Tag: conspiracy

  • The shifting landscape of misinformation: from macro-conspiracies to micro-conspiracies

    This was a fascinating comment by YouTube’s Chief Product Officer about how the misinformation landscape is shifting. We’re seeing a transition from stable narratives with broad support to rapidly evolving narratives with niche interest reflecting the compulsive search for signs which increasingly characterises social platforms: hundreds of millions desperately searching for order amidst the chaos, […]

  • Platform capitalism and the compulsive search for signs

    Platform capitalism and the compulsive search for signs

    This captures something of the phenomenology of the conspiracy theorist but also, I think, the stalker: the compulsive search for signs. A sense that it it all connected and that we can trace out those connections, if only we exhibit enough independence of thought and reject those agencies which kept us unknowingly under their tutelage until we began to do our own research.

  • Hannah Arendt on Conspiracies

    “At a time when full political information, necessarily worldwide ins cope, is available only to the professional, and when statesmen have found no other clue to world politics than the blind alley of imperialism, it is almost a matter of course for the others, who vaguely sense our worldwide interdependence but are unable to penetrate into the actual working of this universal relationship, to turn to the dramatically simple hypothesis of a global conspiracy and a secret worldwide organization.”

  • The spectral character of Covid-19, or, will growing deaths undermine denialism

    This was another really interesting discussion in Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas Christakis. He considers the particular characteristics of Covid-19 which have lent it an almost spectral quality in many people’s experience, lurking on the horizon of their lives as an immaterial threat. It’s easy […]

  • What comes after Trump?

    Much of the commentary on the possibility of post-Trump Trumpism has tended to focus on the possibility of a much more competent populist emerging to lead this movement i.e. one who is disciplined, strategic and serious in contrast to the impulsive and instinctive character of the outgoing president. However this passage from Zizek’s Pandemic 2! […]

  • digital capitalism and the bestiary of the imagination 

    From InfoGlut, by Mark Andrejevic, loc 3148: the deadlock of representation doesn’t simply foreclose the purchase of shared social representations, it simultaneously frees up the field for the proliferation of imagined narratives and counter- narratives. The result is a kind of bestiary of the imaginary: a familiarly disturbing world in which claims once relegated to […]