Ecocrit Long Essay

Living in the End Times:

Year Zero and the Politics of the
Apocalypse

Louis Roux
16051017

Introduction
To say that Nine Inch Nails is a band is a bit of a misnomer: it is in fact the brainchild of one
artist, Trent Reznor, who writes all of the lyrics, composes most of the music and plays most
of the instruments. Coming mostly from a single artist, then, it is easy to see a unified vision
in the albums that are for the most part concept albums, following direct story lines. The
Downward Spiral (1995), for instance, tells the story of a man descending into madness and
isolation, building an emotional wall between him and everything else. The Fragile (2005),
released a decade later, follows on this album by exploring the consequences of tearing down
this wall.
Year Zero (2007) takes place in the year 2022. After an unprovoked atomic attack by the USA
on the Middle East, and the resultant conflicts and terrorist attacks on American soil, the
world is in chaos. Global warming has reached crisis point and the weather has become more
destructive than ever, especially after the nuclear holocaust. Resource scarcity is the biggest
factor in international warfare. The American government has clamped down and renamed
the year to year zero, the year America was reborn. Elections are no longer free, the draft
has been instituted and there are tranquilizers called Parepin in the water supply to keep the
populace calm. The most powerful authority is the U.S. Bureau of Morality, an NSA-like
organization that keeps tabs on the people, apparently to combat terrorism, but also
abducting, interrogating, torturing and executing dissenters, communists, homosexuals,
Muslims, and any other deviants, under the auspices of an extreme version of the Patriot
Act. Reports and rumours about the Presence, a ghostly hand reaching down from the sky,
are beginning to circulate and no-one is sure whether it is God, aliens, a weather phenomenon
or the hallucinatory effects of the medication in the water. The album shows, in my view, that
ecological disaster can never be divorced from political, religious, class or gender concerns,
and although much of the album focusses on technology, religion, violence and imperialism,
it is always against the backdrop of a ruined earth.
Year Zero is the first Nine Inch Nails album to have an overt political message, and its story
is also much looser, following several characters instead of the usual lone protagonist. What
makes Year Zero truly special, though, is its use of an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) for
promotion, allowing listeners to become directly involved in the story of Year Zero through

websites, secret codes hidden in merchandise, USB flashdrives dropped at strategic locations
at concerts and other interactive materials. This makes the story of the album highly
personalized for every user, since no-one will follow the same chronology. Due to the fluid,
transient nature of the ARG, I will not try to follow the plot, or to construct a specific
storyline, I will rather isolate motifs, themes, phrases, characters and other aesthetic elements
from the album and its associated media and subject them to a close reading. In short, I will
not be analysing the work as one would a traditional novel, but rather as a rhizomatic,1 openended artwork. It is difficult to grasp, to tame, but all the more valuable for that: if the
rhizomatic creates confusion in the normal homogenous order of things, it also creates the
space for dissent and rebellion in the gaps left by that confusion spaces that Year Zero
makes full use of. I will enter the work through the songs and attempt to link them to some of
the websites and other media found in Appendix A, Exhibit 24,2 a collection of many of the
websites and other media, collected as evidence against someone only known as [SUBJECT
CLASSIFIED].
HYPERPOWER!
A short introductory song, HYPERPOWER! begins as a fast-paced marching anthem, with
crowds screaming Power! Power! Hy! Per! Power! This quickly devolves into screams and
yells of confusion or pain. In February of 0000, there was a bioterror attack on a nightclub
called the Star Chamber in Cleveland, Ohio. A transcript of a phone conversation between
someone in the nightclub and her father is available in E24 and tells of This guy came into
the club really freaked out. And we, we didnt even see the knife. And his shirt was soaked
red. And Joey said Holy shit you need a doctor. And then the guy just stabbed him, and he
was sweating blood, and screaming, and he wouldnt stop until someone killed him with a
1 A work that is rhizomatic as defined by Deleuze and Guattari is a work that shatters
linearity, has a substantive multiplicity that is not cyclic but always open, stretching out to
infinity, that can be entered at any point, exited at any point, no point (or rhizome) being
more important than the other: a rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle,
between things, interbeing, intermezzo. [...] the fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction,
and... and... and... (1-26). A work of this quality is perhaps what Barthes imagined when he
executed the Author and spoke of the writerly text (see: Death of the Author and S/Z).
2 Much of the text on the websites are unreadable, due to distortions. When referencing I will
mark unreadable parts with ####.

beer bottle. The conversation ends when Mia sees that she is sweating blood, begins crying,
and dies (46).
Later, there is an interview with an officer who responded to the Star Chamber attack. He
reports that he heard screams, and saw Feds quarantining the building, wearing haz-mat
suits. He sees an agent crying orange tears (48-55). From these testimonies we can see that
the weapon used in the attack is Red Horse, an ebola-like virus, and that the agents tears
were orange due to use of the vaccine, Copper, restricted to use by agents, senior officials and
church leaders only (193). Under the Freedom Act, people can be detained indefinitely for
subversive activities or thoughts, and Officer Slanski, it is made clear, will be kept under its
auspices. The crying agent later released her account of the attack (see E24 220) and it
becomes clear that it was planned by the government to spread fear of terrorism.
From this short song, and materials tangentially related to it, we can already see much of
what is going on in the universe of Year Zero: a theocratic, secretive government, false flag
terrorist attacks, and the Freedom Act.
The Beginning of the End
This song picks up where HYPERPOWER! left off, with a strong four to the floor beat. It
sets the tone for much of the rest of the album while the drums are still analogue here, the
guitar takes the tone of noise music, atonal and screeching. The narrator warns that we think
weve climbed so high / up all the backs weve conquered / we face our consequence / this is
the beginning of the end. On Another Version of the Truth, a resistance forum website that
discusses many of the issues of Year Zero more and more participants begin reporting the
Presence. As one poster says: ####theyre right. Something is coming. I dont have to
convince you, though. Youll find out the fucking #####on enough. Im clean, Im smart, Im
off Parepin. I dont use or abuse, I dont believe in ghosts or God or aliens. But I saw it. ####,
I was getting off shift. It came down maybe three blocks away. When it was over I pissed
myself and I was cryi####four years old. I went through this thing like I was the whole planet
and I was us raping the planet at the same time. Paving over every field and dumping crap in
every ####. I ####ith this woman and when it was over she said it was an angel. I sure as hell
hope not. What#### it is, it is *coming*. Now. And it is *pissed*. (E24 231). The Presence
emerges (for some) as some kind of vengeful force, coming to avenge the destruction of the
earth and the exploitation of its people.

Survivalism
A scathingly ironic song, Survivalism opens with the lyrics I should have listened to her /
so hard to keep control / we kept on eating but / our bloated bellys still not full / she gave us
all she had / but we went and took some more / cant seem to shut her legs / our mother
nature is a whore. Survivalism is the practice of preparing for some unknown catastrophic
breakdown of the socio-political order by stockpiling goods, food, water and weapons. The
song seems to expand the idea of survivalism from right-wing individuals to entire nationstates: the stockpiling of oil, consumer goods and weapons that inevitably cross the line of
sustainability and end up creating the catastrophe that it was preparing for. By gendering the
earth as a woman, especially a mother, being raped the song ideologically ties exploitation of
the earth to exploitation of people at the margins, while at the same time invoking the Oedipal
incest taboo: Oedipus sleeping with his mother leads to the downfall of both.
The narrator of the song goes on to say I got my propaganda, I got revisionism / I got my
violence in high-def ultra-realism / all a part of this great nation / I got my fist, I got my plan,
I got survivalism and Dont try to act surprised / we did just what you told us / lost our faith
along the way and found ourselves believing your lies. The narrator seems to be making the
argument that his subjective violence is merely a physical manifestation of the systemic
violence perpetrated by the USA. Here we find what iek refers to in his book, Violence:
subjective acts of one-on-one violence, while still abhorrent, need to be treated for what they
are symptoms of a greater socio-political illness (8-13).
Aesthetically, Survivalism marks the beginning of an aesthetic that will increase and take on
greater dominance throughout the rest of the album clearly influenced by industrial metal
and noise music, though using much more digital instruments, I will term this aesthetic
digital junkspace, to borrow Koolhaass term for the aesthetic of malls and other
postmodern architectures. This aesthetic is also obvious in the look and feel of E24.
The Good Soldier
This song makes great use of loops and layers the beat and the bass riff keep cycling
throughout, but the song builds up in layers until, in the coda, it becomes almost-noise,
perhaps showing how war is a self-perpetuating problem-solution dialectic that inevitably
leads to complete destruction. In E24 there is a comic, written and drawn by a soldier in the

war in Syria, called One Country at a Time, which makes explicit reference to the line in the
song, I am trying to believe. The narrative of the comic follows a troop of American
soldiers in Syria. When they come upon a bombed out village they find a twelve year old
Syrian girl. The captain, despite protests from his subordinates, decides that they should take
her to her relatives 50 miles away. On the way there the Presence appears and many of the
soldiers are shot by enemy snipers. The recipient, and poster, of the comic tells of his fathers
history in the military and how his sister was abducted, raped and murdered by an ex-Special
Forces soldier suffering from PTSD (E24 236-256). The comic and the song tackle themes of
alienation and disillusionment, as the captain says when the narrator asks him if he still
believes in the cause of the war, Im trying.
A complex and intriguing critique of the industrial-military complex, this song and its related
materials are difficult to grasp and bring into coherence. Perhaps we can find some
illumination in the site created by the character Angry Sniper, BeTheHammer. Here, Angry
Sniper shares his experience in the military in his bio page:
ME: small town. no jobs. I WAN####. i believed what they told me. what did i
know back then? what do you know now? joined the 105th [a Special Forces unit
that only recruits members of the Evangelical Church]. Saw things. Did things.
Came back. joined the police. ####ed people like you. THEM: the parepin makes
you ####, but kills aggression. different soldiers get different pills to put it back.
regulars get little blue ones we call them die-agra. blue pills keep you frosty and
get your soldier on. blue pills are fun. Some##############ood at your job, they
give you red pills. the red ones are called blisters or bloody mary or jerk. red
pills erase the line between killing and fuc####. so#######ects are permanent.
your family, you cant go back########################fterwards. LISTEN
TO ME: some of the things i remember didnt happen but this one did. aurora,
illinois, night, 5 of us. cell of unregistered muslims with the N#### stayed out of
the air, walked in sas style. 47 houses##### first one quiet, quiet like santa
clause. the next part very intimate, sudden and slippery. gasps and sighs.
towelling off and then the next house, the next, the next, and we dont stop, never
stop until the last ##########omes up and ######lick, were sweating. i came
four times. when your doo##### open in the middle of the night, you need to
know who is coming through it. (128)

We can see here that the religious and chemical control of the populace takes on an even
more sinister form in the military: the soldiers cannot be blamed for their actions as they are
all indoctrinated and manipulated by the larger power monolith of the theocracy. When the
bio-power exerted on the populace meets the juridical power exercised by the military we see
the emergence of what Achille Mbembe terns necropolitics a biopower that is not aimed at
the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes (Foucault 263), but at destroying these
bodies (Mbembe 16-25).
Vessel
The idea of bio-politics is expanded in Vessel. Beginning with I let you put it in my
mouth / I let it get under my skin / I let you pump it through my veins / I let you take me from
within, the most obvious literal interpretation would be to link it to Parepin, but I believe the
song is also aimed at the insidiousness of ideology and its workings on the populace. While
the drug enters them, so do constant messages of patriotism, morality and fear. The people, in
essence, become vessels for the ruling ideology. One of the best examples of this can be seen
on the site ThePriceOfTreason, run by the USBM (64-79). They use Abraham Lincoln to
justify their suspensions of human rights, thereby linking what is in reality an industrial,
capitalist project to Americanness, and using a false allegory to give themselves historical
precedent. The site contains stories of normal, white bread Americans who make the mistake
of not trusting and listening to their government. One of the most telling anecdotes is that of
Ilse Stanescu:
Ilse S###### now-defunct Washington Post, used her position as a journalist to
protect terrorists in the Uni######rocess of covering a story on Muslim students
in Georgetown University, she learned that several were carrying out acts of civil
disobedience, but failed to al####thorities.
After a bomb scare on the National Mall, Stanescu was summoned to appear in
front of a grand jury and required to na######ources for her story. She refused.
That was her choice ####### without consequences.
Like many a self-styled crusading reporter before her, Stanescu was jailed for
contempt of court. Prison inmates by law are defined as unfit parents. Stanescus

husband thus ######bility for the child. But as a person married to a felon, his
salary was capped under the #########centive plan.
Ilse Stanescu reconsidered her decision and offered to name her sources. By this
time, however ########### country. Stanescu was charged with aiding and
abetting terrorism.
Unable to afford the costs of a church school, Stanescus daughter was sent to a
public school in the slums of ########, DC. On the last day before Christmas
vacation, Cori Stanescu disappeared on the way home from school.
Ilse ################# currently divorced. Her daughter is missing. All
because her decision to give up the names of known terrorists came three months
too late.
Sometimes the free press isnt so free.
(65-66)
This story tells us outright how unfair the system is, but still blames it on the person being
punished. There are ideological blind-spots apparently the writer of the article could not see
that it was indeed the governments fault; the government gets placed above the possibility of
critique, in the realm of the super-ego. Treason becomes the ultimate crime the crime of
turning against your own, but carefully redefined so that your own can only be your country
(in the most abstract sense of the word), and not your family, your friends, your community,
or your beliefs.
Aesthetically, with its distorted, machine-like vocals, the atonal droning and whining of the
synths and digital beat show the induction into the machinery of the system, the individual
becoming more and more like the ideological apparatus. Which leads us to...
Me, Im Not
The digital junkspace aesthetic can be seen very clearly in this song. If space-junk is the
human debris that litters the universe, Junk-Space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet.
Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or more precisely, what
coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout (Koolhaas 175). The whirring,
droning, clicking of the synthesisers in Year Zero are not industrial, they are too unharmonic,
not rhythmic enough. They do not represent the workings of real, nuts and bolts machines,
but rather the workings of the systematic capitalist machine out of synch, unpredictable,

jarring and heart-breaking. The junk of capitalism can be seen in every corner of the Year
Zero aesthetic, especially in Exhibit 24 broken, distorted, glitched. Individuality disappears
to be replaced by a uniform idiosyncrasy, that of the glitch. In the post-political late-capitalist
society, as in E24, things become harder to grasp, to read, to understand. There is simply too
much junk, too much nothing, too much junkspace. Words become fragmented and lose
meaning. Identities become besides-the-point.
Capital G
As if the album knows how pathetically self-aware and referential that last section was, it hits
us with a rather straight-forward industrial metal (using the term here strictly as a
classification of genre) satire. Sung from the perspective of a capitalist, the song makes
explicit the ruling standard of exploitation: Im sick of hearing about the haves and the have
nots / have some personal accountability / the biggest problem with the way that weve been
doing things is / the more we let you have the less that Ill be keeping for me. // well I used to
stand for something / now Im on my hands and knees / traded in my god for this one / and he
signs his name with a capital G. The capital G, it later becomes clear, is Greed one can
hear crowds chanting it in the background. The word capital also takes on its double
meaning in this song.
The sites that most closely echoes the views of the narrator of Capital G is
TheViabilityIndex and MiningForLife. The Viability Index is the real estate investors guide
to changing property values (134), it lists global cities and gives them a score out of ten
ten being the most viable for development and 0 the least. Each city has a summary of what
is wrong with it, and a spin potential real estate developers can put on it to still make a profit:
Miami is under the sea due to global warming, but you can still sell it as an opportunity to
scuba the largest manmade reef (140), Memphis has become a breeding ground for diseases
like cholera and malaria, but, as the spin puts it: Elvis died here. SO CAN YOU! (143).
MiningForLife is a recruitment site for Anglo-Johnson in South Africa (341-344). For both
employees and non-employees there are conversion options: in return for safe housing,
food and education in the A-J compound in Pretoria, you can give blood, marrow, corneas,
skin or a kidney, to be used for saving the mineworkers (though in reality it is merely
extending their lives and thus their capacity to work and their suffering). These employees
bodies are not just being exploited in the traditional Marxist terms of labour, but also in very

real, very terrifying, literal terms. The body-politic is being dismembered to sustain the
economic machinery in which it is inserted.
These two sites show that even in a world decimated by ecological crisis, the capitalist
machine will find ways in which to function for as long as the system itself is not dismantled.
And what is truly terrifying about it is that it does not seem all that far-fetched or unrealistic.
My Violent Heart
My Violent Heart seems to be the manifesto, or anthem, of Angry Sniper the disillusioned
and alienated ex-soldier mentioned earlier. It promotes extreme, violent resistance as the
consequence of the overarching exploitation. The mode of resistance advocated by Angry
Sniper is set out on his website:
kill people.
start there. everything else is posturing.
i killed people in post-iran after we dropped the bomb on tehran. they told me i
was protecting america.
this is a war. the government of the united states has declared and is
fighti#########people of th###### and people all over the world.
i kill people. thats what war is.
when i say the government of the united states is at war with you this is not
propaganda. i know because i was them. i was the guy that broke down your door
at 4AM ####did things to you with pliers until we knew the names of your
friends.
unders##############nment in any way is not an act of free speech or a
way to make your voice heard or a chance to impress your friends with your
principles. resistance is treason and they will kill you for it.
suffering is the point. ########not enough to be willing to die for your country.
you must be willing to kill for your country as well. that is what war means.
i kill people. so should you.
(127)
While he is quite obviously an extremely disturbed individual, Angry Sniper might not be
entirely crazy when suggesting a nation of lone gunmen all other modes of resistance

have been effectively destroyed by the government. There do not seem to be many other
choices left. The sites like OpenSourceResistance and FreeRebelArt that promote passive
resistance have been shut down, and the creator Niel Czerno, was executed for his passive
resistance, his treason. With Angry Sniper the exploited body is beginning to take its
vengeance in the very terms the exploiting class had used to destroy it: You have set
something in motion / much greater than youve ever known / standing there in all your grand
naivet / about to reap what you have sown.
The Warning
The Warning comes with an increase in Presence sightings, as reported on
AnotherVersionOfTheTruth and other sites. The narrator of the song tells us that I was
standing right there / when it came down from the sky / the way it spoke to us / you felt it
from inside / said it was up to us / up to us to decide // Youve become a virus / thats killing
off its host / weve been watching you with all of our eyes / and what you seem to value most
/ So much potential / or so we used to say / your greed, self-importance and your arrogance /
you pissed it all away / We heard her cry / weve come to intervene / you will change your
ways and you will make amends / or we will wipe this place clean. It is interesting to note
that the seemingly incongruous piece of static heard at the end of the song, when run through
a spectrographic analyser,3 shows an image of the Presence. The Presence is, literally, in the
song, leaving its trace, its autograph.
Who or what the Presence is, is not important. What is important is that it can be no other
way. Passive resistance, it has been proven, is suicide. Active resistance is immoral. The
system will not collapse under its own weight. The only way that the Year Zero situation can
be resolved is by total annihilation from outside/within, by an apocalypse.
Conclusion: Zero-Sum
This essay hopes to have shown that while the ecological crisis might be the situation of our
lifetime, it isnt and will never be something separate from politics, economics or
ideology. We are too firmly invested, on the symbolic as well as literal level, in the earth for
the ecological crisis to be free from our ideologies and agendas. To save the earth more must
3 A tool used by music producers, it effectively makes sound visible, producing the
frequencies on a single graph. It can also be used in reverse, draw a picture and it will
produce the sound.

be done than to work from inside the inherently violent system that created the crisis in the
first place, the system itself must be dismantled or we will face the consequences. It is a
simple, and as complex as that.
Bibliography
42Entertainment & Nine Inch Nails. Exhibit 24. Available online.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Flix. A Thousand Plateaus. Bloomsbury: London. 2013.
Foucault, Michel. Right of Death and the Power over Life, in The Foucault Reader. ed.
Rabinow, Paul. Penguin Books: London. 1986.
Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics, in Public Culture 15(1): 11-40. Duke University Press.
2003.
Nine Inch Nails. Year Zero. EMI: Los Angeles. 2007.
iek, Slavoj. Violence. Profile Books: London. 2009.
For General Overviews and Info see:
http://www.42entertainment.com/work/yearzero
http://www.ninwiki.com/Year_Zero_Research
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Zero_(game)