To truly appreciate the rich cultural symbolism of 28 Years Later, the zombie-apocalypse-plague movie whose characters are currently projectile-vomiting blood in a theater near you, it is necessary to return first to 28 Days Later, the original zombie-apocalypse-plague film to which it is a followup. Danny Boyle’s initial foray into the living dead oeuvre was groundbreaking within the genre — it was, among other things, the first time anyone dared to imagine zombies of the fast-and-furious rather than shambling-and-stupid variety — but it was also eerily prescient about what the then-nascent internet was about to do to us. In a moment when neither smartphones nor social media yet existed, 28 Days Later captured the digital age concept of viral outrage via the classic zombie virus framework (in this case, after projectile vomiting bit, the infected party attacks every person he encounters in a mindless, murderous frenzy). Its central thesis was one that, in the online era, we understand intuitively: rage travels fast and spreads like wildfire, and the only thing worse than those consumed by it are the ones who take advantage of its destabilizing effects to seize power for themselves.

Boyle’s original film was a cautionary tale about how dangerous we can be to each other, but it ended on a positive note: reassuring us that some people — the good ones — can find each other, and save each other, even when the world is falling apart. That same sense of optimism was ubiquitous in the early days of the social web, as introverts, artists, and fandom members found their people on Reddit and Livejournal, on Tumblr and Twitter, on forums and blogs and microblogs. For a little while, it seemed like the internet was going to both change and save the world, that we’d created the ultimate tool for human expression, and with it, for human connection.

But some number of years later — 28 in Boyle’s world, and 23 in ours — it’s clear that something irreparably broke in the transition from the embodied, analog era to this one. Shared humanity, a sense of common purpose, and the community and social trust that flows from these things: all have been lost in a world where we have never been more connected, and never felt more alone.

The world of 28 Years Later, crucially, is one in which the internet doesn’t exist; instead, it’s the fictional viral apocalypse that has ripped society apart and left its survivors scattered and isolated both from each other and from the rest of the world. We learn that every other country in the world managed to beat back the virus, while the devastated UK remains quarantined, a lost world whose inhabitants are left to fend for themselves. The main character, Spike, lives in one of the more successful of these recently-established communities, on a barrier island accessible only via a causeway at low tide. It’s a hardscrabble life but a safe society, with a familiar order and structure: there are husbands and wives, parents and children, leaders and followers, rules and regulations. The cursed British mainland, meanwhile, is overrun with the infected: bestial, cannibalistic, and extremely nude. They’re not a society, exactly; they do not have jobs, or conversations. But they run together, and dine together.

There are obvious political parallels here to Brexit specifically, and immigration generally; Spike’s society is an isolationist’s wet dream, intentionally walled off and fiercely guarded against intrusion from any outsider, infected or otherwise. But add in the fact that even the monsters in this world share a community of sorts, and what this movie made me think of wasn’t the border crisis. It was that meme about people who want to have sex with toasters finding each other on the internet.

One of the harshest lessons of the digital age is that creating community is nice, except when it’s not; it matters what you create it out of, and it matters who is drawn in. It matters that gathering in meatspace, in churches and bowling alleys and our neighbors’ homes, is falling by the wayside, replaced by online communities whose membership is strictly policed by politically pious cult leaders with Cluster B personality disorders. Like the occupants of Boyle’s post-apocalypse landscape, what we struggle with isn’t just a changed world but a loss of common identity, and with it, the ability to recognize our common humanity. One of the most striking differences between 28 Days Later and its successor is that the former film was set in England — whereas 28 years later, there is no England. Once the country’s society and civilization collapsed, so too did its shared culture and sense of history. And if one way to destroy a country is to wall it off from the world and allow it to fall into ruin, the other, no less destabilizing, is to make its borders so meaningless that you no longer know where it ends and the rest of the world begins.

And if the internet wrought its destruction by somewhat different means — connecting people on an unprecedented global scale instead of forcing them into terrified isolation — the ultimate impact, and the loss of trust, is very much the same. Whatever the source of the shakeup, be it viral apocalypse or digital revolution, what emerges is a constellation of micro-societies which not only have wildly different notions of what they want the future to look like, but also, increasingly, disagree in their memories of how it used to be.

In 28 Years Later, Spike’s community keeps a vintage portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the wall in their public meeting house, but what does this image mean in a world where the monarchy is gone, and history can be rewritten at will by whoever is left alive to still hold a pen? And what would it mean to an outsider? In our world, meanwhile, we are no less fractured in our understanding of the country, the culture, even reality itself. The attention economy has transformed the marketplace of ideas into a series of siloed information ecosystems, (pay)walled gardens each peddling their own bespoke version of the truth, with no cross-pollination between them; in the wake of every spasmodic reckoning with America’s legacy, a thousand alternative histories bloom. Is the 1619 Project the True History of America’s Founding or an act of stochastic terrorism? Was the Biden presidency a democracy-preserving return to decorum, or a four-year reenactment of Weekend at Bernie’s in a White House setting? Are pediatric sex change operations essential medical care as a matter of settled science, or a medical scandal of historic proportions in the making? Did Epstein kill himself, or what?

Increasingly, your answer to these questions depends entirely on which community you’ve chosen as your ideological home — and through which dirty internet lens you’ve chosen to filter your reality. Establishment Dems and MAGA shitposters, trust-fund socialists and trad pronatalists, micro-dosing optimizers and transhumanist doomers and AI trollbots pretending to be people: all these groups believe themselves to be at war for the future of America, but their battleground isn’t anywhere in the United States. It’s in the borderless ether of the internet, one that bears an uncanny resemblance to Boyle’s fictional ruined England right down to the part where it’s ruled by rage-driven hordes who communicate exclusively by shrieking, and eat people alive for fun. The only difference is that the person cannibalizing you online is probably wearing clothes.

If this makes you nostalgic for the good old days before the zombie/social media apocalypse — the days of Sunday church service, Tuesday night bowling leagues, and a shared set of facts based on embodied reality — you might be intrigued, as I was, to learn that Boyle seems to see things differently. In a recent appearance on the IndieWire podcast, he expressed something almost like admiration for the film’s zombie coalition, while sniffing at the uninfected characters for having “regressed” to “a 1950s-type subsistence living.” “They’ve learned how to survive, but they haven’t really evolved,” he said. “The virus has evolved more creatively.”

I’m not generally in the habit of being offended on behalf of imaginary people in fictional stories, but reading this, I couldn’t help thinking that Boyle had some nerve to complain that the uninfected people — who have survived nearly three decades, against all odds, in a world overrun by distance-running naked cannibal corpses — haven’t progressed more as they rebuild society from scratch. But I also found it interesting that Boyle singled out the 1950s specifically, when at least technologically, the survivors have surely been set back much further than this. Spike’s community lacks not just digital age conveniences but also electricity, running water, modern medicine; it’s more medieval than mid-century. But what does look a bit like the 1950s, arguably, is the social structure. The men are warriors, guards, weapons makers; the women sew, cook, and tend to the children.

And perhaps this explains the director’s reflexive distaste for his non-zombie characters and the society they’ve built: it’s hard not to notice the parallels between the return to the mean of these fictional survivors and the nostalgia for traditional gender roles and a simpler way of life that continues to proliferate in certain corners of politics — and not just among the trollish RETVRN to tradition types whose hobbies include anal suntanning, drinking raw milk, and posting AI-generated Norman Rockwell-style portraits of families whose seven rosy-cheeked kids have 82 fingers between them. Whether or not you agree that political progressives will ultimately prove to have been on the right side of history, the living conditions of the world they’ve created in the here and now clearly leave something to be desired. People are less happy, more anxious, and a great deal more lonely; life expectancy is down and mental illness is up; and every measure of embodied human connection from dating to marriage to fertility has fallen off a cliff.

Of course some people are keen to turn back the clock, to try to recapture the hope and happiness and promise of that earlier time. Indeed, it’s only when things are falling apart that people tend to realize that many of the old structures they kicked down in the name of progress were pretty useful, actually, the kind of thing that holds a society together when everything else falls apart. Call it regressive, call it a trad renaissance; call it whatever you want, dude. Who cares, so long as it keeps you safe when the wolves are at the door?

Earlier this month, an alarming Gallup poll showed that pride in America had fallen to a historic low, especially among Millennials and Gen Z. Immediately, various culprits were identified: too much critical race theory and America-as-global-villain narratives in public education, too many unassimilated immigrants great-replacing the native patriot population, no recent national tragedy to inflame the patriotic sentiment of a generation too young to remember 9/11. Well, maybe, or maybe there’s something more fundamental at play: a digital native population who grew up as citizens of the internet rather than any one nation, and whose loyalties are far more likely to lie with their chosen online tribe, be it fandom or politics or toaster-fucking, than with their country of origin. Many have posited that the loss of American identity, and American pride along with it, is a direct result of demographic changes wrought by Democratic open border policies and the Biden-era immigration surge; I suspect it’s not only the other way around, but that the former thing has been in the making ever since American households were carpetbombed in the 1990s with those AOL mass mailers that opened a portal from every desktop computer into the infinite universe of cyberspace.

And how long has it been since then, roughly?

As such, intentionally or not, 28 Years Later makes for a poignant allegory of the challenges of creating community, or even establishing basic social norms, in the wake of rapid and destabilizing change. Because if there’s anything we’ve learned in the decades since the digital revolution, it’s that you don’t need a zombie apocalypse for people to start coalescing around a shared vision of the world and the future that is ugly, antisocial, and deeply dysfunctional — to fall into conspiracy theorizing, or doomerism, or the cult of the eternal covidian. You just need people to be afraid, and mistrustful, and desperate for something to sink their teeth into.

—Kat Rosenfield