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Posts Tagged ‘anti-vaccination movement’

“Trust your (foamy) immune system”

Posted in Anthropocene, Eco-theory, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on August 2, 2021 | 7 Comments »

“Trust your immune system.” One often hears this slogan, or some version of it, from people who are against vaccination. But what does it mean, or what should it mean for an intensely social species like ours, living in a microbiologically fluid and creative environment like Earth’s biosphere? We can only trust something if we […]

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Letter to a vaccine skeptic

Posted in Cultural politics, Science & society, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 12, 2021 | 1 Comment »

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 […]

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More conspiratology: the internet as monochord & storm machine

Posted in Media ecology, Spirit matter, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 2, 2020 | 5 Comments »

At a time when the U.S. itself appears on the brink of collapse — with riots in the streets, a pandemic crippling the country’s heath care system and wreaking havoc on its economy, a president tweeting out nods of recognition to his QAnon fan base and hinting at “the Storm” that is coming — the sense-making apparatus of digital media is rife with opportunities for disinformational entrepreneurs to make headway in various directions. […]

The internet is like a huge instrument — a hyper-complex, Robert Fluddian monochord, that works by allowing for an infinity of connections through which flow the sounds and vibrations of human emotional and affective contagion. When protests erupt across the country over the senseless killing of a black man in Minneapolis, the time scale in which large-scale action occurs speeds up and become affect-driven time, not a time in which collective deliberation is really possible. This means that informational, and therefore “disinformational,” bursts into that monochord become all the more powerful.

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