Big data + authoritarian governance = techno-totalitarianism. At least that’s the equation we’re most familiar with, and the route that appears to be being laid out in Xi’s China, according to this lengthily researched New York Times piece. (To be fair, the authors only use “techno-authoritarianism,” and the titular and subtitular “-totalitarianism” gloss appears to […]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Ukraine, the “migrant crisis,” & the future
Posted in Cultural politics, Politics, tagged borders, Climate change, critical zones, cultural politics, ecotopia, futurism, green politics, liberalism, migrant crisis, migration, Putinism, refugee crisis, refugees, Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukraine, xenophobia on March 14, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Here are some thoughts on the humanitarian, historical, moral, and environmental implications of the crisis of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They were prompted by questions asked of me by a public radio interviewer. I’m still working on the answers (and the interview has not aired, as far as I can tell). Comments […]
Info war & peace, theories turning to ashes
Posted in Media ecology, Politics, tagged Bellingcat, cyber warfare, cyberwar, disinformation, information warfare, infowar, media warfare, Putin, Russia, Svitlana Matviyenko, Ukraine, Zelenskiy, Zelensky, Zelenskyy on March 11, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
This is being cross-posted (in modified form) from UKR-TAZ, where it is part of a series examining the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The invasion of Ukraine continues to horrify, with casualties mounting and humanitarian corridors failing to materialize. But one of its more interesting dimensions, from the perspective of media and cultural theory, is the […]
Invasion of Ukraine
Posted in Politics, tagged fascism, global politics, hyper-events, peace, Putin, Putinism, Russia, Ukraine, war on February 26, 2022 | Leave a Comment »
Readers of this blog may know that I have longstanding research as well as personal/family connections in Ukraine and that I have sometimes run a parallel blog on issues related to that country. (Called “UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone,” the blog is found here.) I recently began posting to that blog more regularly with […]
Post-pandemic, what will have changed?
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Media ecology, Politics, tagged ClimateJustice, COVID-19, ecojustice, environmentalism, futurism, globalism, green cities, green politics, international green movement, localism, media ecology, optimism, pandemic, post-pandemic, predictions on May 13, 2021 | 2 Comments »
When we look back at this time a few decades hence, what changes will we take the pandemic of 2020-21 to have ushered in? How will it have transformed work, recreation, travel and transportation, food, politics, and everything else? The following are some initial thoughts toward a hopeful eco-justice based perspective on how the world […]
Local election call
Posted in Politics, tagged Ali Dieng, Burlington, local politics, Max Tracy, Miro Weinberger, Vermont on February 26, 2021 | 3 Comments »
I don’t usually write about local politics on this blog. But why not? Here’s my prediction for next Tuesday’s Burlington,* Vermont, mayoral election. Let this be a test of how good, or bad, I’ve gotten at observing my city’s politics. (For outsiders: this is the city where Bernie Sanders cut his political chops as mayor […]
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 […]
No surprises
Posted in Blog stuff, Climate change, Politics, tagged 01-06-21, Capitol, climate denialism, disinformation, far right, fascism, hope, image war, information war, insurrection, January 6 2021, meme magic, QAnon, right-wing media, Trump, Trump-Like Derangement Syndrome, Trumpism, Trumplan, U.S. Capitol, Washington D.C. on January 7, 2021 | Leave a Comment »
I am an academic who researches, writes, and teaches about the human relationship with the ecological environment within which we live and on which we depend. I recognize that that relationship is deeply troubled, and I want to be working on untroubling it. Politics — the shaping and implementation of policy to steer collective and […]
“I am become Death…”
Posted in Politics, tagged Bhagavad Gita, democracy, Donald Trump, media, public education, public media, public sphere, Trumpism on November 12, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Trump’s parting electoral tantrum puts the exclamation mark on the fundamental flaw of democracy that his presidency has revealed: that a poorly informed electorate can willingly choose its own demise (even as it recites platitudes to the contrary). Two institutions are most implicated in this flaw: public education and the mass media. In well functioning […]
Well, here we go…
Posted in Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump, electoral, Joe Biden, media coverage of U.S. politics, media ecology, negative visualization, political conflict, premortem, Stoicism on November 2, 2020 | Leave a Comment »
Cross-posted from e2mc. Note that this post takes the Stoic strategy of preparing for the worst, so as to be pleasantly surprised when the worst fails to come to pass. Deep breath, Americanos. Let’s brace ourselves for what may be the messiest, most litigious and disruptive Interregnum in U.S. history. (“Interregnum” = the 79 day interval between […]
Generalized Floating Dread Event (GFDE)
Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics, tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, affective contagion, affective politics, dark flow, dark matter, emptiness, political affect, revolutions, Zizek on October 30, 2020 | 2 Comments »
Rather like the Airborne Toxic Event in Don Delillo’s 1980s novel White Noise, these days seem, to many of us, suffused with a kind of Generalized Floating Dread. I’ve picked this sense up from students, from colleagues, from friends and neighbors. It is as if there is a cloud of dark matter around us, whose […]
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@aimmanence- New post: Is there life after ‘big data’? https://t.co/7sCnoRz0gG
about 1 day ago
- New post: Is there life after ‘big data’? https://t.co/7sCnoRz0gG
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