If you’re theory-averse — both take some time to present the theoretical framework I bring to studying images, including moving images (as in Ecologies of the Moving Image) and digital images (in the forthcoming The New Lives of Images) — you might want to just skip to the 28-minute mark of the second video. That’s where I focus in on the current political issues encompassed in the sub-title (and not so much on the climate disasters, which I’ve covered in other talks you can find on my web site, in the side-bar next to this post in Immanence, or through a YouTube search). It’s a bit of a précis of the thinking I’ve been sharing on this blog and working through in my writing of the book I had been calling Stormy Weather, up until William Connolly came out with a brilliant book of that title. I haven’t come up with an adequate replacement title yet, but pieces of it have also come out in my talks at the SFU Institute for the Humanities conferences on Fascist Neoliberalism and the Fate of Radical Democracy, last year, and on Apocalyptic Anxieties the previous year.
Here’s “Ecologies of the Multipolar Information Disorder”:
As a Canadian who has long valued this country’s differences from the United States, I’m as concerned as anyone about the Trump administration’s threats of annexation toward Canada. This is mostly for obvious reasons: threats of annexation against sovereign nations violate Article One of the United Nations charter, and these threats are being made in a context of an attempt to radically redraw global geopolitics in the direction of a more authoritarian, neo-imperial order. Trump’s imperial grasp should be curtailed, and the Canadian border is as good a place to do that as any.
I happen to be a US citizen as well, having lived there for most of a quarter-century, so my appreciation of some things about that country makes things a bit more complex.
But mostly I consider myself a citizen of a rapidly changing planet. It’s those changes that I study, write, and teach about. And because of them I believe we need to view these things not only through the prism of business-as-usual, but through a longer range view. That requires asking what kind of subdivision of governance responsibilities makes most sense on a fragile and rapidly altering planet.
From an ecological perspective, bioregional, or ecoregional, boundaries are much more sensible than the boundaries we’ve inherited from our colonial histories. Ecology should not necessarily trump culture, history, and identity (sorry for using the “t” word), but it should be factored into the ways we adapt to a world in which climate is destabilizing, setting off mounting migration pressures, and in which the infrastructure of everyday life will have to change radically or will suffer dramatically.
I highly recommend Antonia Juhasz’s Rolling Stone cover story “Is Trump’s ‘Minerals Deal’ a Fossil Fuel Shakedown?” In a Facebook post, Juhasz notes that Ukrainian president Zelensky “is on his way to Saudi Arabia next week, being forced into a corner by the unholy alliance of Putin and Trump and to sign an ‘extortionist’ ‘neocolonial plundering’ of Ukraine’s vast natural resource riches, giving Trump and Putin unprecedented control of fossil fuels and minerals.”
The winners of the war, it turns out, are intended to be none other than Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Big Oil. Juhasz writes:
It’s looking increasingly likely that the last 35 years or so will come to be seen as an Interregnum between two world orders: the Cold War order, which emerged from the ashes of World War Two, and whatever it is that is beginning to envelop us now. The question is whether what is enveloping us will become the new order, or if an alternative to it can be imagined into existence, and soon.
The first and second failures
The Cold War order pitted two global blocs — the liberal capitalist one led by the U.S. and its allies, and the ostensibly socialist one led by the Soviet Politburo in Moscow — against each other in a kind of “profoundly unstable stability,” a relationship of hostility tempered by the threat of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Ultimately that order fell apart due to the internal and external contradictions of the Socialist bloc. That bloc’s main internal contradiction was between the equality and prosperity it promised its people, and the authoritarianism of its centrally planned socialist economic practice, which failed to deliver that promise. Its main external threat was its western opponent, against whom it felt a need to build up a massive defense system that taxed its own capacities to the max. By 1991, the Socialist bloc seemed to have clearly lost that struggle, with liberal democracy (or democratic capitalism) triumphing.
The Interregnum has been a time when the seemingly victorious liberal democratic world was in a position to build a more lasting, relatively peaceable world. It had the means to do this — by strengthening the international order of sovereign nation-states, international agreements, and rule of law, and by skillfully addressing its own challenges. But now, in 2025, it seems clear that it has failed, and that this is due in part to its own central internal contradiction.
That contradiction is between the democracy and general prosperity it has promised and the capitalism it has harbored. For all of its productiveness, capitalism generates huge costs to its environment — which means to all of those people, lands, and ecological systems it treats as resources and not as equal partners. The costs eventually come to haunt it — in such forms as climate change and biospheric deterioration, as well as in the disgruntlement of those who don’t share in its benefits. They become both its external and its internal enemy.
I’m sharing an exchange between my son and ChatGPT, wherein he is asking the AI about whether bison ever lived in the northeastern United States. When he hones in on some confusing information, ChatGPT begins to respond in a way that seems calculated to please, and when he tells it its information is incorrect, ChatGPT happily corrects itself, in a repeated back-and-forth dance of apologies that is hilarious to follow.
The strategy seems to be: say anything that sounds reasonable, supporting it with data that looks believable. If your client pushes you, apologize and say something different. Treat any contradictions with a polite shrug and a deflection. Carry on.
Click below for the full exchange. Here are a few choice bits:
There’s a clear lesson for us in the mass firings of federal employees, carried out as part of an administrative coup led by the world’s wealthiest tech oligarch, in the country that had up till recently been seen as the paragon of stability and prosperity.
That lesson is that we are all dispensable now.
In the new order that’s being instituted, no one is secure anymore. Just as climate change has been making us all vulnerable in ways that had previously been limited to the victims of colonialism and extractive capitalism, the new tech order makes us all vulnerable to the dispossession of any security we thought we had — of our jobs, our homes, our communities.
The new order is an alliance between the world’s techno-industrial oligarchs and the authoritarian neo-imperialists who now lead the three most militarily powerful countries in the world (Trump, Xi, and Putin). It’s being ushered in, most obviously, by the Trump–Musk axis, with other tech lords playing along, since they have plenty to gain from it and too much to lose if they do not.
The alliance is hardly unified at the global level, and will likely be characterized by rivalry, if not military confrontation. But its goals are unified.
They are, first, to continue the scramble for valuable techno-industrial resources — including remaining fossil fuel reserves, newly critical “green tech” minerals (lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare-earth minerals, et al.), control over the rapidly warming Arctic, and the new digital frontiers of artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and whatever will come next.
And, second, to control the masses of humanity using those very technologies, through information warfare, opaque media algorithms, and the same artificial intelligence.
With its flurry of perplexing and often contradictory initiatives and statements, Donald Trump’s second presidency is leaving traditional media outlets, along with their tired viewers, overwhelmed and incapacitated (qualities exacerbated by the media outlets’ oligarchic owners’ kowtowing to the new administration). There are still many good journalists doing important work. But there’s also a palpable sense, especially on the left, that media are failing at their critical task, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
This post considers the situation and shares a starting list of some writers and researchers sharing important analyses of what is unfolding. The list is growing without warning (last revised on Feb. 17), and your suggestions are welcome, in the comments or by email.
In a matter of days, Donald Trump has accomplished for Vladimir Putin, and to a lesser degree for Xi Jinping, what neither of them would have imagined possible or at least likely. By withdrawing nearly all U.S. support for humanitarian and civil society initiatives around the world (except for Israel and Egypt), and by launching economic wars against the U.S.’s two closest neighbors, Canada and Mexico, and threatening former allies including Norway, Trump has signaled to the world that a new configuration is dawning: a multipolar, neo-imperial one in which oligarchic empires can dominate their “spheres of influence” in whatever way they like, and that democracy has nothing to do with it and power has everything. Ukraine and Taiwan, like Canada, Greenland, and Panama, are in this sense just starting points for this new global realignment.
Where the Americas were the meeting ground for a previous round of multipolar (as opposed to bipolar) inter-imperial conflict, the warming Arctic is poised to play that role for the coming one — hence, the attractiveness of Canada and Greenland, a tacit way to acknowledge the realities of climate change whilst continuing to deny them.
Watching Onscene.tv’s continuous, commentary-free footage of the fires in and around Los Angeles is like watching a Buddhist cremation ceremony.
Recently vacated homes and buildings burn, slowly collapsing, walls crashing, smoke plumes exiting from windows, and embers blowing from building to building, as a hand-held or vehicle-mounted camera moves silently through empty neighborhoods. Sometimes it pauses to linger on a scene, taking in the scattered trash, the recycling bins lying on their side, to see if a wall will collapse or a metal railing snap.
Sometimes the camera moves as if pursued. Sirens or a police radio may be heard, or firefighters seen in action, actors in the midst of a sublime scene. Or a more active intervention: water hoses sprayed all around, or an attempted rescue of someone surrounded by flames, an animal fenced in, a dog running confusedly between fire trucks and flames. Then: cars driving on a highway through thick plumes of impenetrable smoke and billowing flame.
At other times the scene is silent, with only wind, flames, and the sounds of burning. Or the slow, processional movement through blocks of charred, leveled homes.
To watch it Buddhistically is to view it with full awareness of what you are witnessing and how you are witnessing it. It is to watch and listen closely to the sights and to the sounds, and to your heartbeat, breath, and felt response in taking it in. It is to know that these fires are actually happening as you watch, or were happening quite recently. (Onscene’s About page tells us that “From the moment the photographer arrives at a scene to the time it is broadcast on our secure client-only server, average elapsed times exceed[s] no more than thirty minutes.” By the time it gets to its free video repository, or to YouTube, it might have been last night, with the buildings now bare remnants of what you are watching.)
It is to know that people fled these homes and are elsewhere, in some purgatorial waiting room, their lives upended and their belongings vanished. And that this is one of the ways that things come to their ends, which all things will. To take in this sublime event, this reminder of the continuity of destruction, the fire burning at the heart of all things, and to feel the full weight of its meaning in the lives of every being, every witness, everyone born that will live and will die, is to feel the solidarity of all things.
If “reality TV” was always a misleading label for things that had little to do with reality and more with contrived situations, these scenes are reality TV in its raw form. Like the images of the evacuation of Fort McMurray in 2016, or the Spillcam at the BP Gulf Oil spill of 2010, they render visible the reality of what lies ahead for all of us, in a mesmerizing kind of horrific beauty. They approximate William Burroughs’s “naked lunch,” “the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
As the Buddha is said to have put in the Ādittapariyāya Sutta, or the Fire Sermon:
“Monks, the All is aflame. What All is aflame? The eye is aflame. Forms are aflame. Consciousness at the eye is aflame. Contact at the eye is aflame. And whatever there is that arises in dependence on contact at the eye—experienced as pleasure, pain or neither-pleasure-nor-pain—that too is aflame. Aflame with what? Aflame with the fire of passion, the fire of aversion, the fire of delusion. Aflame, I tell you, with birth, aging & death, with sorrows, lamentations, pains, distresses, & despairs.”
The trick is not to lose ourselves in the horror or the beauty of the flame, nor to wallow in the “disenchantment” the sermon itself advises (interpreting it is a risky business, and one must choose one’s Buddhisms just as one chooses anything else). It is, rather, to allow it to connect us to everyone everywhere. And then to take that connection with us, carrying it like an ember to our next encounter, and the next.
I’m working up a conference idea around the following set of thoughts, which are still very much in the process of being formulated. Comments welcome.
The present conjuncture
For those who study such things, social and cultural theory — sometimes simply called “Theory” with a capital T — has done wonders for helping us understand the twentieth century, and perhaps the turn of the twenty-first. The category includes a variety of schools of thought ranging from neo-Marxist world-systems analysis, psychoanalysis, Frankfurt School critical theory (with its integration of the latter two), and European existential phenomenology, to French structuralism (Levi-Straussian anthropological studies, Barthesian studies of popular mythology) and poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, et al.), British cultural studies (the Birmingham School), the postcolonial/decolonial analyses of scholars from the Global South (Said, Fanon, et al), and the many shades of American cultural studies, gender studies, and the like. Theory’s various recent “turns” — toward affect, materiality and the nonhuman, ontology, and others — have made for a consistently interesting landscape of ideas and debates, with loose consensuses emerging but rival perspectives never quite going away.
What “Theory” has to offer for understanding the present, however, is not entirely clear to me, and it’s partly because the present is already different from what it was just a few years ago. In the last theory course I taught (Advanced Environmental Humanities), I thought it was enough to include Achille Mbembe, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Christina Sharpe, and an array of other BIPOC scholars to capture the pandemic and George Floyd “moments.” Today, just three years later, I feel that extension needs itself to be extended, to make room for a world that’s become noticeably different.
Specifically, I see at least four trends of recent years that have yet to be critically assessed in a sufficiently integrated way.
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)…
Here are my thoughts on the US election, and on the challenges it presents us, in four parts.
1. The informational catastrophe, and the sadness of it
For all the reasons to be dismayed about these elections, there’s one that saddens me most. It’s that all the people (me among them) who’ve given their professional lives to elucidating and communicating the state of the world — the climate and ecological crises, the pressures these crises will put on human and nonhuman populations, and the things we should do now to mitigate the coming suffering — have failed to communicate these things to the majority of our compatriots. (See the comments to this post here for an inkling of that.)
This is an informational failure, maybe even an informational disaster. That makes it potentially a societal disaster, since any society that doesn’t base its decisions on real information about its environment will not survive for very long. Authoritarian, elite-driven societies can succeed for a little while if the elites who decide things work from a genuine understanding of environmental realities. Ultimately, they tend to fail because elites become more interested in maintaining their own status, so the polities fall apart and the masses abandon them (with more or less bloodshed; cf. the Roman empire, the Classic Mayan city-states, or any number of others).
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.
![Theory for a hybrid [war] world](https://i0.wp.com/blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/files/2025/01/image.png?resize=40%2C40&ssl=1){kind=small}
