that that Frank Herbert's original thinking along these lines was less this physical conflict between man and machine, between humans and thinking machines, but but more about what what does it do when we depend upon all this technology, we depend on thinking machine, how does

it change the human experience? Do we end up thinking more like machines? Um, which certainly gets into the whole. One of the key areas in the in in computers and in human computer interaction is is you know, the continual struggle to well, let's let's try and make make it a situation where the machines are more human like and I don't have to become more machine like to

use them. Yeah, let's actually talk about that, the concept of of cybernetics and and those those actual combinations and the horrific idea of of losing your humanity by being by by willfully becoming part machine. Right. Well, there's the very simple version of this, which is that you imagine that we have cybernetics that increase our physical capabilities. That's sort of you know, the brute force version. You have exoskeleton, you have a robot arm. I'd take a robot arm.

I mean yeah, right, yeah, I think we did a poll on the podcast before Robert off your arm to get a stronger robot arm. I have to cut one off to get a robot and just had a third robot arm. No, you have to cut off your armor.

You can get a stronger robot arm. I'd have to see a demo for really the younger me would say yes, because it was very obsessed with robotic arms when I as a kid, you know, because you'd see that scene in terminators trying out in front of near But right, but that's the simple version that we just don't think about all that deeply. Okay, it's just augmenting physical capability

is sure, that's one thing cybernetics could do. But it increasingly looks like cybernetics are going to have to involve direct connections with the brain, which is now widely accepted to be the seat of the self. As we were just talking about in the in the last point. So we've discussed on the podcast before how brain computer interfaces

allow all kinds of crazy stuff. We talked about how monkeys can control computer cursors with their brains and I don't know if you've read about this rather, but yeah, so they don't need to use their hands at all. They can just look at a computer screen with the wire going into their head and move the cursor around. The same thing has been done with allowing people suffering from quadruplegia to be able to move a robot arm to feed themselves with a brain implant. There was actually

just something I read about the other day. It was published in Science Translational Medicine by sellers Ryan and Hawser, and then reported in New Scientists and that they described how just the other day, a non invasive brain computer interface allowed a sixty eight year old man with locked in syndrome. So that means he's aware, but he can't use any of his muscles, uh, following a brain stem stroke to spell out written messages to family members with

brain activity alone. So communicating through computers using only your brain. And I think this is only going to continue and get more efficient and more deeply involved biologically. Yeah, and and it's and it's so wonderful for for people who do have a traumatic brain injury or or traumatic bodily injury, or who who otherwise need this kind of technology in order to have a a quote unquote normal life. Oh certainly right. I'm mentioning that in the in the context

of a monster podcast. I don't want to demonize technology, though, absolutely super welcome news. Yeah, yeah, that is rad extremely red. But what happens when brain computer interfaces or b c i s get so good that healthy people want to use them to browse the internet to communicate with domestic robots to play video games. I mean, you can, we

can we assume that this will be done. Could self modification in the coming cybernetics era lead to a resurgence I thought about in the body horror genre, the kind of stuff we saw from Cronenberg, like the fly Videodrome, the brood, where the threat is not so much that there's an external predator coming to get you, but there's a loss of your sense of autonomy, a loss of the sense of self, transformation of the self into this

non human and otherwise unrecognizable abomination. Yeah, you see this externalization of the self, and then you begin to wonder, well, where do where do where do I actually end? And where does it begin? And we we already see shades of that as our as our memory ends up sort of offloading some of its capabilities. You know, we we no longer really need to know how to spell even normal words in our everyday usage, because the machine is

taking care of that. You know, in the same way that if you you're you're in a even a short term relationship, but let's say a long term relationship, and there are things that your spouse remembers or your your partner remembers that you don't, and you end up so compartmentalizing. It's actually the same kind of mental process going on there, all right. Sure it's going like, oh, Judy, I don't remember you tell this story exactly kind of thing. It's a very good point. We we even planned for that,

don't we. I Mean, I feel like there are just some types of information I don't even try to remember because I know my wife Rachel will remember them. Yeah, and it's and everything else is just a key stroke away. I mean, it's a wonder we'd bother to remember anything. And so so Yeah, even though the the the smartphone in our pocket isn't actually connected to our body, I mean, it becomes such a part of us. It becomes a

part of our our working memory. Even so, cybernetics, yeah, I I see very good potential for that in the Monsters of the Future. It's it's that crossover again, the mixing of categories what's machine what's human that already terrifies people now that it's not even necessarily imminent for the average person. I mean, when when it is a common thing, who knows how scary this will be? Yeah, I mean,

and we're all fundamentally cybernetic organisms. I mean, and I'm not necessarily talking about the fact that we have a a lot of us wear glasses or we have, you know, some sort of medical implant or what have you. But I mean, just done a very basic level when when when primitive humans picked up stick or a bone club, it updates their body scheme and in their mind that bone club is becoming a part of their body, becoming

a part of their arm. And so I mean, you can make an argument that that's the earliest cyborg and we've been cybers for a very long time, and anything else we do digitally is just icing on the cake. Sure, you know, kind of the same way that that you feel a personal territory to your car when you're driving it like it it becomes an extension of your body, and when someone moves too close to it, you get a little bit me about it. This is something I

was thinking about. Not to go on a huge tangent, but I did a blog post on this because I was thinking about it in terms of gun ownership. Because of obviously gun ownership big controversial issue, especially here in the States, people get very possessive of their their firearms, and there's a lot of anxiety along along the ideas of rights to have them and the the you know,

the the bugbear of them being taken away. And I wonder, you know, when you're when one is using that, when one is comfortable with that weapon, they're updating into their body scheme. It's becoming a part of themselves. So does it become a type of dismemberment for that to be taken away from them anyway? And also, I mean speaking of Cronenberg and like video drome, So we've been talking about about the brain, and I think that that's another really terrific example of of of how horror might go

in the future through through the study of neuroscience. We haven't seen a lot of neur are scientific monsters out there yet, but but I think it has huge potential. Right, So we've been talking about technology, mostly how technology affects the brain, but what about the research that's going to continue to be conducted in pure neuroscience itself, just learning more about the relationship between the mind and the brain. Is that a cause for horror? Is there a monster

somewhere in there? We're talking earlier about about shadows and monsters. Is there room in the shadows for for for this particular brand of monster. And certainly there's plenty of room in the shadows when it comes to human consciousness and our mental processes. And and you know, the more we learn, the more it seems as if our mind is just there, just the the shallow, sunlit waters of a bunch of

deeper body. And there's plenty of darkness there with the where there's there's cognition going on that we don't really have access to. And then you start dissecting that apart, and you get into a whole discussion of free will. Are we actually choosing anything or we just sort of, uh have this We're in this self delusion that we're making all these choices for ourselves. Are we just these

these chemical computers that are running out programs. Well, I think people are already terrified of this idea, or I don't know if terrified is the right word, but there at least many people are repulsed by the idea of determinism. If you hear this brought up in a philosophical conversation, some people find they seem to find it repugnant. They can't deal with it. Do you know, what I mean. Yeah, yeah,

I mean, I mean even myself. I I've certainly covered it enough and and read enough about it to where on a on a level, I pretty much agree with it. I say, yeah, I'm I don't really think we have a lot of free will in our lives. I think we're obeying our programming, we're obeying their environmental stimuli. But at the end of the day, that doesn't match up all that well with my experience of the reality. And then I have to sort of fall back in into just thinking about it and the way the way we

all do that. I'm making these choices and I'm deciding what I'm gonna do with this hour of free time, even though it's pretty much already been written, right. I guess we can't get into a whole debate about determinism, compatible is um, and libertarian free will on this podcast, but uh, yeah, it's certainly a serious question and one that neuroscience I think does have something to say about.

It's there. I think there's some people who are skeptical that neuroscience can offer anything on this question, but I think it certainly can, especially if you find seats of consciousness and decision making in the brain. We've talked on

this podcast before. Not to keep referring to previous podcasts all the time, but we definitely have about uh, like recent recent research that made it look like, Oh, I wonder if the clostrum is the part of the brain that actually combines the various phenomena to create the sensation of consciousness. You're saying, there's a monster in the classroom. Um, yeah,

and so. But the other question I would ask is that that definitely is a deeply scary idea that I think will resonate with people as this science becomes more and more popular and we get popular reporting on it. But what does the monster actually look like? What form does it to a? Well, you know, another another side to think about in terms of this is also a

memory and the fallibility of memory false memories. Um. When you really start getting into that area, it gets a little scary because you start looking at your life and you're saying, well, my life is made out of these memories, and how many of them are real? And when you start realizing that every time you reach back into the archives and you draw out that memory, you're actually changing it. M One one recent example that comes to mind on. This is the movie Oculus. I don't know if you

guys have seen it. I have not, But I was just going to bring up the fact that I think that some of the recent return to Mirror and Doublegang or Horror might have something to do with the advances that we've been making a neuroscience because it's about ourselves and who we are. And Oculus, besides of being just

a bleak our film, I thought it was. I thought it was well executed, and it does some interesting things where it plays with memory, with these two characters memory of a traumatic event and uh and and I thought it it dabbled in that in an effective way. So in a in a way, even though it's dealing with a very old trope of the of the haunted Mirror, Uh, it kind of is getting into a neuro scientific zone. Yeah, I've been wanting to check it out. I will add that to my list of all of the movies that

I apparently need to go see now. Yeah, okay, So how about just straight up post apocalyptic dystopia the breakdown of society. This is something that's really on people's minds. I noticed that there's so much common reporting about like about like are we at the end of this era of like like are we going the way of the Romans kind of stuff or even down just like at the at the vox populi level YouTube comments, we make

videos about the future. We make videos about the future and put them up on YouTube, and tons of comments are about you know, just the coming dystopia, the end of the world, the apocalypse. People. This is popular. People are thinking about this idea a lot. What happens when society collapses because of you know, politics or technology or social change, whatever it is. Yeah, and and there's so much there's so much popular media about zombies right now.

Like I I think that Robert and I we've had a little bit of a conversation and just around the office before about how kind of tired we get of zombies. Sometimes I am right there with you. I discovered Dawn of the Dead when I was I think in my senior year of high school, and I went through a brief phase where I was like, zombie movies, this is the best thing ever. And then I got so sick

of them I couldn't stand it anymore. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you get kind of used to the taste, and then you start trying different spiced versions of it to try and stick with that diet. But eventually you kind of realized, I don't know, I think maybe I'm done with zombies. I'd like to pause it that I would I never want to think about spiced zombies again. Um it is it is. It is decorative gourd season you guys, it's

pumping spice zombies. Sorry, okay please, Uh well, anyway, one thing I think I'd like to tie the post apocalyptic zombie genre into is Cohen's thesis about desire about how this is so it's sort of scary. It's not a situation you'd actually want to be in. But on the other hand, you hear this a lot in the popular talk about zombies. People want that experience of blowing a zombie's head off with a shotgun. Oh sure, I mean it's being it's the experience of being able to destroy

human body with no consequences. And I'm sure I just sounded like a terrible murderer right now and I said that, But but they're certainly amongst my friends anecdotally. Uh, there's almost a fetish fetishization of that kind of post apocalyptic environment. We spend so many casual conversations talking about our roles in the post apocalypse and like how we would get out of the city and and you know what kind of weapons we would use and and you know that

kind of stuff. It's huge and of course we do all die there. I would be first. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm useless in a post apocalypse. I'm a writer, like what, But you know it's uh, I totally agree, though, it is something we desire and uh and and even that that physical violence, it's against the zombie we desire because it's a it's a situation where we've we've simplified reality into a vision where there's a definite right and a

definite wrong. There's dead and there's removed the moral ambiguity. Yeah, or there's living in there's undead. I guess. So they're the zombies and there us. They are bad, we are good. If we see one of those, we can use direct

lethal violence against them and solve the problem. And because we live these lives where very little is black and white, everything's grey, and and you know that the problems on the news are not so easily solved that as a situation of what point a gun at the zombie's head and then the case is closed. So we desire that

kind of simplicity. Um. I've heard it argued that the zombie Horde comet is also almost kind of a flow state, kind of a fantasy, because the zombies are easily dispatched one by one and it's just a matter of getting in the flow of dealing with it. It's like a checklist that never ends, but we can definitely check things off that list. It's it's it's that immediate reward kind of thing, right, It's the it's the achievement unlocked right right.

The flow state is the it's a continuous challenge, so you're never bored, but it's something you can do exactly, you can get it done. So ye, zombie Apocalypse is kind of a flow state fantasy. And and also it's a chance and almost kind of a more honey sense, We're we get it. It's a chance to sort of reconnect or at least fantasize about reconnecting with older modes of life. You know, suddenly you're you're actually living for

yourself out there. You're not depending on technology. You're picking food or growing food, or at least scavenging for food. You know, you're protecting the loved one closest to you

from this this very cut and dry horror. Yeah. Yeah, I do think that the part of the popularity of zombie movies right now is also just a general like urbanization anxiety and that we're we're losing touch with those parts of ourselves as humans and losing touch with the nature, losing some of our individuality and freedom by being in these in these stifling urban environments, and also are just being kind of starting crammed into these inescapable and claustrophobic spaces.

So do you guys think that we're that we're coming to an end of this fascination with zombies or do you think that we're we're just kind of riding the wave. I don't know. I thought we were kind of getting to the end of a few years back, and we keep going. So yeah, it's interesting because it's something that

I feel like people people are beginning to tire of. Actually, I mean, they're catching on that this has been done a lot, But then again, it does continuously play on on these the zeitgeist right in ways that we I don't think we're done with this feeling yet. In culture, that there's there's something we're domesticated, there's some kind of violent, primal existence we'd like to get back to. We still do desire this flow state with our kind of uh

stifling office jobs. Not not speaking about my own if my boss is listening, but you know the idea, and we're living in these urban spaces where there's so many people so close together in the same space. I can see this continuing too, to reach the feelings that are

still very popular. I don't see going away. Yeah, I mean, like you know, we as we discussed, the monster comes out of culture, and as long as its culturally relevant, as long as there's something in the monster that fulfills our desires or helps us process our fears, we're going to keep coming back to it, even if we we don't like to admit. Wait, so, do you think it's actually going away or not? I guess not. It's gonna

It's gonna be here. And you know, the good thing is that along the ride some people are going to do something interesting with it. People are going to spice those zombies and uh and make them a little more palatable. Well, I certainly don't mean to say there are no good recent zombie movies. I don't that entirely, but I'm still

enjoying some some parts of the culture. Um. But another thing that actually think zombies tap into very deeply is our current anxiety around pandemic, which is certainly with with the recent Ebola outbreaks, very forefront in a lot of people's minds. Yeah, I think this is also very much related to urbanization, because you come into the office, if one person sick, ends up, half the office gets sick, or maybe everybody gets sick. We're all in close spaces

and we're all sharing germs. This didn't this wasn't always the case, right, I mean, this is a fairly recent thing in human history that we're cramming so many people together in such tight spaces. Oh. Sure, Also there is you know, just just as we discover more about how our bodies work and kind of how fragile they are, and how many weird new diseases can kind of come

out of nothing. Um and and be very serious, I mean, you know, I think that a lot of the recent interest in vampire horror kicking off in the nineteen eighties was very much due to the AIDS epidemic. Uh. Fun fact by the way. For instance, Sport Coppola was working on a documentary about AIDS at the same time that

he was putting together his film bram Stoker's Dragula. That's interesting, especially considering that there are some strong arguments that brom Stoker himself uh wrote Dracula and was became so obsessed with the vampire motif because he himself may have been suffering from syphilis, and that you see a lot of shades of specially the third final level of syphilis in the Vampire. Yeah. Absolutely. I think you've talked a lot about the link between syphilis and vampires, and that was

really on syphilis for a while. It's a fascinating topic. Um, if you've been around me, I probably tried to convince you of it. But yeah, but this is another one I can definitely see extending into the future and creating the monsters of tomorrow. They might be tiny monsters. Germs. I mean something that's hard to hard to to place put your finger on, especially because it's especially frightening because

a germ is mindless. It chases you and and and hunts you without knowing what it's doing, so there's nothing

to demonize you can't really argue with it. Yeah, but also but there, but it's that that boundary point can also come into play because in order to get the germ, I mean, one of the whole things, especially with syphilis and in any sexually transmitted disease, is that there's kind of this moral zone to it because to acquire that that mindless and you know, non judging entity, you had to engage in activity that might be considered um morable,

apprehensive others would judge. Yeah, it's that border patrol and exactly. Yeah. Uh And and also someone wrote in here and I think it's a really terrific uh parallel the Fly and the thing um from the early nineties, late eighties, eighties issue Yah. Yeah, and that kind of of of body horror that was going on at the time that was very very much I think part of our anxiety about these diseases that we that we couldn't do a whole

lot about. Oh yeah, I think definitely with Cronenberg's The Fly, I think that's a there's a there's a strong case to be made that there's a lot of AIDS anxiety tied up in that one. Definitely. How about technological connectivity, I mean, this is something that I cannot see going away now. There there are people talking about how we're going to get sick of Facebook and surveillance and stuff like that. I don't buy it at all. I think

we are headlong and we're not coming back. I think that the deeply connected, digitally enabled networking that we're experiencing now, we haven't even reached the peak yet, not not even close. I don't think yeah. I mean I fantasize about leaving it all behind sometimes, and then I remind myself rather quickly, oh well, I have I have to do it as part of my job, so there's no way I would have to leave this job and to leave that behind. And then I have. It's the way I connect with people.

I know. It's just we're we've waited too far into that pool to really get out again. I think there's really no going back. I hate Facebook sometimes, but then I realized that without Facebook, I'd probably never talk to these dozen friends of mine who live in different cities.

And I mean, it keeps you connected, it really does, sure, sure, and you know there are some parts of it that are a little bit a horrible, but but there's a lot of it that is very dear to me, and that I would I would, you know, I feel like I really am being enriched by seeing the photographs that they post and and and reading about how their kids are doing, or their dogs or you know whatever. It is. That it and it's great that all that social connection

is his own via a soulless corporation. It is intent on making profits, right, but that occasionally turning your life into money. Yeah, yeah, and that and that occasionally does strange uh psychological studies on us. So but you can't really, you can't turn away from it because yeah, your your social connections are bound up in it. But if we accept the prediction that this trend continues, we're only going to get more and more connected via these digital channels.

What does this mean for our anxieties as a culture and how does that turn into a monster or does it? Well? I think you know, monsters on Facebook, monsters on message boards. I mean it's easy because I mean, really, you encounter trolls already, and and you on one level, you know that that is an actual person. On the other side, on the same level you they're human. Well, I know,

and that's that's where it gets kind of interesting. I wonder if that, if the trolls of the Internet, that the the impostures of the Internet, to what extent that becomes more and more of a thing. I mean, maybe I'm I missed there's a there's actually maybe there's an actual recent example of this in horror cinema that I'm

I'm I'm forgetting about. But it seems like that's I feel like this could be part of the return to the to the slasher and serial killer genres that we've been seeing a little bit lately, because I feel like that that de humanizing, that that de humanized human is very much a part of of our lives every day. I mean, it's it's why you know, we all know not to read the comments, except for those of us for whom that's that's our job. But uh it we

get lots of really lovely comments. Oh no, no, no, you guys specifically are upstanding ladies and gentlemen and et cetera, and uh and we love every single one of you. But there there are many other people on the Internet who are not that curious and kind. So yeah, maybe that thing I can't help. But wonder, as we you know, as we we sort of lose our one to one social connections, and we depend more and more on this on Facebook and the Internet in general to connect with people.

Like maybe we end up having a more of a return to not only the slasher but like the straight up like Dario Argento hands strangling someone kind of slasher scenario, not as almost out of a desire to just be physically contact. Yeah. Yeah, well you mean as a as a result of the fact that we're carrying on so many of our relationships not in person, right, Yeah, that you might be the five people you're closest with, maybe

you don't even see them on a regular basis. So maybe the sort of dark desire become well, at least when I die, let my murder hug me to death, you know, because then at least I'll go out of this world with some human contact. Yeah. I wonder if there could also be the exact opposite, where the horror is isolation. I mean people, people are terrified now to be away from email, to be away from Facebook. Not everyone, but this is a common fear. People report, I haven't

checked my email in three hours. I have intense anxiety about this. Yeah. Yeah, and maybe that could even tie back into another thing which I'm started skipping around in our notes, but but space exploration. Uh. Certainly in the seventies ish there was there was a lot of that horror of being isolated literally in space on on a cold dark ship somewhere, even though space isn't cold, which we have discussed. Um. But uh uh, and so maybe

maybe we'll see more of that. Yeah, Definitely, there's always room in the in the world of isolation for the monster, because that's the realm where your mind turns on itself. Uh. And the instant of hours. Ye. But speaking of of human contact, I think I think parenthood is a trope and horror cinema that we are certainly not done with. Yeah.

I think there are several facets to this. Number one is going to be something more related to the cybernetics we already talked about, because I think we're seeing we've already seen, at least in America, I think, largely a medicalizing of birth, and it's become it's a hospital event. It's associated with health industry and technology and stuff like that. And I think is technology intrudes more and more on on birth, that's something that really does make people uncomfortable

because birth. I mean, it's one of the the most intensely emotional experiences that humans have. We feel very strongly about it. And now we've got things coming up, like what about the the idea of the artificial uterus. You can to allow a fetus to just date without putting it in a human body. Yeah. Actually, one of the only scenes, m one of the most visually arresting scenes for me in The Matrix was that scene where where Keanu Reeves is born in that goo bath and it's

and it's and it's actually really quite horrific. Like, not a whole lot in that movie is very scary, but that that kind of stuck with me. True. I mean, there's certainly a lot of room for for horror there. But but on the other hand, there's there's a lot that we easily get used to. Like I can't help but think back to like Newsweek and Time covers about the test tube baby. The age of the test two baby is coming, and now we live in the age of the test tube baby, and it's generally not that

big of a deal. I feel the same. It's going to be the same with with human cloning, you know, it's it's still remains a bit of a bug bear, but as uh as we work out the kinks, as it becomes more of a reality, it becomes a reproductive choice than you know, we're going to realize. It's it's not you know, reaching into devoid and or anything. It's something ultimately grounded in biological reality. Yeah. Oh man, I've

got another one. I can't believe I didn't put this in the notes, but genetic modification of humans, I mean, genetic engineering of humans is something that I think will be very much related to the birth horror, the scariness of what you're creating this child? You know, do you do you tamper with nature? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, And maybe that's also part of what we were seeing in in like in Prometheus, with the abortion squid and um and

and all of that kind of stuff. I mean, I mean, of course, all of the alien movies are very much about birth and they've got a very feminine mystique kind of thing going on. But genetic modification, with just body modification in general, you get into that scenario at what point you go too far? At what point are you is it? Are you? Are you becoming less human or more human and both of course for their own shade of monsters. Uh. The idea of genetic modification also, I

mean it touches several of Cohen's theses. Actually, So yeah, there's the idea about policing the borders and the scientifically possible. There's also the idea of mixing of categories, because a lot of times when you're talking about creating transgenic organisms, you're talking about taking a gene and one organism and placing it in another. That's why you read these stories about how you had these tomatoes that were genetically modified to resist frost because they had a fish gene implanted

tomatoes exactly. Yeah, people were extremely upset about this, and if you if you ask them, I remember there was some pole I read about where people thought that these tomatoes would taste fishing. They believed there was some kind of inherent essence of fishiness that would come along to

the tomato with that isolated frost resistance gene. And so I wonder if the same kind of thing could happen if we we say, oh, there's a gene we can take from some other animal that will prevent perhaps some sort of birth defactor or health problem or something like that, if we put it in a human embryo, and so let's just go ahead and do that to be safe. Does that bring some kind of scary animal essence with it?

Are you crossing the category line between human and be And kids are already terrifying as we know, so if we have these genetically modified kids, uh, I don't I don't mean to actually say that I'm terrified of that, but I think that could be something that catches on in the popular conscious, the creation of monster imaginations of monsters. Yeah,

and the uh, the idea of genetically augmenting ourselves. That kind of gets back into the idea of cybernetics as well, because of our earlier ideas about about cyborgs that really had to do a space exploration and the possibility of changing the human body to uh to to better adapt to travel in space, exploration in space, and ultimately reaching other worlds. Because you know, we we we inevitably always come back around to the idea of, well, let's change

space to to meet our biological needs. Let's change you know, we're gonna we're gonna take a bubble of our own atmosphere in our own world up there into the orbit, and if we get to another planet, we want to change that too, right, we want to terriform that into something different, something more earthlike. But the other side of the argument is why do we not change in yourselves? Why?

And we figure out what works from a biological standpoint for space travel, and then we we adapt to meet that, and then when the age comes that we finally make it to other worlds. Maybe it's a little bit of terraforming and a little bit of the of the genetic augmentation and the cybernetic agmentation of the human form. We've talked a little bit about that in our episode about what the what what humans will look like in the future.

Oh yeah, there was that controversial article, right, what was it? I think a couple of people they drew some pictures of what they guessed humans would look like in the future, you know, yeah, like like like a hundred years or a hundred thousand years, and and they got increasingly anime looking at these with these very large shiny eyes and giant foreheads. Yeah, but I think the reasoned that the reason that you would have huge eyes is to use less energy in places that are dark. If you just

have larger pupils you can resolve images. Yeah, yeah, and that we would specifically have genetically modified ourselves in order to do that. Um And but but I'm you know, as we spoke about in the in in that conversation, I'm not sure if we will ever get over that bodily horror enough to want to do it. But but I think it's absolutely something that that people are going to be playing with in in Through Monsters. Okay, I got one more big one to ask about. What about

the supernatural? Because most of what we've discussed about, and this is probably by virtue of trying to predict future monsters based on the trends coming and technology, So it might just be a function of our categories, but we have been focusing mostly on materialist kinds of monsters, robots, cybernetics, etcetera. Is the replace in the future for good old fashioned spirits and ghosts and wraiths and you know, these vengeful

other worldly creatures. I would say there has to be, because there's still come trends of these kind of things today. For the past six or seven years, I'd say there has been a craze in the movies for demon possession and exorcism. Yeah, and I don't think this reflects largely an expanded belief in demon possession in the general population, but it does mean something. It reflects some kind of thing in the popular consciousness that's that's just represented by

this demon possession. Well, I think that that with the possession tropes specifically, um, it's relating to a lot of the spiritual versus science anxieties that that are our global culture is going through right now. Yeah. I mean there's the idea popularized by by Karl Sagan that that science is a candle in the demon haunted world, you know, illuminating the darkness, and until science reaches the point where you have absolute illumination, which it's you know, arguably, it

will never reach that point. Arguably, there are always going to be some shadows remaining, and therefore they're always going to be some spaces for the demons to haunt us, for the monsters to hanson, for the supernatural to to exist, at least as an idea. Yeah, I don't see the supernatural monster going away. I hope not. Because ghosts are my favorite. Yeah, mine too, I find them. Of all

the monsters, I find regular old ghosts, the scariest. Oh, I find them the scariest, But I also find them the most um uh palatable uh not spiced but um zombie flesh Uh yeah, certainly, um but but but I'm also genuinely disturbed by a lot of um uh serial killer kind of like the hostile sort of genre. I'm I'm genuinely upset by it. I'm not horrified, I'm just grossed out. And and why did they make this? Yeah? Yeah, like like this is this is actually not fun to watch.

Um so those tend to not even be monster movies. Yeah, they're just about sure Why we start time talking about torture movies? That's not in our arena? Now, if you have a monster in there somewhere, then you have my attention a little bit. But yeah, you know, we'll see how it all plays out. But yeah, I think that this has been such a fun to discussion. Thank you so much Robert for coming and joining us. We have

really enjoyed having you. Yes, I enjoyed having you. Now you say it, Lauren, I enjoyed having you as well. Huzzah um um. If you have also enjoyed this discussion, let us know. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Our handle is generally f W Thinking, or you know, search the Googles for us, you'll find us. Uh. You can also email us at f W Thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. We hope that we will hear from you, and either way we will talk to

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