28 Years Later. (Sony Pictures)
Cordyceps unilateralis, colloquially known as the “zombie ant fungus”, is an organism straight out of a horror story. A native of tropical rainforests, the fungus emits spores that attach themselves to passing ants and infect the insects’ nervous system. After inducing its carrier to move from the leaf canopy to the humid forest floor, the fungus fruits from its victim’s head, to infect another generation of zombie ants.
Is there a political equivalent? This could perhaps explain why Labour has decided, amid an omnicrisis of state capacity, public finance, social cohesion, cost of living, and basic legitimacy, to launch plans that include uncapped new routes for migration, legalizing tent cities, and making normal parenting illegal. Why now? Are they insane? Have they become infected by the political equivalent of Cordyceps unilateralis?
But it only looks to bewildered normies as though our government is plowing ahead, for unknown (perhaps fungal) reasons, with policies guaranteed to make everything infinitely worse including its own approval rating. It’s really the climax of a long-standing shift in the way states conceive of themselves, one that began decades ago. It’s just that the Left saw the trend earlier, and is better-poised to exploit it — especially where, as in Britain today, decisive leadership is otherwise lacking.
The last time we saw such blatant opportunism was in another leadership vacuum, as eerie as our current nightmare interregnum: the Biden administration. Even as Democrat staffers hailed the increasingly clearly faltering 80-year-old Biden as leader, and signed “his” proclamations using an autopen, the power-vacuum created by his age-related decline facilitated a program with that unmistakable zombie-fungus feeling: as though the polity everyone thought they still lived in had been covertly hacked and re-programmed.
We might call the agenda doing the re-programming Cordyceps politicus. Wherever it infects a body politic, it sets out to replace clear boundaries and accountable force with horizontal networks, mercurial and overlapping sets of rules, and an authority that recedes from accountability. The classic culture-war battles it produces are usually boundary-related: opening borders, expanding citizenship to everyone, dissolving sex categories, muddling child and adult, defunding police, emptying prisons. But C. politicus is not libertarian. It calls certain acts crimes — it’s just that the crimes are different. Shoplifting is tolerated, but you could be de-banked for the wrong opinions (as Farage was), or have your kids taken off you for knowing sex is immutable.
Though here I’m giving this sensibility a baroque, fungal name, it’s not new. Its most prescient theorists, in fact identified it more than three decades ago: the French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In an essay written all the way back in 1990, Gilles Deleuze drew on the work of his close collaborator Felix Guattari to argue that methods of control exerted in the information age radically invert those of the previous era. This older model, he suggests, was exhaustively documented by Michel Foucault as disciplinary societies, developed through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Disciplinary societies are characterized by “spaces of enclosure”, each governed by its own laws, such as the family, the school, the hospital, and the barracks. All these are in turn enclosed by the nation-state, whose laws govern all.
Deleuze argued that the disciplinary model has been obsolete since World War II, superseded by forces including, centrally, digital computing in order better to serve the mercurial needs of capitalism. Deleuze, being French and a theorist, doesn’t have a very detailed material account of this, though Marshall McLuhan might ground it in “electric simultaneity” or, more recently, Jacob Siegel in “the information state”. But however you account for it, the shift dissolves previously clear boundaries, replacing them with something more porous and flexible: less a boundary than a mesh or network.
In the wake of this shift, all those spaces formerly defined by clear rules separating inside from outside now only maintain the appearance of this form. In truth, though, they’re just shambling along, evacuated zombies, “until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door”. In Deleuze’s account, then, the ant was a zombie long before the fungus infected it.
As for the “new forces” themselves, he describes these as societies not of discipline, but control: a new form of social organization, where formerly well-defined institutions become porous, nebulous, and immaterial. A society of control defines who (or what) is or isn’t included, not via gates and fences but access codes. And instead of agglomerating “individuals” into boundaried “masses”, the idea of “individuals” itself is dissolved into overlapping datasets. Institutions become de-materialized, porous, and edge-less: the corporation replaces the factory, continuous education replaces school, and ankle tags replace prison.
What does that look like in policy terms? Perhaps most controversially, a radical softening of national borders. Under Biden, that meant a torrent of people flowing into the USA from everywhere on earth, in many cases simply recorded by border guards who caught, documented, and then paroled them against future immigration hearings. Similarly, much as C. politicus simply didn’t recognize the principle of maintaining a hard border in Texas, nor does it do so now, at England’s coastline. Here, we find that for every boundary erected, another access point opens: Labour makes noises about tackling Channel migration by “smashing the gangs”, perhaps even including those of its members alleged by one smuggler to operate inside the UK government; all while quietly dropping the ban on small boat migrants obtaining citizenship.
In almost the same breath, the Home Office announces another set of boundaries grown porous, another set of clear hierarchies replaced by networked, situational, and unaccountable power. Universities, businesses, and “community groups”, we hear, will now be able to sponsor and house an uncapped number of “refugees” at taxpayer expense. Members of the public, meanwhile, will be drafted to hear asylum appeals.
Should these new arrivals exit their taxpayer-funded lodgings, too, they can pitch a tent wherever they like. Another new initiative will de-criminalize rough sleeping, following the model first pioneered in Democrat states during the Biden years. The Government will repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act, which allows police to move on rough sleepers. In its place, a slew of initiatives will provide housing, tackle organized begging, and funnel resources to homelessness charities.
The track record of “housing first” initiatives in the USA might invite some to wonder at the wisdom of this proposal. And just as cynics are already wondering whose vested interests will be furthered by this seeming devolution, or how much these “community groups” will overlap with longstanding Labour sectarian lobbies, we might also wonder how much funding this programme will funnel to yet more Labour client NGOs. Regardless, here again the governing theme is the dissolution of discipline into mercurial, networked control.
At the border, the issue is not how to manage arrivals, but whether the border should even exist as such, and to what end. This is, fundamentally, a contest between the disciplinary and control models. The disciplinary model treated as self-evident the idea that illegal migrants should be expelled, and where they were expelled to didn’t really matter. The control model, though, doesn’t have an inside or outside: from this vantage-point, the idea of someone being “illegal” makes no sense. Instead, problems arise when people are “undocumented”, meaning the system cannot properly manage access, resources, and flows.
We see the same all-transforming shift in new legislation that directly challenges the final, most central “disciplinary” institution of all, on Deleuze’s list: the family. A draft bill announced over the weekend proposes to criminalize “conversion practices”, which is to say therapies that aim to alter someone’s felt sense of sexual identity — in terms that will, if passed, criminalize parents for refusing to assent to their child’s assertion of cross-sex identification. The only carve-outs are for doctors, meaning this Bill places parents legally on a less authoritative footing than medical practitioners as regards their children’s lives and wellbeing — despite having birthed, raised, and loved them from the start.
This is a regime that simply doesn’t view the family as a meaningful institution. The same was already clear in recently-announced plans to restrict social media for children — with enforcement responsibility placed entirely on tech firms, via face-scanning and digital verification. Parents simply don’t figure. The clear implication is that, as in “conversion practices”, parents are simply not viewed as having a special or trustworthy authority, in relation to their kids.
But perhaps this makes sense — for this model also muddles the boundary between “child” and “adult”, to a degree that renders adult authority suspect by extension. Now, kids are competent to consent to puberty blockers at 11, but not to scroll TikTok until 16, whereupon they can vote, but not vape. And parents aren’t trusted to enforce any of this. The meme circulates about brains not maturing till 25. Nothing makes sense, at least if you’re expecting the disciplinary model of individual responsibility at a clearly-defined age. But it does make sense within the control model, which sees none of us as an “individual”. Instead, we’re an aggregate of overlapping datasets and access codes; there simply isn’t a general concept of “old enough”, just a series of case-by-case assessments.
Lest you were hoping that a future government might come along and reverse all these policies, the final icing proposed for Andy Burnham’s cake is the return of Sue Gray, and an aggressive devolution program. If delivered, it will end the Parliamentary sovereignty that still clings to British government, a hangover from our heyday as a disciplinary nation-state and still on the constitutional books even if under-used. The proposed alternative is a permanent regional committee-ism that locks the Blairite settlement in forever: a perfect recipe for the special pleading, clientelism, and infinite regress of accountable power that characterizes C. politicus.
Can anything save us? Yes, but also no. If Deleuze is right, this has been coming for decades. Everything he predicted in 1990 is happening now. And even in America, where a legislative fightback has been underway since 2024 against the Left-wing version of C. politicus, that hasn’t exactly brought back the old, industrial nation-state. The same fights about citizenship and migration are ongoing; the data centers are still being built; the power still, now, rests with Big Data and assorted more or less fully realized forms of network state.
If the real, underlying shift is the one away from an industrial society to one of information, no amount of railing against the Left will bring the old world back. But though it might be grounds for gloom, it needn’t cause us to despair. Ultimately, if Deleuze is right, the disciplinary, nation-state Britain is already long gone, and attempts to revive it a waste of time. But even if there’s no escaping the society of control, it doesn’t follow from this that everything must be ceded to oikophobes and genderists.
There’s plenty of work to be done by thoughtful Right-wingers in elaborating what it might mean to map Deleuze’s post-border model to the good, the true, and the beautiful. It need not necessarily follow from permeable borders, for example, that humans everywhere are precisely interchangeable. Less abstractly, we might just be less weird about pointing technologies of control at (for example) tackling criminal gangs.
Most centrally of all, the reason we shouldn’t despair is that there was already an England, long before the disciplinary nation-state “Great Britain” was ever composed. I see no insuperable reason why there won’t also be an England, after its demise. As long as we remember we’re not datasets, but human souls, no zombie fungus can fully consume us.
