Posted By John Sears on December 6, 2011
One of our trusted UK informants obtained an interview with two of the apparent leading lights of the Living Supremacist Architecture movement, and the results are a chilling look into the attempted harnessing of consumer culture to prejudice and oppression:
So our solution to the idea of a zombie apocalypse is not a ‘one-off’ mobile fortress, but rather a socio-economic strategy, culturally embedded in our social psyche in the way we know best: the cult of consumerism. Rather than create a ‘zombie-proof house’, it is instead proposed to zombie-proof your own home in the event of a zombie apocalypse. The proposal approaches designing a zombie proof house from a perspective which assumes a future of everyday (albeit unwanted) co-existence with the undead. Z-Rated: Zombie-proof your own home projects a typical suburban London based strategy for adapting ordinary Londoners homes for protection against the marauding zombie threat.
I’d say ‘How very Madison Avenue’ of them but since we’re talking about London I’d have to assume there’s a soulless UK media vulture equivalent that would be more apt, and if anyone has a suggestion please do leave it in the comments. I like to tailor my expressions of outrage regionally after all.
The idea of profiting from paranoia and borderline mass hysteria is hardly new. Think of the market for bomb shelters at the height of the Cold War, or the enormous market in dubious homeopathic ‘remedies’ peddled at those skeptical of science-based medicine, or, of course, the peddling of Anti-Zombie ammunition, guns, swords and other weapons paraphernalia highlighted here on this very blog.
Still, to see the strategy, ie, the method to separate rubes from their hard-earned quiddage, so blatantly and openly outlined is certainly a tad unusual.
In a nutshell the ‘Z-Rated’ plan is to construct a parallel world in the sky, so to speak, of raised, separate, and thoroughly segregated housing fortified and secured above the level of the street, utilizing flat rooftop spaces typically seen in suburban London housing developments. This parallel street-above-a-street would then be outfitted with a variety of cruel, even sadistic Anti-Zombie mechanisms to keep the Undead out of this gated, or perhaps, laddered community in the heavens until a brutal military junta can put down the Zombie plebs on the street.
Naturally, this will be done in the name of ‘community’ and strengthening society:
If establishing the prime objective of the zombie-proof house is to increase one’s chances of survival, this approach has a number of pragmatic advantages:
• Good defence is based on familiarity, and no place on Earth is better known than your own home;
• Strengthens communities;
• The familiarity of the home will help frightened untainted citizens adjust to their new-found unwanted co-existence with the undead;
• Should our current communications infrastructure break down (i.e, phone, Internet), any untainted close family, friends and neighbours will instinctively head towards a trusted home;
• With forward planning, neighbourhoods can become zombie-proof, creating a safe, self-sufficient haven where life carries on relatively normally until military intervention;
• When military intervention arrives, zombie proof houses/neighbourhoods become stage points for a military counter-strike over a decentralised network;
• Creates a resilient system where the human survival rate becomes much higher and is based on existing community clustering and co operation
• Big Society in action.
Several major questions came to me while reading this piece. 1) If the idea is that everyone flees toward ‘Home’ in the event of an emergency, then how do people agree on what ‘home’ is? Is it your house, or your parents’ place? What about Uncle Bob?
2) These housing structures must, obviously, be human-accessible in order to be used, and therefore, how would you secure them against Zombies? Doors get battered down, barricades torn up, I mean, isn’t that the story of half of all post-Romero Anti-Zombie cinema? If the house below your ‘Z-Rated’ sky palace is breached, how long until your upstairs segregated condo gets opened like a can of beans?
2a) As hinted above, ladder-access is pivotal in the actual Z-Rated design. Ignoring that many Zombies have no issue with ladders, many Living people in fact do, especially the aged and infirm. Who’s going to get them up these ladders in an emergency? It’s not easy toting someone up a ladder. Or is Grandma expected to fight a valiant rear-guard action and become, allegedly, Zombie-chow?
3) How long can a ransacked, open-to-the-elements London suburban home support the weight of this whole secondary society up above, anyway? If you’re assuming that these ‘Zombie hordes’ are so destructive and prevalent that you have to abandon your first and second floor, traditional architecture structures, why assume that they will leave the old housing stock, which is now your new, load-bearing basement, intact? Even if they only bash in a few doors and windows trying to ‘get’ you, ie, in a class-based conflict against a Zompartheid regime, that will let in water, fungus, plants, even animals. How long is the Z-Rated world projected to last, Life After People style?
Incredibly, these Anti-Zombie pioneers even have a Greenie final solution in mind for their downstairs neighbors once the incoming Junta declares them legal non-entities and gives the ok signal for mass slaughter:
Turn Zombies into ethanol.
Not making that up:
The idea is you would grind up the zombies organic matter and spread it as a substrate (along things like garden clippings, food waste and sawdust) in a container. You then add the vegetative part of fungi, known as mycelium, onto the substrate. The mycelium is amazing in itself – it cleans up contaminants, breaks down complex hydrocarbons and lignins, purifies water, and least of all, they sprout mushrooms you can then pick and eat! It’s the reason why the earth isn’t covered in 200 ft high dead organic matter, because mycelium is an integral part of the decaying process. So you have this mycelium and this rotting substrate. Then you add some yeast and a few other active ingredients to the fungal sugars that occur naturally as part of the process, let it ferment and voila, you have an ethanol that’s no different from the bio-diesel you use in vehicles. Paul Stamets, the mycologist who pioneered the technique claims you can produce 3.5 litres of fuel from 48 kg’s of organic matter. Now considering the average zombie would weigh just under twice that, it’s a reasonable assumption you can produce about 5 litres of fuels per zombie you process. You can drive a car about 40 miles with one zombie’s worth of bio-diesel or a lot more depending on how good your fuel economy is. A 5KW diesel generator would use up about 5 litres per hour, which is enough to power your home for a small period of time. Thankfully though, unlike other fossil-fuel based processes, this time the feedstock comes to you – all you have to do is kill it (again), collect and process it. Now I’m pretty sure most inner city neighbourhoods won’t have any trouble acquiring a fair amount of fresh fuel sources every day! I’d estimate ‘Peak Zombie’ wouldn’t happen for a long time and is entirely dependent on how successful the scheme is on a national level, and let’s face it, if you’re running out of fuel source then that’s a good thing, right?
Once again the incredibly fearful world of Anti-Zombie prejudice exposes shocking new lows in human behavior, and the ZRC is appalled and, yes, a bit frightened. At the point where the supposed ‘Good guys’ are talking about grinding up the ‘Bad Guys’ and feeding them to mushrooms as part of an elaborate plan to fuel their cars in the post-apocalypse, you know society has taken a bad turn.
Still, we here at the Zombie Rights Campaign won’t give in to and indulge our fears until succumbing to paranoia, like the folks at Z-Rated, or the hucksters peddling guns, ammo and sharp objects we highlighted above. Zombies are people too, and the way for people to address injustice is through social progress, not sharpening table legs and making a gruesome IKEA branded torture device. (Seriously, that’s one of their ideas, see the diagram toward the bottom of the page here)
Still, I have to say, with the concoction and open promotion of ideas like these the danger level toward UK Zombies is clearly very high. It might be best to avoid any unnecessary travel to the United Kingdom until things quiet down and the courts address this situation, hopefully in our favor.
Once the right of a Zombie to full participation in English society has been established I just know that tolerance will spread, or at least the blatant intolerance represented by Z-Rated will diminish. And that will be a brighter day for all, Living and Differently Animated alike.
Category: Zombie Media |
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Tags: Advertising, Anti-Zombie Products, Euro-zom, Mainstream Media, Social Justice
