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 Election Day and the swearing-in of the next president.)
Continue Reading »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 | Leave a Comment »
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 origin is unknown and whose face is invisible, but whose presence is palpable.
Okay, it is Hallowe’en. Samhain, All Souls, Dias de los muertos. The veil between the worlds is thin, as they say. Which maybe just adds another layer to everything else.
But let’s stick with everything else. In this country at least, coronavirus cases are at their highest levels ever — topping 100,000 in one day for the first time, and close to 1,000 deaths. And there is an election coming… or, rather, swarming around us, with the very real possibility that no clear result will arrive on Tuesday, or at least be accepted by all. The prospect of no clear outcome feels like the kind of vacuum that will quickly fill with possibilities we don’t really want to imagine.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries, Politics | Tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, affective contagion, affective politics, dark flow, dark matter, emptiness, political affect, revolutions, Zizek | 2 Comments »
I’ve begun posting updates on media coverage related to the U.S. presidential election (and related issues, such as social media disinformation) on my blog e2mc, which I’ve restarted to accompany my course “Media Ecologies and Cultural Politics.” Here is the latest post, which summarizes some key stories from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. I may cross-post some things here, but not everything. To stay up to date, go to e2mc.
For an observer of the politics of the “media ecosystem,” so much can happen in a single day, and even in a single newspaper (the Sunday New York Times).
Continue Reading »Posted in Media ecology | Tagged 2020 U.S. presidential election, disinformation, Epoch Times, Falun Gong, Google antitrust lawsuit, Gulen movement, media ecologies, media ecology, media gatekeepers, New York Times, U.S. politics, Wall Street Journal | 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 can still have an impact. I call this the “secret ballot factor.” For all the things that went wrong in the 2016 presidential elections—the “horserace” media coverage that enabled a character like Donald Trump to take control of one of the two major parties, the levels of disinformation (from multiple sources) saturating so many levels of public culture and online media, and all the rest—this one factor has not been well understood nor extensively studied.
What I’m referring to is the psychological, emotional, and affective, dimensions underlying the secret ballot. The fact that Americans vote behind a privacy screen, and that no one will ultimately know who you voted for, gives the moment of voting a certain psychological potency: at that moment of (figuratively) “pulling the switch,” what you feel somewhere deeper than at the level of conversational culture can come through to the surface and voice itself through your pen-wielding hand. This is the level where people vote with their gut, not their head. (Mail-in ballots are different in this respect, and I’ll get to them in a minute.)
Continue Reading »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 | Leave a Comment »
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 as a domestic terrorism threat by the FBI last year, that dozens of U.S. congressional candidates (and a few representatives) have voiced support for it, and that President Trump’s Twitter feed is its most influential “superspreading” node. At last week’s nationally televised “town hall,” Trump refused to renounce the movement and instead nodded positively in its direction. Meanwhile, it is spreading rapidly in various forms not only in the U.S. but in Europe and around the world.
At heart, QAnon is an addictively interactive, video-game like, pyramid-schemey blob of a conspiracy theory, the ultimate in “conspirituality,” that has all the hallmarks of a new religious movement but with multiple entry points for different kinds of people. (As a new religious movement, it reminds me of the politically potent kinds of religious movements that China has seen a lot of, from the late medieval “redemptive societies” to Falun Gong.)
QAnon’s general subtext — that Donald Trump is taking on an elite global cabal of satanic and cannibalistic pedophiles, a group that includes everyone you most want to hate, especially if they are wealthy, liberal “globalists” of any stripe (but preferably Democrats) — is patently absurd. But that subtext is presented in a dizzyingly obfuscatory and beguilingly baroque, smoke-and-mirrors concoction that seeps into its followers’ psyches by engaging their hopes and fears in the most sinuously (and deviously) compelling ways.
Continue Reading »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 | 3 Comments »
Cross-posted with the EcoCultureLab blog.
Media+Environment has just published another article in its “States of Media and Environment” series, and this one should be of broad interest to environmental educators, media scholars, and environmentally concerned media users.
“Streaming Media’s Environmental Impact” draws attention to an unpopular but inescapable issue: the adverse environmental effects of streaming media. Four of the brief interventions in this multi-part article focus on streaming media’s carbon footprint, estimated by some to be 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions (The Shift Project 2019). This startling figure is rising at a calamitous rate as more people around the world stream more media at higher bandwidth—now exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Another factor in streaming media’s environmental impact is even less welcome: the deleterious effects of higher levels of electromagnetic frequencies that media corporations’ turn to fifth-generation (5G) wireless technology would exacerbate. These effects are well documented yet almost universally ignored. Despite all these findings, the notion abides that digital media are immaterial.
Continue Reading »Posted in Eco-culture, Media ecology | Tagged carbon footprint, data centers, digital media, ecological footprint, environmental impact, industrial ecology, Laura Marks, media ecology, Media+Environment, pedagogical media, streaming media | 3 Comments »
I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei’s superb cover design of my book. Cool.
Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead!
(Hipster alert!)
Posted in Anthropocene | Tagged Shadowing the Anthropocene | Leave a Comment »
My course “Self-Cultivation and Spiritual Practice” starts from the premise that philosophy — at least as it has existed outside of today’s analytical philosophy departments — has generally been about how to live, and that the best philosophers around the world have offered detailed instructions on how to get better at that. Historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot has called those “spiritual exercises,” and some contemporary philosophers (including Michel Foucault in his last years and Peter Sloterdijk more recently) have tried, in some ways, to make it that again. Since that dovetails well with the current popular interest in spirituality, yoga, mindfulness, and other such things, I offer the course to provide some historical and cultural grounding to practices found in the spiritual and philosophical “marketplace” today.
It’s a survey course that moves from the ancient world (Greece, India, China) to today’s emergent spiritualities. We just covered the Hellenistic world last week, and one of the little tidbits I shared included some advice for living in difficult times. It’s intended to help students distinguish between the perspectives of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and specifically between what Stoics call the “view from above” — a kind of universe’s view on our lives — and what the Epicureans might have called the “view from within” (or the “argument from nature”). While the views below aren’t exactly demonstrative of these, I think they work in our present context.
I prefaced the comment by noting that I teach and research the cultural dimensions of the environmental crisis. (The spiritual practice course is a special course taught for my university’s Honors College.) That means that I’m as aware as anyone of the scope, scale, and difficulty of the challenges humanity is and will be facing in the coming decades — an awareness that is enough to make anyone a pessimist (no kidding). The Covid-19 pandemic has only made that awareness feel more acute. So these are ways of tempering a “pessimogenic” situation with what I think of as “realistic optimism.”
Continue Reading »Posted in Philosophy, Spirit matter | Tagged argument from nature, Epicureanism, Pierre Hadot, spiritual exercises, spiritual practice, Stoicism, view from above, world situation | Leave a Comment »
On day one, I poked an eye open. And shut it tight.
On day two, I tried again, looked around, grasped for something, clutched it tight. Then I ate it.
On day three (a lot of things happened between days two and three), I started thinking.
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged apocalypse, creation story, Day Six, Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymus Bosch, holy triamazikamno, octave doctor, Peter Sloterdijk | Leave a Comment »
See how far you follow my line of thinking here:
(1) Democracy (institutional and not just majoritarian/representational) is better than the alternatives. Let’s live with it (and defend it).
(2) Democracy as practiced in the U.S. today is partial, compromised, and somewhat muzzled, but still better than the alternatives. Let’s fix it up.
(3) Democracy, no matter how partial or complete, is not sufficient when it is leading us all off a cliff. At that point direct action becomes necessary. So are we heading off a cliff yet?
Continue Reading »Posted in Manifestos & auguries | Tagged democracy, tipping points, Trump | 1 Comment »
In part 1 of this article, I compared two recent books, each of which proclaims a “new paradigm” in the scientific study of emotions and affect: Lisa Feldman Barrett’s “constructivist” How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain and Stephen Asma’s and Rami Gabriel’s “basic emotions”-rooted The Emotional Mind: The Affective Roots of Culture and Cognition. In part 2, I relate each of these to recent social-scientific writing on “affective” or “emotional practices” and to a few key sources of my own efforts to articulate a “philosophy as a way of life,” that is, a contemporary askēsis: specifically, to Spinoza (briefly), Gurdjieff (at greater length), and Shinzen Young (whose mindfulness system I used as a basis for my own, presented in part 2 of Shadowing the Anthropocene). I end with an extended practical exercise that brings these strands of thinking together.
Continue Reading »Posted in Spirit matter | Tagged A. H. Almaas, affect theory, affective neuroscience, affective practice, askesis, C. S. Peirce, constructivism, emotional practice, G. I. Gurdjieff, Gurdjieff, Hadot, inquiry, Jacques Lacan, neo-Spinozism, Paul Maclean, philosophy as way of life, philosophy of the moment, Shadowing the Anthropocene, Shinzen Young, Spinoza, spiritual practice, three-body practice, triune brain, triune self | 1 Comment »
