PETER AYOLOV

From Matheson’s Vampires to Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man: The Invisible Apocalypse and the Death of the Moral Human ## Introduction — People Are Strange: The Last Man in a City of Millions Some people have always experienced the strange sensation of being the last man alive in a city of millions. Nothing has physically happened to the city. The cafés are full, traffic jams still clog the streets, office towers illuminate the night, television studios broadcast continuously, phones vibrate, advertisements scream, politicians speak, influencers smile, consumers buy and crowds hurry towards destinations they rarely stop to question. Yet for the person who has somehow fallen out of synchronisation with this machinery, the metropolis can suddenly resemble the abandoned New York of I Am Legend. Everyone is there, but almost nobody seems present. Bodies move while the same phrases circulate between them; faces glow in the reflected light of identical screens; opinions arrive preassemble...