We are living in an era of technological transformation, characterized by a qualitative acceleration of time. Rather than time literally moving faster, it is seemingly becoming denser, characterized by an ever-closer temporal clustering of noteworthy events. As Nick Land (2011) put it, “the current time is a period of transition, with a distinctive quality, characterizing the end of an epoch. Something – some age – is coming quite rapidly to an end.” The catalyst of this transition – technology – is the most likely candidate for the essential feature of the coming epoch. We explore various visions of technological society, found in our pop culture as well as certain scholarly works, with a particular focus on two main motifs that seem to reflect an unconscious apprehension at the inevitability of the technological transformation of society. To this end, we will attempt to explore and interpret the commonly recurring motifs of unfriendly AI usurping humanity as the “apex of existence,” which we designated as “the Basilisk,” and the reduction of humanity to automata, dubbed “the Zombie.” We use these motifs and their portrayals as a vehicle for the exploration of the future consequences of widespread AI technology and our society’s attitudes toward them.

In 2002, the worldwide success of Japanese pop culture was labelled by Douglas McGray as “cool Japan”, a way for the country to gain influence through its export of content, a phenomenon analysed as “soft power” (Nye 1990). McGray was emphasising the massive success of characters like the Pokémon or Hello Kitty, which were recent global hits at that time. Then the expression “cool Japan” was so successful that it became a key word with which to point to that global diffusion. Nevertheless, the process was running long before this moment in Europe, specifically in France. Japanese animation has been broadcasted on French television since the end of the 1970s, and manga began to be translated and published during the 1990s. Consequently, generations of French children grew up with Japanese pop culture as background entertainment. Some become so involved that they gathered as a fandom, an imagined community of Japanese pop culture lovers who share knowledge and references about what they love and the country from which it comes. Therefore, these fans are making a direct link between manga, animation and Japan, as they do so building dream images of the country. This process can be linked to exoticism as a way to represent otherness through symbolic and imaginary pictures. Since the Japonist movement, France has had a long tradition of exoticism focusing on Japan, and we can therefore raise the idea of new manga-related images as neojaponism, a way in which to renew traditional ‘clichés’.