Territorialization has ripped itself from overaged capitalism and has slithered its way into a new exchange of intellect and signs. Dictators of this knowledge and the expansion of power limits who receives this information resulting in information poverty.

“Let’s begin with the motif of territorialising. As previously noted, Army of the Dead frames its Alpha zombies within a quasi-Hobbesian state of nature. This is, obviously, not simply an anthropological projection of what happens when the human form gives in to violent lawlessness and cannibalistic aggression; any more than Hobbes’ account of the state of nature in the seventeenth century was. In fact, the very persuasiveness of Hobbes’ argument of the need for societal agreement is rooted in slippages between metaphors, analogies and experienced reality. This is no better illustrated than when what was effectively a thought experiment coincided with European expansion into the ‘New World’, where colonists encountered ‘natives’ who appeared, largely due to their ignorance of European farming methods, to be enacting the very state Hobbes had described. In this way, and to different ends, both Hobbes and Zach Snyder have assembled a set of relations in order to pull together contemporary anxieties of violence and the loss of culture with universalistic concerns around reason, intellect and right. Both find their experiments in pre- and post-society reified within broader narratives, whether this be European colonial conquest or vigilante riots.¶ The difference is “that in Hobbes’ time the issue really was spatial territory. Today, territorialisation is superseded by the fundamental precarity of what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes as ‘the knowledge society’ of late capitalism. For Berardi, this precarity refers ‘to the fragmentation of time and the unceasing deterritorialization of the factors of social production’ (Berardi 2012, p.117). This is rooted in the shift to the post-industrial knowledge society in the late 60s and 70s, a shift marked by ‘technological transformations’ which ‘displaced the focus from the sphere of the production of material goods towards the sphere of semiotic goods: the info-sphere’ (2009b, p.44). Capitalism in its historical sense, as the production and exchange of material goods, was replaced with semio-capitalism, the production and exchange of signs. Under such conditions: “Both labor and capital…no longer have a stable relation to territory or community. Capital flows in the financial circuits, and enterprise is no longer based on territorialised material assets, but on signs, ideas, information, knowledge, and linguistic exchange. Enterprise is no longer linked to territory and the work process is no longer based on a community of workers…but instead takes the form of an ever-changing recombination of time fragments connected in the global network. (Berardi 2012, pp.117-18)¶ If Snyder’s film makes much of the difference between the high-tech capabilities of the global world outside Las Vegas and the mythological primitives within, this serves to emphasise the anomaly of focusing on the dangerously stupid as a spatialised, bounded group at precisely the time that the basis of such a grouping is based on the ever-changing recombination of ‘signs, ideas, information, knowledge and linguistic exchange’ rather than the solidity of, say, a fixed community. Consider, for example, the hybrid monstrosity created from mass data collection embedded within information technology, storing the extensive contents of our lives, mutated into simplistic collectives. After Brexit, this meant both ad hominem stereotypes – ‘convinced that they were right “Remainers were very much inclined to regard people who voted Leave as being old, white, under-educated stupid and racist’ (Mills, 2019, p.73) – and newfound populations such as the often-discussed ‘left behind’. This latter group emerged as a shorthand for some kind of primitive instinct-response by those incapable of strategic thought; a shorthand that, as Rafael Behr noted, ‘resonates as an analysis of social and political trends’ but ‘has become a convenient affliction projected on to diverse voters by politicians who need simple answers to complex questions’ (Behr, 2017). The left behind worked as a group because it drew on the territorialised distance between not only the economically downtrodden and the well-off, but also the inarticulate and the writers and policymakers looking for decisive answers to how Brexit happened. When Guy Standing (2018) warned that the ‘notion of “left behind” implies a static situation, which is misleading’, this is not just in an economic sense, but also in the way that the sense-making cynicism of post-Brexit analysis established itself in terms of intellectual territory: territories which no longer reflect the circulation of information and enterprise, but are nevertheless formed through particular figures and motifs with a longer culture resonance.¶ Such figures are not limited to the zombie, the racist or the socially and economically alienated. If the flow of capital creates complexities in the traditional groups of “economic and social grouping, then the models of the intellectual expert are not exempt from this. Indeed, under the conditions of semio-capitalism, the intellect becomes the key commodity: the shift to immaterial ideas, signs and knowledge creates a tension between the ideal figure of critical knowledge who spreads truth freely and universally, and the guardian of intellectual property who prevents the circulation of knowledge in order to retain its value.¶ However, rhetorically speaking the latter still depends on the former. As Berardi argues, the view of intellectual activity within the economy – such as in Marx’s discussion of the ‘general intellect’ in the Grundrisse – is that which can separate itself as independent from social conditions. ‘As the bearer of a universal human rationality, the enlightened intellectual can be considered as the social determination of Kant’s “I think”. The intellectual is the guarantor of a thought freed from any boundaries, the expression of a universally human rationality’ (Berardi 2009a, p.30). This form of enlightenment required a space ostensibly outside of social conditions, such as the traditional model of the university (Fisher, 2021, p.132). To observe the problem of sustaining such a model, one need only think of how every year the media produces stories about academic grades getting easier or harder and university entries rising or falling (given they will never stay the same, this is a perpetual motion machine of journalism),”¶ “along with the usual scoffing about ‘dumbing down’ and ‘joke degrees’. But in many cases, what are described as ‘joke’ or ‘unnecessary’ degrees are the product of years of struggle for professional recognition, such as in childcare, nursing or social work. They are, in effect, a testament to the currency of intelligence – or, at least, signifiers of intelligence, such as accredited degrees – in the development of late-capitalist economies. Boaventura de Sousa Santos thus refers to this as ‘university capitalism’: the production of ‘a commodity whose market value derives from its capacity to create other market values’ (2018, p.272). At the same time, the vocational nature of such degrees means that the expansion of the general intellect sits in tension between, on the one hand, the enhanced cognitive training of higher degrees, and on the other hand a quagmire of professional learning outcomes which replace the ‘universally human rationality’ Kant may have envisaged.”