{"id":1887,"date":"2025-02-19T03:56:17","date_gmt":"2025-02-19T07:56:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/?p=1887"},"modified":"2025-07-09T10:08:04","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T14:08:04","slug":"the-emergent-neo-imperial-reconfiguration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/2025\/02\/19\/the-emergent-neo-imperial-reconfiguration\/","title":{"rendered":"The emergent neo-imperial reconfiguration"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This blog has been quiet since before the inauguration of Donald Trump, but I’ve been writing things at my other blog, Immanence<\/a>, which are as relevant to Ukraine as they are to the topics explored there (ecology, philosophy, politics, media). That’s because all of these issues have become rolled into one. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edgar Morin’s term “polycrisis<\/a>” is sometimes used to get at the ways in which numerous cascading crises — ecological, climatic, economic, technological (e.g., misinformation and echo-chambered social media, artificial intelligence getting out of hand), biological (e.g., viral outbreaks like the Covid pandemic), et al. — combine to make a kind of perfect storm. With the takeover of the U.S. by Trump, Musk (his unelected co-leader), and the Project 2025 folks, and now their seemingly emergent alliance with Russia against Ukraine (how else to explain Vance’s comments in Munich<\/a> and now Trump’s declaration that Zelensky “should never have started” the war<\/a> with Russia?), we clearly have a dramatic destabilization of the world-system into a new configuration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I describe that configuration here<\/a> as a “multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their ‘spheres of influence’ in whatever way they like,” with democracy having “nothing to do with it” and power having everything. (On that same page<\/a> I provide a resource guide to writers and web sites to follow in these rapidly changing times.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently I’ve written about the importance of media, and specifically the importance for people to regain control of social media<\/a> from the tech oligarchs who are squelching any possibility for useful information to triumph over useless information, disinformation, and misinformation. (Pekka Kallioniemi’s thread on X about Elon Musk’s Election Interference Machine<\/a> is a pretty good summary of one of the most powerful prongs of that squelching.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In any case, I am likely to be posting much more there<\/a> than here for the simple reason that Ukraine is now the unmistakable victim of this new configuration of political, economic, and media power that we might call “emergent global techno-authoritarian neo-imperialism,” or something like that. To keep it simple, we could call it “technofascism<\/a>,” or “kleptofascism<\/a>,” or one of the other terms being thrown around. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s all evolving very rapidly (see Christina Pagel’s running summary of the U.S. wing<\/a> of that neo-imperialism, and also of resistance against it<\/a>), but eventually we’ll see what sticks. And how resistance will build. It’s the only hope not only for Ukraine, but for all of us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This blog has been quiet since before the inauguration of Donald Trump, but I’ve been writing things at my other blog, Immanence, which are as relevant to Ukraine as they are to the topics explored there (ecology, philosophy, politics, media). That’s because all of these issues have become rolled into one. Edgar Morin’s term “polycrisis” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdPO21-ur","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1887"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2046,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1887\/revisions\/2046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-ukrtaz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}