Lost Zombies

» see lostzombies.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The barrier on Lost Zombies was never access. Anybody with a browser could sign up from anywhere. The barrier was that you had to be willing to point a camera at yourself and act, in English, in character, and that is a considerably higher wall than a phone bill.

It opened on 1 May 2008, built on Ning by Ryan Leach and Skot Leach with Rob Oshima. The premise came with a date attached. An influenza epidemic starts in February 2007 and the virus mutates into something that reanimates the dead. By the story's present day three quarters of the world's population is dead or walking around dead. Everything a member posted had to fit inside that timeline.

What members posted was evidence. Video and written accounts, presented as recovered footage rather than as fan work, with the stated goal of cutting the whole pile into one documentary assembled from it. A social network with an editorial constraint is a strange object. Most of them are empty containers you can put anything into. This one rejected whatever broke the story.

It held together well enough that South by Southwest gave it two awards on 15 March 2009, Best Community Website alongside the People's Choice. FilmMaker Magazine put the people behind it into its 25 New Faces list that summer.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

2008 was the correct year for this. Cheap cameras were everywhere and YouTube had spent three years training people to shoot handheld and badly on purpose. The found footage horror form was in the middle of its second wind, with Cloverfield having opened that January. Lost Zombies took the form and handed the shooting to the audience.

Ning is worth naming, because it is the reason the site could exist at all. Ning let anybody stand up a social network without writing a login system or a photo uploader, and for about four years the interesting communities online were the ones nobody had to build software for. Ning ended its free tier in 2010 and a lot of that generation went quiet at once.

~ the long tail ~

The documentary is the part that never landed as pitched. There was output and there was plenty of it, but no single finished film ever assembled the community's footage into the thing the site had been built to produce. Crowdsourced narrative is easy to start and close to impossible to finish, because the editing is unpaid work somebody has to do after the fun part is over.

It closed on 22 March 2014, and nothing dramatic did it. The founders had moved to other projects and the arrivals had slowed. A community with an editorial constraint dies faster than an open one once the moderators stop caring, because there is nobody left to tell a newcomer what does and does not fit the story.

lostzombies.com still answers, and what it answers with is a frameset. One frame, pointed at a Tumblr blog. The domain is doing the least a domain can do while still being renewed by somebody.

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