I just finished watching Aliens, for the third time, and it got me thinking. Despite the hardcore action and sci-fi trappings, it's a tale that we see told more and more often now. In fact, I hope that some day films like it are used in sociology classes to depict what I think is a growing concern in society.

Watch Akira, seminal 1980s anime film. Play System Shock 2, an action-RPG from 1999. See the Alien films.

For every evil government research project, psychotic artificial intelligence and rogue android... there'll be a destructive amorphous lifeform, hive mind monstrosity and xenomorphic nightmare.

Contrast the animes Ghost in the Shell and Neon Genesis Evangelion, the former depicting the loss of individuality that results from the implantation of the human mind into machines, the latter depicting humanity being threatened/consumed by massive biological entities.

Cables are tentacles, and vice versa. The thought of having one's mind made into a channel or linking point in a network is as terrible as the thought of one's body being a vessel or organ within a greater being. Personal preference will mean we find those polar opposites frightening in varying degrees. Machines are clean, and sleek, but cold and distanced from the mess of emotion and sensation that people identify with. Great biomasses are powerful and organic, but deformed and too far lost in primal biological urges.

Think of it like this, in System Shock 2, the rogue AI SHODAN has convinced herself she's a deity. In her mechanical thought processes, annihilating humanity is perfectly acceptable, seeing them as a mess in an otherwise clean and ordered environment. In Aliens, the Xenomorphs seem to have no interest in actions other than perpetual propagation, spreading their biomass further and consuming all alternate lifeforms.

We don't fear silicone or slime, and maybe not even death itself, as much as we fear the cessation of our being. Be it due to death or integration into an unfeeling network of either flesh or metal, this terror only grows in a society more and more able to determine its form with machinery and medicine.

The great ontological fears distilled: Will we be lost in a sea of virii and chemical weapons, or stripped of self in a bed of cold and unfeeling machinery?