I suspect I’m not the only one fascinated by the mystery #drone sightings that have been reported in various parts of the eastern United States and occasionally near military installations in Europe and the UK over the last several weeks. There are three general hypotheses I can think of to account for them (and it could of course be a combination of two or more of them). My assessment of the likelihood of each follows below. (I welcome your votes — in the comments or by emailing me.) A future post will delve into the ontological implications of this sort of question, though I’m not convinced the drone sightings are a strong enough instance of the case I want to make. They may just peter out (depending on which of the hypotheses turns out to be correct)…
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology, Science & society | Tagged conspiracy culture, drone ontology, drone sightings, drones, epistemology, Forteana, La Monte Young, mysteries, Ontology, paranormal, science | Leave a Comment »
The big question around these back-to-back hurricanes in the southeast U.S. is not why they are happening (that’s easy enough to answer), but why so many people find it easier to believe they were artificially generated by the U.S. government, the “deep state,” FEMA, industry, or some euphemistic “they” (and we know who “they” are) for some nefarious purpose, such as harming Republicans before the election, seizing people’s land to access lithium deposits, testing out their space lasers, falsely convincing us that climate change is real, and so on — than it is to believe in the science of anthropogenic climate change.
Conspiracy theories have flourished in the last few weeks, and they follow in the grooves of longerstanding theories about chemtrails, geoengineering, the deep state, the climate change “hoax,” and so on (see here, here, here, here, and in my earlier series of posts for some background on this).
The question, then, is why some people fall for theories that are so much less congruent with known facts than the more obvious, empirically parsimonious answer — that climate change is real and getting worse, and that scientists have known and demonstrated that for years. But this isn’t just about knowledge versus ignorance. It reflects a deep failure of trust in public institutions.
What are the causes of that failure? In the U.S. (and in what we could call “Greater America,” which like a “long twentieth [or any] century,” is the world beyond the U.S. that is most influenced by U.S. media discourses), I would suggest that there are three main causes, all of them quite real.
Continue Reading »Posted in Climate change, Cultural politics, Politics | Tagged climate change, climate hoax, conspiracy culture, conspiratistics, conspiratology, geoengineering, global media literacy, hurricanes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, media ecology, neoliberalism, Network Propaganda, political corruption, twitter, U.S. politics, X | 1 Comment »
I’ve let things slide a bit on this blog as I’ve been transitioning into my new role as J. S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Please stay tuned; the blog will become more active again soon.
Meanwhile, here is an interview the Global Humanities department carried out with me a little while ago, in which I address Woodsworth’s somewhat contentious legacy, as well as my plans and goals for the position. Click here for the full interview.
Posted in Blog stuff | Leave a Comment »
This is a slightly evolved out-take from my recent Vermont Humanities talk, which can be viewed here.
Netflix’s 3 Body Problem was remarkably entertaining, I thought, but the whole San-Ti plot line is built around a basic ecological fallacy. Let me explain. (And I’m referring here to the Netflix series, not necessarily to the novel by Cixin Liu, which I have not read, though I’ve been told by those who’ve read it that it largely holds for that as well.)
The Three-Body Problem is about humanity’s encounter with an alien race, the San-Ti or Trisolarans, who have emerged in a star system that is a three-body system. A three-body system is a classic example of an unpredictable stochastic system: it’s one in which three similar bodies — suns, in this case — exert gravitational pulls on each other that are only stable for limited periods and whose stability cannot be predicted. The mathematics for predicting it is too complex and our, earthly, mathematicians (like the Trisolarans’) have never been able to crack it. (There’s some debate over that, but let’s leave it aside.)
This alien race has developed the means to rapidly dehydrate themselves at the onset of an unstable period and go into a state of suspended animation until the next stable system arises, with presumably enough of them remaining in an underground shelter to monitor things during the intervening chaos. The planet goes from frozen states to hothouse states at will. In this it’s something of a metaphor for Earth, which has also gone from cool to warm periods, but not quite as dramatically as this, and far more slowly. But with the current Anthropocene event, there’s a looming instability that will at least affect our capacity to survive.
What’s wrong with this picture is that the kind of highly technological, space-faring, and 11-dimensional science wielding civilization shown in the series could hardly develop under such circumstances.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-theory, Science & society | Tagged 3 Body Problem, anthropocentrism, Cixin Liu, ecocriticism, ecological fallacy, ecotheory, Netflix, science fiction, speculative fiction, Three Body Problem, zero-order humanism | Leave a Comment »
This blog has been a bit quiet as I transition to my new position as Woodsworth Chair in Global Humanities at Simon Fraser University. I’ll be sharing more about that soon. In the meantime, I can share links to a few recent talks.
Last year’s Free Cultural Spaces symposium “Towards the Symbiocene,” held in Amsterdam’s Club Paradiso and at the “free cultural space” of Ruigoord, Netherlands, has just made available some symposium highlights on YouTube. My talk, “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound,” can be watched here or below (first video). The talk was a part of a series featuring Glenn Albrecht, philosopher and theorist of the Symbiocene (“era of mutually beneficial relationships between humans and everything else”), critical political geographer Erik Swyngedouw, and philosopher Lisa Doeland, and we shared a panel moderated by Indira van ‘t Klooster, which you can also watch below (second video).
Here’s “Eco-Trauma & Beyond: Ways of Becoming Earthbound”:
And the Symbiocene panel:
Continue Reading »Posted in Anthropocene, Media ecology | Tagged AI, artificial intelligence, big data, Free Cultural Space, Glenn Albrecht, human-nature relationships, Symbiocene, Towards the Symbiocene | 1 Comment »
The article “Indigenous identity & Vermont, an update” has been updated with some new information and several new links. Click here (or on the image below) to read that article.
Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
I’m part of a roundtable discussion on ecomaterialist theory that’s just been published by the New Review of Film and Television Studies. It’s with film and media studies scholars Seán Cubitt (of Melbourne University), Elena Past (Wayne State University), and Hunter Vaughan (University of Cambridge), and curated by Ludo de Roo (Macquarie University).
Among other topics, the roundtable delves into what counts as media today, why media studies should inherently be “eco-,” different styles of materialism, the “elemental” in “elemental media,” and the origins of the two journals that distinguish the ecomedia field, the open-access Media+Environment and the Journal of Environmental Media.
You can find the roundtable here. Click on the “Topic” links to open up the sections of the multi-part conversation.
Posted in Cinema, Media ecology | Tagged ecomaterialism, Ecomedia theory, materialism, media studies, New Review of Film and Television Studies | Leave a Comment »
The study of so-called “near-death experiences” is fascinating, as it is one of those areas that remain most mysterious to science, yet which empirical evidence suggests is very consequential to those who undergo it.
By now we’ve all likely heard of the countless reports of people journeying through tunnels toward sources of light, being greeted by dead relatives or benevolent deities, and experiencing emotions by which they have been able to deeply reframe their lives upon “re-entry” into their post-near-death lives. What’s less well known are the cases in which someone has been “clinically dead” for a period of hours — more than six hours, in some instances — and who has “come back” to describe experiences like the above.
In a Guardian “Long Read” article titled “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’,” Alex Blasdel provides a fascinating overview of the growing study of near-death experiences — and even some death experiences, examined from a brain-science perspective.
Blasdel divides the various schools of thought among near-death researchers into three, and while the three categories strike me as overgeneralized (e.g., I don’t think it’s accurate to say that all parapsychologists believe mind and brain are separate), it’s a helpful mapping. The three are the “spiritualists,” “some of them evangelical Christians, who were convinced that near-death experiences were genuine sojourns in the land of the dead and divine”; the “parapsychologists,” the largest faction, whose scientific study pursues “phenomena that seemed to undermine the scientific orthodoxy that the mind could not exist independently of the brain”; and the “physicalists,” the “smallest contingent,” who are “committed to a strictly biological account of near-death experiences.”
By the end, Blasdel favors the physicalists, for whom mind and body require each other and cannot function apart from each other. My own leaning favors this view as well, even if I’m fascinated by the experiences that play center stage for the spiritualists, and by the creative theorizing of the parapsychologists. The physicalist understanding fits best with the process-relational ontology I’ve been developing (and with Spinozism, panpsychism, and other forms of relational “new materialism”). This (and the others) are forms of mind-body non-dualism, or what’s sometimes called dual-aspect monism: they see “mind” and “body” — and therefore also “mind” and “brain” — as two sides of the same phenomenon, the first experienced from the “inside” and the second observed from the “outside.” (Not all the perspectives are as clear on this inside/outside dynamic as is Whiteheadian process-relationalism, which sees the inside and outside as co-determining and present in all things, i.e., all relational events.)
Viewed from this perspective, near-death experiences and their accompanying brain activities appear to be the experience of the brain going into a kind of “hyperdrive” (as neurologist Jimo Borjigin calls it). This raises two important questions: (1) Why do reported near-death experiences seem so coherent and meaningful (as opposed to being something akin to the hypnagogic state that precedes sleep, which our mind experiences as a kind of randomizing release from narrative coherence)? (2) And what evolutionary benefit do these experiences bring? Why did we evolve to have these experiences?
Continue Reading »Posted in Science & society, Spirit matter | Tagged Adam Frank, dual-aspect monism, Evan Thompson, experientialism, Marcelo Gleiser, mind-body, mind-body dualism, near-death experience, Niagaras of beauty, nondualism, panpsychism, parapsychology, phenomenology, physicalism, process-relational ontology, Terence McKenna | 4 Comments »
The recent International Union of Geological Sciences decision to reject the proposed “Anthropocene epoch” might seem confusing. Here’s a piece of draft material from my forthcoming book-in-progress, The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds, that attempts to bring the situation up to date. Comments welcome! Please note that the references to signs, signatures, and indexicality come from the book’s (processual-) semiotic approach to understanding images; if they seem abstruse, the first half of the book explains them clearly.
While it had some forerunners, the concept of the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and limnologist Eugene Stoermer in the year 2000. Within a few years, geologists were taking the concept as a serious proposal to mark a new epoch in the history of planet Earth, an epoch brought about by human activities.
For geologists, an epoch is not just any time period; it is part of a nested set of delineations: from smallest to largest and most encompassing, these are known as ages, epochs, periods, eras, and eons. Each is a geochronological unit, that is, a unit of time as marked by Earth history (geology) and determined through the practice of chronostratigraphy, or the reading and writing (-graphy) of layers of rock (strata) marking time (chronos). The entirety is based on the long verified observation that the remnants of the earth’s surface lay themselves down in horizontal layers, with the more recent laid on top of the less recent. The smaller chronostratographic units denote smaller levels of change over time; these combine to make up the larger ones, which denote larger changes.
The geologic time scale provides a kind of chronostratigraphic “address” for anything in the geologic record. We who live today are said to find ourselves “in” the Holocene or—if it should come to be accepted—the Anthropocene epoch, which are respectively the second and potentially third epochs of the third period (Quaternary) of the third era (Cenozoic) of the fourth eon (Phanerozoic) since the formation of the Earth. The Holocene, which began about 11,700 years ago, is roughly the thirty-eighth epoch in Earth’s history.
To say that we are in it, however, or in the Anthropocene, is to presume that we, or someone, could step out of time and see ourselves inside it. We cannot: we are at the leading edge (one of an infinity of leading edges) of a set of dynamic processes that unfolds not with the flatness of a unrolling roll of paper, but with noticeable folds, twists, and lumps. Whether today’s present will one day appear smooth or lumpy, or even form a dramatic twist in the geochronological fabric, cannot possibly be known until that present has become past. It will take additional layering on top of it—further epochs or ages at the very least—to see what it will look like once it is lain down. Geology is, after all (at least in its stratigraphic form), a reading of the past in the rockscape of the present.* Its ability to read the present is constrained by the fact that the present is not yet past. Its layering can only be predicted or, perhaps, divined.
Continue Reading »Posted in Anthropocene, Science & society | Tagged Anthropocene epoch, Anthropocene Working Group, Erle Ellis, geological time scale, geology, IUGS, Jan Zalasiewicz, Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy | 1 Comment »
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