The following distills the essence of my responses to questions from a vaccine (and Covid) skeptical friend. I share it in case it’s useful for others (and because it updates a few things I’ve written before on the topic). I’m not an epidemiologist and the comments on the science of the pandemic are those of […]
Archive for the ‘Cultural politics’ Category
Letter to a vaccine skeptic
Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged Anomalies, anti-vaccination movement, anti-vaxx, climate crisis, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, COVID-19, emergency brake, Letters to..., pandemic politics, pandemic response, vaccine science on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »
Civil crisis, media, & the future of hegemony
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, tagged cultural hegemony, culture wars, Fairness Doctrine, George Lakoff, illiberalism, media ecologies, media ecology, media hegemony, media regimes, political polarization, Trumpism, Walter Cronkite on January 12, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
There’s a fairly straightforward narrative about media and cultural hegemony in the United States that most scholarly observers have come to largely agree on (with the usual spectrum of variations in emphasis), but that more of the public ought to be aware of. It accounts for how we got here, into this situation where media […]
Mob politics, killer selfies, and the future of social media: an ecotopian perspective
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Politics, tagged bioregionalism, Capitol insurrection, cell phones, ecocriticism, ecocultural theory, ecopolitics, ecotopia, ecotopian criticism, Googlization, media ecologies, media ecology, media politics, QAnization, surveillance, surveillance capitalism, Trumpism, twitter, voluntary mass self-surveillance on January 10, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
Two points of social media use call for more attention as we make sense of this week’s events at the U. S. Capitol. 1) Videos and selfies from Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rallies are circulating online and making it easier to identify those who participated in the attempted coup at the Capitol. Images created and […]
America is waiting: Meme magic & the spiritual practices of the Interregnum
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, Spirit matter, tagged alt-right, America is Waiting, Byrne and Eno, election interregnum, election magic, Interregnum, Interregnum before the Interregnum, meme magic, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, Paula White, power of prayer, prayer, remix culture, spiritual practices, Trumpism on November 6, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
One of the things I study is spiritual practices – which I’ll define (for simplicity’s sake) as the things people do to enhance their capacity to live in accordance with chosen ideals. Those ideals can be defined in religious terms (for instance, as salvation, enlightenment, or unity with God) or in more secular and philosophical […]
The secret ballot “id”: affect & electoral politics
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged 2020 election, affect, affective politics, Donald Trump, electoral politics, emotional politics, id, Joe Biden, political id, presidential debates, secret ballot, U.S. cultural politics on October 23, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Last night’s presidential debate was, in many ways, superfluous: if a U.S. citizen had not already made up their mind who they will vote for (or not already voted), it’s because they haven’t been paying attention. But there is one factor pollsters and predictors of every stripe have not gotten good at accounting for, which […]
The Qanization of the world
Posted in Cultural politics, Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged 8chan, AI, Anomalies, artificial intelligence, China, conspiracies, conspiracy culture, conspiracy entrepreneurs, conspiracy theories, conspiratistics, conspiratology, conspirituality, Donald Trump, evil, Falun Gong, Instagram influencers, internet cultures, LARPs, machine intelligence, pastel QAnon, QAnon, redemptive societies, satanic cult, surveillance capitalism, wellness QAnon on October 18, 2020 | 3 Comments »
As I’ve been preparing to cover QAnon in my media course (and trying to keep up with it, since it’s really been ramping up ahead of the election), I’ve seriously begun to think of it is a work of evil genius. Let me explain why. For starters, it’s worth reminding ourselves that QAnon was designated […]
Observations and a hypothesis on the Harper’s letter
Posted in Cultural politics, tagged cancel culture, culture wars, free speech, intellectual class, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, media ecology, media platforms, media politics, media regimes, Noam Chomsky, print literati on July 10, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
So, 150 or so fairly prominent individuals write/sign an open letter defending “justice and open debate.” (We can call them intellectuals, or literati, or academics, or even celebrities of a sort — maybe “intellectual celebrities” — but see point #1 below on generalizations.) In the letter, they single out Donald Trump and the “forces of […]
We are all tuteishi (or, on not being posthuman)
Posted in Cultural politics, Manifestos & auguries, tagged alternative humanism, bioregionalism, border identities, borderlands, Bruno Latour, cultural identity, earthbound, ethnicity, Gaia, Galician, global cultural studies, humanism, identity, mestizo, nationality, Origins of the Slavic Nations, place, placelessness, posthuman, posthumanism, posthumanities, postmodern, premodern, Russian, Rusyn, Serhii Plokhy, Slavic, tuteishi, tuteishyi, Ukrainian, Zomia on June 17, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
A social media conversation prompted me to dig up something I had written in my notebook years ago after reading Serhii Plokhy’s masterful book on “premodern identities” in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. Which in turn prompted me to realize that coronavirus provides an answer to the question I had just finished writing an article about […]
The “what does it have to do with me?” defense
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged colonialism, coloniality, Decolonization, genocide, George Floyd protests, Mignolo, modernity, racism, slavery, Ukraine, United States, US history, white privilege, whiteness, xenophilia, xenophobia on June 11, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
A casual comment on a minor article in a provincial newspaper in a faraway country (Ukraine) got me going on a response to what is, essentially, the white world’s default position on all things racial. (Social media comments, as a rule, aren’t indicative of anything, but this one is so symptomatic it’s worth examining.) The […]
Categories
- Academe (108)
- Anthropocene (73)
- Blog stuff (51)
- Cinema (88)
- Climate change (74)
- Cultural politics (43)
- Eco-culture (174)
- Eco-theory (53)
- Manifestos & auguries (41)
- Media ecology (119)
- Music & soundscape (39)
- Philosophy (261)
- Politics (164)
- Process-relational thought (101)
- Science & society (35)
- Spirit matter (128)
- Uncategorized (56)
- Visual culture (88)
Translate
Archives
Subscribe to Blog via Email
Subscribe2
Top Posts & Pages
Popular resources
Books & articles
Interviews & music
Associated sites
Immanence on Facebook
-
