Beyoncé is a Clone. Be a Zombie.
From pop music to cinema, we’re living the collapse of uniqueness. In a culture of infinite versions, remembering how to rot may be the only revolutionary act.
There is something uncanny about the contemporary proliferation of clones, both literal and metaphorical, across our cultural landscape. While still at home there, cloning is no longer confined to speculative fiction or dystopian parable. What began with Barbie and Poor Things has led into Severance, The Substance, Mickey 17 and A Different Man—these works are not mere meditations on identity but the confessions of a system increasingly anxious that it has optimised out of alterity. What we are witnessing is not just a thematic trend, though it certainly is that. Instead, the reliance of artists of all stripes on the concept of cloning exposes a more profound economic and symbolic logic. Cloning is no longer speculative but descriptive. It names the cultural condition under late capitalism wherein difference is not lost but abolished, not eroded but engineered out of existence. The cloning obsession has only reached its present pitch because it reflects the fundamental ontology of the now. Are the franchise “IP films” of Disney and Marvel not, in the simplest sense, clones?
This logic extends far beyond the confines of cinema. It colonises music, fashion, and persona itself. Beyoncé is a clone—of Beyoncé, of capital, of whatever configuration the algorithm demands this quarter. One moment, she is a cyborgian extraterrestrial dropping club bangers, as in ‘Renaissance’; the next, she’s the stars and stripes-toting ‘Cowboy Carter’. While unified under the artist’s newfound project of explicating the breadth of Black influence across American music, these albums occupy sonic and cultural poles. It would be easy to write this off as Beyoncé exercising her virtuosity as a performer. Still, one must assume that the explosion of country music’s popularity and profitability guided this calculation. However cynical the genre finagling may be, her singular vocal ability convinces us that, at the very least, we are buying the Beyoncé, irrespective of the moment’s cloak.
On the other hand, there is Taylor Swift, whose relentless traversal of “eras” has become a pop-cultural axiom, less an artistic progression than a consciously commercial strategy of identity liquidation. Swift does not inhabit time; she samples it, retrofits it and reissues it. Her career is not a linear arc but a portfolio—each “era” an asset class, each aesthetic pivot a calculated rebrand engineered for maximal saturation. The girl-next-door of ‘Fearless’, the doomed romantic of ‘Red’, the vengeful diva of ‘Reputation’, the introspective auteur of ‘Folklore’—these are not stages of becoming, but switchable costumes in a carousel of commodified selfhood. The Swiftian “era” functions as a marketing scaffold: an opportunity to re-theme the tour, repackage the vinyl, re-curate the playlist, re-monetise the myth. What apes evolution is merely version control. Her persona is not emergent but deployed.
In this schema, the artist becomes a speculative instrument whose value is derived from the promise of infinitesimal transformation, not embodied substance. It is the logic of the clone: infinite substitutability masquerading as growth. And this cloning goes beyond individual artists: Tyler, the Creator doesn’t collaborate with Doechii as a mere cosign, Doechii openly mutates into his female Mark II.
Writing in the early twentieth century, Walter Benjamin famously feared that mechanical reproduction would strip art of its “aura”, being its unique presence in time and space. He theorised that reproduction would sever the connection between the artwork and its origins, as well as its ritualistic and cultural embeddedness. But what we face now is something altogether more insidious. The clone does not destroy aura. It simulates and multiplies it. In the age of streaming platforms, TikTok fragments, and algorithmically curated aesthetics, aura is no longer singular or sacred. It is modular.
This is the critical pivot: whereas reproduction presupposed an original that was copied, cloning operates without origin. No ‘original’ Beyoncé exists, only a series of commercially engineered instances. There is no foundational artistry to return to, no true essence beneath the spectacle—only endless reconfigurations optimised for reach, engagement, and cultural stickiness. This is not a straightforward loss of identity. It is the logical endpoint of identity being raised to the highest capitalist value, facilitating and encouraging the total monetisation of personality. What Benjamin warned against has been inverted: the aura is not gone, it is artificially inseminated into each clone, including ourselves as “creator-consumers”, giving the appearance of existence where only the void dwells.
This system thrives because it demands active participants, not passive spectators. Think of it not as individualised consumption, but social consumption. Social media does not reflect our identities—it enables us to mass-produce them in conjunction with everyone else. This sandbox allows us to recall faulty versions and issue new ones. We are not just watching Beyoncé shift between archetypes but doing it ourselves. Sometimes, this process is interconnected, like when we put together a different, thematically-tuned costume for the ‘Cowboy Carter’ tour than we do for the ‘Renaissance’ tour. These are not symptoms of narcissism but economic conditioning. We internalise the logic of cloning as the price of visibility. We are simply acting out the playbook of capitalism’s most powerful profit engines, political parties and evangelists when we fragment ourselves into bite-sized, repeatable personas, each optimised for success during a distinct algorithmic window. Once primarily a site of real-life action or struggle, in many cases today, identity is just another feed to curate.
In his under-read but surgically precise essay The Clone, or the Xerox Degree of the Species, French sociologist and philosopher Jean Baudrillard saw this coming. The clone, for Baudrillard, is not a degraded copy but the sign of a world without Otherness, a sign that the category of the original no longer exists. It is the triumph of equivalence over difference, of replication over creation, and pure operationality over the eroticism of the unique. The clone is not born, it is produced. It does not inherit, it is programmed. Baudrillard’s argument is, at core, a radical extension of Marx’s critique of commodity exchange.
For Marx, the generalisation of exchange under capitalism transforms all objects—and eventually all relations—into equivalents, reducible to abstract labour and monetary value. What is assumed by the system of generalised commodity exchange of goods is the commodification of time, human labour and life’s necessities. Baudrillard merely updates this to capture its current metaphysical consequence: in the clone, we are confronted not with the commodification of the subject, but the total erasure of difference itself. Cloning does not represent the failure to preserve uniqueness. Instead, it marks the system’s success in abolishing uniqueness as such.
In this light, the cultural clone is not a metaphor—it is the structural condition of postmodern cultural production. The reason Beyoncé can be alien and cowgirl in quick succession is not artistic audacity but the total collapse of symbolic tension. There is no contradiction, no danger of alienating the audience or straying too far from one’s essence, because everything is equivalent and nothing is different. To borrow from Benjamin, there is no residual aura, only infinite interchangeability. The clone is the perfect commodity-form, the full realisation of what Marx railed against: a world in which all qualitative distinction is liquidated into quantitative sameness, where everything is equivalent because everything must be exchangeable.
It is this logic that subtends the cultural cloning motifs now proliferating across art and media. In Ben Stiller’s Severance, workers are not merely alienated in the classical Marxist sense, as we are, but split into recombinant modules—“innies” and “outies”. Contrary to dominant interpretation, Severance dramatises not the loss of self but the perfect rationalisation of selfhood into a form of operational currency. This is why the events of the show’s recently concluded second season reintroduce a psychic or social struggle between aspects of the self. If it were only that identity is alienated, with each self-unit self-contained and sealed off, there would be no drama for the show to mine, no possibility of contradiction, no dialectical tension to set in motion.
For all its stylised grotesquerie, The Substance stages a similarly ambivalent response to the logic of equivalence. The younger, feminised double created to absorb violence, attention, and sexual labour is not straightforwardly the victim of commodification but the site where the original begins to fracture under the weight of her own reproducibility. The film never truly embraces cloning’s promise—delegation of risk, outsourcing of pain and liberation from consequence—because from the beginning, it is clear that Elisabeth (Demi Moore) shares a single consciousness with her junior double, Sue (Margaret Qualley). But as the clone cements her position in place of the source, the fantasy collapses into horror. The brilliance of the film’s climax, missed by many, is that the abortive fusion of the two women, affectionately named Monstro Elisasue by director Coralie Fargeat, crystallises Baudrillard’s warning. This is not a failed synthesis but a grotesque recombination, a parody of our desire to escape our singularness. The monstrosity emerges not from difference, but from its erasure: the horror is one of a world where identity is no longer relational, only recursive. Even in its excess, the film signals a buried longing for rupture, singularity, and a difference that cannot be recomposed.
Mickey 17 makes this even more explicit, though less successfully. Its titular protagonist (Robert Pattinson) is a disposable labour clone, reincarnated ad infinitum to perform suicidal missions on behalf of a colonial expedition. The premise is pure Baudrillard: death, once the ultimate boundary, becomes routinised, iterated, stripped of its finality. Mortality itself is made perfunctory. This should be terrifying—and it is, in theory. But the film retreats from its most radical implications. Rather than embrace the existential threat that cloning implies, it reintroduces narrative stakes through residual traces of memory, personal loyalty, and the yearning for personal love. Director Bong Joon Ho can’t quite hold the potential of cloning, and thus, Mickey’s clone, Mickey 18, begins to differentiate himself.
The very structure of Mickey 17 betrays the ideology of the world it depicts. Though ostensibly a film about the death of death—about a world in which mortality has been fully absorbed into capitalist production as a logistical lubricant—the film cannot sustain this premise without short-circuiting its own narrative logic. If death no longer matters, contradiction dissolves. If contradiction dissolves, so too does narrative itself. Like Mickey 18, the film craves uniqueness within a system that annihilates it. This is not a narrative failure, but a systemic one: even within a perfectly operative regime of replication, the spectre of alterity insists on returning. The film’s flirtation with cloning ironically ends with Mickey 18 sacrificing his life to save that of his original, who later destroys the cloning machine to restore the equilibrium of differentiation.
It is here that Baudrillard’s critique reaches its most piercing depth. The clone is not merely a figure of technological excess or speculative science fiction—it is the real telos of capitalist exchangeability. In a world governed by the law of equivalence, where all value is rendered commensurate through the logic of the commodity, and the efficiency of sameness is the highest value, we have ceased to exist. The subject becomes a platform; the platform, a catalogue of potential updates. To speak of “identity” in this schema is to misname a fluid operating system as a soul. Under late capitalism, we are all clones in potentia—engineered not for uniqueness, but for circulation.
What these cultural texts reveal—often despite themselves—is the lingering trace of what cloning seeks to erase: the erotic charge of the singular, the sacred violence of the unrepeatable, the necessity of the Other as the condition for both desire and contradiction. Cloning does not resolve contradiction. It abolishes the conditions under which contradiction can arise. And yet, contradiction returns—distorted, disavowed, leaking through the seams of every narrative. These are not simply dystopias of commodified life; they are failed utopias of perfect operationality, haunted by the irrepressible memory of difference. The singular is not dead—it is repressed, exiled beneath layers of equivalence, buried alive within the algorithmic smoothness of circulation.
This is not merely a metaphysical crisis. It is the political fantasy at the heart of late capitalism: to annihilate history’s stubbornness, overwrite memory with metrics, and abolish the kind of difference that might congeal into political antagonism or collective solidarity. We see this fantasy enacted in its most dangerous form under the Trump administration, not merely in its post-truth theatrics, but in its frenzied drive to dismantle education, research and the archival infrastructures of human knowledge. This is not ignorance or stupidity. It is strategic epistemicide—the logic of a regime seeking to emancipate itself from the burdens of the real.
To resist this extermination of alterity—to refuse a world in which art no longer dreams of immortality, but of upgrade and replacement—we must become zombies. Not the anaemic caricatures of consumerist satire, but the revenants of singularity: broken, decomposing, and putrid, yet incorruptibly unique. Zombies do not version. They do not circulate. They return. They linger. They rot in place. This is not melancholic decay, but insurgent putrefaction—a flesh-tearing rupture with optimisation, reproduction, and the sanitised temporalities of replacement.
Let the cloners replicate; our task as zombies is to remember. I hope you’re hungry.