Japan has survived a litany of disasters, at the hands of both nature and human kind. The ultra-violent game of survival metered out by a near-future government on to disenfranchised and disobedient youths In Battle Royale (2001, dir. Kinji Fukasaku) is on one level a parable for the loss of all that Japan has rebuilt. On the other hand the abandonment of the Battle Royale students to base survivalism satires this very distrust, inflating this passively violent conservatism to grotesque and humiliating proportions.

William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies charts the degeneration of a group of young boys stranded on a desert island from ordered pragmatism in to barbaric power struggles. It stresses the pitfalls and fragility of governance and civility in the face of first survival and the revolutionary violence particularly when this sits amongst the young.

“You know I’m not goin’ diss you on the internet
‘Cause my mama taught me better than that”

Instead of merely adding to the woeful safety record of mining, the plight of 33 Chilean miners trapped for 69 days in a San Jose copper mine was a particularly effective official PR exercise beamed across the world to a disaster-movie trained audience. Camp Hope’s initially happy ending soured somewhat when the miner’s own attempts to cash-in on the media scrum proved less effective, and a now mining accident hungry media could only relay the tragic news of no survivors in a subsequent Welsh mining accident.

Memes survive parasitically on the parasitic attention of bored internet-users.

Alive (dir. Frank Marshall, 1993) – a remake of the 1974 book Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by Piers Paul Richards – charts the 1972 Uruguayan Rugby team’s ill fated flight across the Andes. Their plane crashes into the side of a mountain, various members of the team and their relatives die but through a mixture of survival methods including religious faith and cannibalism, 16 survive the two month ordeal.

Regardless of their lack of survival credentials and common sense, the best paid and best looking actors always survive even the most outrageous disasters.

Like the self perpetuating and regenerative Internet itself, the post-Internet Survival guide appropriates and creates analogues of a seemingly unconnected and ostensibly originless string images and texts.

Common Practice is a grouping of small-scale London galleries and publications that work together to help each other survive and maintain their independence. This quasi-corporate support structure appropriates the survival of the biggest in solidarity at least.

The movement of cemeteries from the within the town to its extremities prefigures the more recent but no less revealing zeal for apocalyptical Zombie invasions. So culturally potent is this fear of the prosthetic dead that in 2011 a Freedom Of Information request was sent to Leicester (land of the Brave) City Council to see the city’s preparations for a Zombie influx and demand that better strategies were put in place. Brains.