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Search Results for 'conspiracy'

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) […]

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Conspiracy movements like QAnon are a kind of cultural virus that spreads rapidly and widely in the new global media environment. Like invasive species, they spread into diverse cultural ecosystems, colonizing them even as they take on new forms that mimic each environment’s original inhabitants. To understand how they do this, we need to understand […]

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There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin. The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after […]

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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 […]

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My talk at the recent “Apocalyptic Anxieties” conference, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, is available for viewing at the SFU Institute for the Humanities YouTube page, or below. Here is an abstract of the talk: From the Angel of Apocalyptic History to the Optimism of the Will: Climate Hope within States of Urgency Apocalyptic […]

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While it’s easy to overuse the term “ecofascism,” applying it to things that don’t necessarily deserve it (the debate might be a little like the one I’ve been following over whether Putinist Russia qualifies as fascist), it’s important for anyone involved in environmental issues to have a sense of where the term does apply and […]

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Here’s a working thesis on the present global moment: 1. For many people around the world, life has always been precarious. But for a certain class — the global middle class (and up) — the world had felt more or less secure and comfortable, as long as one knew how to navigate it: play by […]

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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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In my writing about media, I’ve been using the words “ecology” and “ecosystem” fairly liberally. In a new piece called “The Limitations of the ‘New Ecosystem’ Metaphor,” The Columbia Journalism Review’s Lauren Harris argues that this metaphor is misguided. She interviews media scholar Anthony Nadler, who has claims that the metaphor “naturaliz[es] current trends in the diffusion and development of news practices.” Its use “suggests ‘spontaneous, self-ordering principles’ in the news market obscuring all the social, political, and economic decisions that undergird the status quo.”

I want to respond to that argument here by presenting the case that “ecology” is not a metaphor imported from biology, but that it’s more like the other way around: “media ecology” is a description of the world of media as much as it is a description of the world of biology. Both media and biology are constituted by the actions and processes of their constituents. In this sense, it is not a metaphor but a way of seeing, and it’s more important to ensure we understand what it is we are looking at.

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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 […]

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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 […]

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I’m working on a lengthyish post about conspiracy theory (specifically, QAnon) and the “post-truth condition,” but in the meantime I want to post a few tidbits from something I’ve been enjoying reading related to that topic. A Reddit conversation with QAnon researcher Marc-André Argentino includes some smart observations about QAnon, but also useful insights into […]

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