Open Book Publishers

On ‘Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change’

On ‘Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change’

By Domenic Rotundo

What we hear about climate change is influenced by science, politics, the media, and NGOs—but what about local communities, where its effects might arguably be observed most clearly, not least during the past year, when we have all travelled far less? Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Changeexamines an impressive range of case studies from across the globe, granting great insight into the processes by which we make sense of climate change, and challenging certain expectations or assumptions. In taking a multi-pronged approach to this topic, we gain a varied perspective on the means by which climate change and its effects are transmitted and interpreted in local communities.

The first chapter, “We are Climate Change: Climate Debates Between Transnational and Local Discourses” (Michael Brüggemann and Simone Rödder), includes a concise description of what you will find in this thought-provoking book: “Local discourses around the world draw on multiple resources to make sense of a ‘travelling idea’ such as climate change, including direct experiences of extreme weather, mediated reports, educational NGO activities, and pre-existing values and belief systems.” Chapter One discusses the link between humans (society) and ‘nature’, including anthropogenic global warming (how the physical environment influences social realities), which affects how people perceive their physical surroundings and live (which, in turn, impacts the climate). The question  of whyit is important to study how local communities make sense of climate change is also answered: “Interpretations of climate change, such as those that stress individual and collective efficacy (the belief that ‘we can make a difference’), may motivate people to change their lifestyles and, more importantly, mobilize political action, while feelings of fear and shock may overwhelm, paralyze actions or lead to risk denial (O'Neill and Nicholson-Cole 2009; Feldman and Hart 2015).” The chapter considers key factors, such as transnational and local discourses or scientific and other ways of sense-making. Three dimensions of climate change discourse are also examined: “patterns of communicationrelated to climate change”; “patterns of interpretationabout climate change that emerge from the different flows of communication”; and “entanglement of meaningsoriginating at the local or transnational level including how the scientific and other framings of climate change speak to each other.”

In Chapter Two, “The Case of ‘Costa del Nuuk’: Greenlanders Make Sense of Global Climate Change”, Freja C. Eriksen analyzes social representations theory and the views (mostly ignored by the media) of fifteen Greenlanders on the subject of climate change, taking into account their media exposure and personal experiences. Findings show that these individuals do not self-identify as victims of climate change, contrary to what is largely represented in the media (e.g. through frequent images of meltingicebergs). There is also a more positive outlook for a warmer Greenland, including possible political independence and development, and media coverage is criticized by both young and old. ‘Professional background’ influenced whether the interviewees emphasized potential economic benefits (e.g. ice melt: greater accessibility to oil, gas, mining, and hydrocarbon development) or environmental risks of climate change. Older people were less likely to believe that climate change is anthropogenic, and more likely to believe that climate change is exaggerated by the media. On the other hand, the younger interviewees felt that the media underestimates anthropogenic global warming. In closing this chapter, Eriksen explains how sense-making (of climate change) involves six factors: natural/unnatural, certainty/uncertainty, self/other, local/global, positive/negative, and environment/economy, and concludes that personal experience played a critical role.

In Chapter Three, “Communication and Knowledge Transfer on Climate Change in the Philippines”, Thomas Friedrich uses multi-method ethnography to investigate the  views of residents of the island of Palawan (which often experiences extreme weather) about the fact that it is  ‘carbon negative’. Personal experiences, pre-existing knowledge of nature, and cultural practices—such as strong environmentalism—are examined. This chapter explores the top-down direction of communicating the idea of climate change: “from global  IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] knowledge via networks of media and politics to local people with diverse cultural backgrounds and epistemologies” (Brüggemann and Rödder); the contrast between knowledge and meaning of climate change is also considered. The notion of climate change as a “travelling idea” is analyzed, and it is revealed that local educational theatre productions link natural disasters to immoral environmental actions. In Palawan, therefore, climate change is viewed as being real, but this strong environmentalism is due to “pre-existing beliefs, values, and practices” (Brüggemann and Rödder). Sense-making “is a multi-layered process, in which discourses and narratives, cultural models of human-environment relationships, interpersonal communications, personal experiences, and other sources of information (including the media) play a decisive role in how climate change is eventually comprehended and communicated” (Friedrich).

In Chapter Four, “Sense-Making of COP 21 among Rural and City Residents: The Role of Space in Media Reception”, authors Imke Hoppe, Fenja De Silva-Schmidt, Michael Brüggemann, and Dorothee Arlt delve into views regarding the COP 21 climate summit, which ultimately led to the 2015 Paris Agreement. Participants in the study came from both urban (Hamburg) and rural (Otterndorf) locations in Northern Germany. The chapter examines “how space, both as a physical and a social context, influences interpretations of climate change, with a focus on the role media reception plays in the process” (Brüggemann and Rödder). Focus groups, media diaries, and an online panel survey were used; in both locations, media use (local media was criticized by participants) and climate change interpretations were comparable. Personal concern over climate change was higher among rural participants, who were worried about the coastal protection and the future possibility of floods. This study showed that “the longer an individual lives in a place and the more connected he or she feels to it, the more relevant spatial factors become for her or his experience of climate change” (Brüggemann and Rödder). This makes much logical sense, and might indicate that long-term residents of a place will make a greater effort to combat climate change. This idea is certainly echoed by a recent poll (conducted by Opinium in the United Kingdom), whose findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief that millennials are more active in their practical response to climate change than their elders, in fact half of those over 55 shop locally, buy fewer clothes, and make an effort to avoid single-use plastics, whilst just a quarter of those aged between 18 and 34 do the same.

In Chapter Five, “What Does Climate Change Mean to Us, the Maasai? How Climate Change Discourse is Translated in Maasailand, Northern Tanzania”, Sara de Wit, through a multi-sited fourteen-month research project, “studies the ways in which climate change discourse is translated, communicated and received in a rural village in Northern Tanzania, exploring how villagers who have no experience with Western life and whose culture is shaped by religion translate the story of climate change” (Brüggemann and Rödder). Climate change information, which is acquired via mass media (such as the local radio station), NGOs, and the Christian church, conflicts with the culture and religion of the Maasai. For instance, an educational movie clip (Climate Conscious Program), created by a few NGOs, shows that drought is caused by anthropogenic climate change, whereas the Maasai believe that God is responsible for droughts and rain. The people distrust scientists and are unwilling to talk about the future (since they believe that only God knows the future). The Maasai consequently believe that what is viewed as climate change is simply the “normal conditions of life” (Brüggemann and Rödder).

In Chapter Six, “Living on the Frontier: Laypeople’s Perceptions and Communication of Climate Change in the Coastal Region of Bangladesh”, Shameem Mahmud considers the principal sources of information on climate change for the local community, and examines “how it understands climate change in the context of constant exposure to regional geo-hazards such as tropical cyclones, floods, salinity in the water and soil, storms, and coastal erosion” (Brüggemann and Rödder). Interviews of thirty-eight citizens (over half of whom were literate) revealed that they received climate change information from radio, television, NGOs (of which there are 250 in the region), and local leaders. Their processes of sense-making followed two key patterns: the “regional geo-hazard pattern” and “weather and seasonal variance” (which involves personal experiences of changing weather). Interviewees accept that climate change has some responsibility for local problems, such as increased salinity or rising tidal surges, but they also saw local causes, including shrimp aquaculture, as a source of increased salinization.

In the volume’s final chapter, “Extreme Weather Events and Local Impacts of Climate Change: The Scientific Perspective”, Friederike E. L. Otto explains present local climate changes and probable future ones, including newly-advanced research (and limitations) on the connection between extreme weather and climate change: “The chapter translates the question of links between climate change and extreme weather into the scientific language [using world-wide data] of changing probabilities” (Brüggemann and Rödder). The impact of media and public debates on climate science is also conveyed: increased public attention to climate change has led to further development of climate-change science (such as greater methods for estimating changing hazards), as well as a greater volume of critical examinations of scientific studies. Otto discusses attribution science, the effects of a warming climate, and the fact that “a heightened understanding of regional changes in individual types of extreme weather events facilitates preparation for all types of extreme weather.”

For those interested in climate science and how the wide array of information sources (media, politics, NGOs, and science) impact people's opinions and understanding of climate change, and indeed the means by which the idea itself ‘travels’ between global and local contexts, this insightful book will be a great asset.

Global Warming in Local Discourses: How Communities around the World Make Sense of Climate Change, by Michael Brüggemann and Simone Rödder (eds) is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in paperback, hardback and various eBook formats here.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

INC

The Conspiracy Theorist as Influencer

Here’s a conversation starter: “What do you do?” “I research conspiracy theories.” This response is usually met with varied forms of excitement and curiosity: “Oh, sick, I love conspiracy theories!”, “Like what, 9/11? You know, I think it was an inside job”, “You know, I think this corona stuff is made up by [insert global superpower/anti-Semitic trope/alien conspiracy] to control us!!!1”.

Let’s get straight, I understand that “good”, or at least legitimized, knowledge is not a neutral notion. I also understand that conspiracy theories are, in the end, alternative ways of processing information in an increasingly networked age, “a way of making links in the combined sense of discovering as well as creating”[1] 

It might be comforting to think that the shadowy figures that populate the more unpleasant corners of the internet, as well as your aunt on Facebook, are cretins who genuinely believe the narratives they spout to their audience of galaxy brains. It helps recalibrate our own position as sane, thinking, intelligent citizens and identifies a scapegoat in a nebulous uneducated, media-illiterate class that seemingly dispenses with science and logic. 

What some of these conspiracists understand better than most is that this game is not one of winning people’s minds, but their hearts. All clichés aside, appealing to users’ logic with sound arguments and facts simply doesn’t do the trick anymore. You have to be able to generate clicks.

Why Are Conspiracy Theorists So Obsessed with Collagen?

Much like all entrepreneurs, conspiracy theorists need an actual product to sell, something that can finance their efforts to propagate arcane stories about “evil lizard people” and the like. And while they do traffic in conspiracies, they often must find other things to capitalize, especially in a precarious platform landscape, where demonetization and deplatforming are lurking around the corner. 

RedPill Living: QAnon truther Dustin Nemos’ eshop.

 

From Dauntless Dialogue on YouTube.

Rebecca Lewis has previously pointed out that political content creators use tactics linked to lifestyle influencers, and build their brand identity, connect with their audience, and market their (political) ideas in similar ways[2]. It’s not merely the shadowy Algorithm, which radicalizes the masses, but the networked potential and influence dynamics of the platform itself, as well as the ability it affords to capitalize on extant demand. 

It isn’t especially surprising that a number of lifestyle and wellness influencers have also realized this and begun repackaging and seamlessly integrating QAnon and pro-Trump hashtags into their saccharine Insta-aesthetics. The alternative wellness industry (think essential oils and healing crystals), already suspicious of pharmaceutical companies and mainstream talking points around health and dieting, serves as an ideal mouthpiece for such content.

 

The “Live Laugh Love” aesthetics of QAnon.

 

Who said makeup tutorials and QAnon propaganda didn’t go together?

It makes sense that conspiracy theories become more insidious when they linger behind more “wholesome” aesthetics or commendable causes, like wellness and spirituality. Take Maryam Henein, for instance: the director of an award-winning documentary Vanishing of the Bees, about bee preservation, is also a prolific COVID-19 conspiracy peddler.

This is also the case when it comes to the supposed anti-establishment cadence of conspiracism. In the Netherlands, a plethora of influencers and celebrities have parroted the talking points of conspiracy group Viruswaarheid, calling on people to: “get the government back under control”. Viruswaarheid has also received support from the right-wing FvD’s embattled leader Thierry Baudet. 

Critiquing Critique

This is the caveat of basing one’s politics around resisting a loosely defined status quo. Georgio Agamben’s op-eds from earlier this year excoriating the state of exception imposed by governments and the belief that COVID-19 was no more serious a threat than the common flu curiously mirror the theories emerging from more reactionary corners of the web. Indeed, refusal to comply with the imposed measures is often framed in terms of resisting authority. 

Back in 2004, Bruno Latour [Author disclaimer: As a grad student in an STS-heavy media studies program, I am legally obliged to quote Latour] wrote that the spirit of critical thinking and healthy doubt has been deformed by conspiracists[3]. Inhabiting an increasingly complex networked landscape, and grappling with the lessening importance of our decisions, also means that we are primed to look for connections and eager to make sense of things[4]. Conspiracy theorists might be the most eager of all.

I do consider myself a person with decent critical thinking abilities, but I also find myself torn between the imperative to question constructs like objectivity [Author disclaimer: As a grad student in the humanities, I am also legally obliged to reject grand narratives] and my contempt for simplistic explanations for complex, systemic issues. Conspiracy theories, for all their convolutedness, are the latter, as they generally are mutations of preexisting fears, anxieties, and moral panics, things which easily lend themselves to appropriation by conspiracy theorists. As Marc Tuters and Peter Knight explain in The Conversation, “[c]onspiracy theorists usually have a complete worldview, through which they interpret new information and events, to fit their existing theory”. 

Despite what Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum recently diagnosed as “conspiracy without the theory”, conspiracy supporters, including corona-deniers, often instrumentalize scientism just as often as their opponents do, albeit in different ways, likely because they are aware of its authoritative appeal. Despite their apparent critique of the “status quo”, many of these conspiracists still invoke authority in order to consolidate their credibility, from citing “experts” to masquerading as experts themselves.

What makes this penchant for critique, as well as the appeal to authority, even more interesting is its pairing with faith and religiously inflected spirituality. Born-again Christian and Q interpreter Praying Medic, whose real name is David Hayes, embodies this apparent contradiction. A prolific author of books about spiritual healing, he has more recently veered into Q and Covid-19 conspiracy territory[5]. 

Apocalyptic language and skepticism seem to not go well together, but they might actually explain how conspiratorial narratives like QAnon have managed to mobilize and sustain such a diverse following, uniting 4chan denizens following digital “crumbs” with mommy bloggers fearing for the safety of their children.

Teh Internet Is Serious Business

Researchers conducting work at the intersections of online subcultures, trolling, and bigotry have pointed out that ambivalence is a feature of this volatile landscape. This landscape bears more of a resemblance to the anarchic and playful cyberspace of the 90s than the post-2010s platformized web, where the offline and online are increasingly converging around the performance of a stable, quantifiable, and datafied identity. Anonymous image boards have cultivated a reputation as spaces where meaning is produced through the carnivalesque performance of identity (via linguistic signifiers rather than other conventional identity markers) and the mockery of all things serious. This ludic spirit has in more recent years been transformed into, well, a cesspool of bigotry; and, in the face of the supposed political dominance of technocratic liberalism, the memetic turn of the 2010s can be understood as a reactionary attempt towards “metapolitics”, the (ironically) Gramscian project of transposing politics in the domain of culture. 

All of this has been widely discussed and written about, of course, but it bears repeating. For the past five or so years, journalists and commentators have been caught up in the vortex of the reactionary right and its discontents—fringe internet fora and the conspiracy theories that these have spawned—often while lacking the conceptual tools to discuss these phenomena. To explain that irony and ambivalence are fundamental features of these discourses is not to take them lightly, but is crucial in order to understand them. 

And now the million-dollar question: what happens when there’s money to be made?

(Former?) alt-right darling, Laura Southern, was recently the subject of a profile in The Atlantic, which, besides painting a rather grim (with a dash of Schadenfreude) image of the way this political space treats its women, has also confirmed the suspicion of many: genuine belief in extreme ideas isn’t actually a prerequisite to publicly espouse them. In fact, we might argue that being a woman, a person of color, an LGBTQI+ individual with reactionary ideas offers an easier pathway to attention and therefore speaking engagements, and monetization opportunities; take a look at Milo Yiannopoulos (before his dramatic fall from alt-right grace). 

If these reactionary ideas can easily be combined with latent societal fears and anxieties—the perfect raw material for the creation and dissemination of conspiracy theories—,well, even better!

But weren’t conspiracy theories supposed to be fringe, marginal, and decidedly unmainstream?

The Platformization of Conspiracy Production(?)

We are arguably living through an era in which leisure is being absorbed by the neoliberal imperative of productivity. Before the “influencer’ was a venerable career path, she was an average person mediating between companies and audiences in a more or less hobbyistic manner. As the perception of the influencer is becoming increasingly imbued with inflections of celebrity, and conventional professions burdened with demands of self-branding, we are now observing figures like the journalist-as-influencer, the academic-as-influencer, the meme producer (or poacher)-as-influencer. Why not, then, the conspiracy theorist as influencer?

It is indeed a bit surprising that the figures which emerged from the murky waters of anonymous imageboard culture are building their profiles as (soooort of) legitimate entrepreneurs. Pizzagate, QAnon, and the Epstein-didn’t-kill-himself narrative were initially based on the anonymous crowdsourcing and crumb-collection of 4chan. Here a marked separation of the “real” from the online is encouraged, and the entrepreneurial spirit cultivated by mainstream platforms becomes a target of ridicule. But conspiracy entrepreneurs, like Dustin Nemos, who was recently interviewed by CBS News as one of the “leaders” of QAnon (itself an oxymoron, if we look at the non-hierarchical vernacular spaces from which QAnon originates), not only denounce anonymity but also, by monetizing their content, the ostensibly idealistic premises that are still venerated in these domains. 

Like so many other things, including sociality, labor, and cultural production, it is unsurprising that the dissemination of conspiracies might also become subsumed into the logic of what Anne Helmond has called platformization, or the “rise of the platform as the dominant infrastructural and economic model of the social web”[6].

As we are beginning to see with other kinds of celebrity, the more “established”, old-school conspiracy entrepreneurs, like David Icke (who has been banned from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter), are increasingly being replaced by a new crop of conspiracy influencers, who have found a precarious home on YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram (as well as alt-right-friendly platforms, like Bitchute). While their viewership is generally smaller than that of the alt-right celebrities Lewis writes about, they mimic their techniques of influence, having established an alternative (facts?) media ecology, where conventional influencer practices, such as collaborations, brand deals, promotional codes, subscriptions, memberships, and merchandise, provide opportunities for the monetization of controversial content. What is sold, beyond snake oil, is an overarching lifestyle.

Of course, these creators, whether it’s the “old-school” Q interpreters or the pastel-tinted lifestyle bloggers, are aware of the dangers of deplatforming, which is why their branding takes on the added urgency of having to adapt to perceived censorship, introducing new hashtags, as well as grammatical and spelling mistakes in an effort to obfuscate the true meaning behind their hashtags and posts.

If we assume that these millennial and Gen Z conspiracy entrepreneurs do not, literally and figuratively, buy what they sell, is it only profit that motivates their peddling of outlandish theories and dicey remedies? What about the ludic, mischievous essence that undergirds the spaces where such theories often circulate? Of course, monetization and name-making betray this. And QAnon buffs having a meltdown about their supreme leader failing to sweep this election implies that not everything is a joke, after all.

Joe M, noted Q influencer, handling Trump’s loss extremely well.

On the other hand, the dissemination of misinformation is facilitated by hordes of bots, meme factories[7] or digital armies[8], all of which indicate a standardization and a certain professionalization, in line with what we’ve been seeing in other forms of invisible, “free”, and immaterial labor performed online. Platforms are now more intensely cracking down on disinformation, but this response has only come after influencers on Instagram and YouTube amassed thousands of followers by posting conspiracist content.

Does this signal the capitulation of previously untouched grounds to the logics of platformization, professionalization, and expropriation of collectively produced vernacular creativity? And if so, does this mean that the last major frontier of the playful, irreverent, and unmonetizable “old internet” is a white supremacist-infested swamp? 

There is something profoundly depressing about that.

References

[1]Jodi Dean. Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace. Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 143.

[2]span style=”font-weight: 400;”>Rebecca Lewis. “Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube.’ Data & Society, 2018, https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2018/09/DS_Alternative_Influence.pdf. 

[3] Bruno Latour. “Has Critique Ran out of Steam?” Critical Inquiry, 30, no. 2, Winter 2004.

[4]Dean, Aliens in America.

[5]The “medic” in his moniker might imply medical training and incur a legitimacy, particularly regarding his coronavirus-related videos, but Hayes is actually a paramedic. 

[6]Anne Helmond.“The Platformization of the Web: Making Web Data Platform Ready.” Social Media + Society, July 2015, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115603080. 

[7]Crystal Abidin. “Meme factory cultures and content pivoting in Singapore and Malaysia during COVID-19”. HKS Misinformation Review,  July 15 2020, https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/meme-factory-cultures-and-content-pivoting-in-singapore-and-malaysia-during-covid-19/.

[8] Estrella Gualda Caballero. “Social network analysis, social big data and conspiracy theories”. Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories, Routledge, 2020, pp. 135-147.

 

Open Book Publishers

On Mendl Mann’s ‘The Fall of Berlin’

On Mendl Mann’s 'The Fall of Berlin'

by Hannah Godfrey

It is estimated that between 490,000 and 520,000 Jews served in the Soviet Red Army during the Second World War. Indeed, the USSR’s highest military honour – ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ – was awarded to 154 Jews over the course of the War.1While many of these soldiers may have been motivated initially to fight against the destruction of the Jews by the Nazis and to combat anti-Semitism, it soon became apparent that Germany was not the only place that harboured such attitudes. Anti-Semitism persisted at all levels of the Soviet Union. From1943 in particular, as the tide of war shifted, many soldiers perceived a clear change in policy whereby Jews were discriminated against in awards and recognition and new draftees were more likely to be anti-Semitic.2This conflict of interests; namely fighting against Nazism while experiencing rampant anti-Semitism in the country they were fighting for, made many such Jewish soldiers experience of war – and sense of victory – a tainted one.

Despite such a large amount of Jewish soldiers – and such an abundance of Second World War novels – the experience of Jews fighting in the Red Army against the Nazis is one that is rarely seen in literature and popular media. Mendl Mann’s The Fall of Berlin is one such rare example.

The Fall of Berlin is an autobiographical look at the Second World War from the perspective of a Jewish soldier. Menakhem Isaacovich, a Polish Jew, flees the Germans and finds refuge in the Soviet Union.The book follows Menakhem as he fights in Stalin’s Red Army, inspired both to defend the country that has taken him in and to seek revenge on the Germans destroying his homeland of Poland and exterminating the Jews. The third book in a trilogy, The Fall of Berlin focuses on Menakhem’s dilemma regarding where it is that he will settle as the end of the War comes within sight. He knows that he cannot stay in the USSR after experiencing rampant anti-Semitism at the hands of its population, but he also cannot return home to Poland as his entire family has perished in the Holocaust.

Mann’s The Fall of Berlindetails the anti-Semitism that Menakhem faces at the front. “Dirty Jews”, “draft-dodgers” and “I do not talk to Jews” are all such examples of the hostility and antagonism directed towards the Jewish community by various characters throughout the novel. While the impact of such incessant anti-Semitic rhetoric upon the reader is at times distressing and uncomfortable, it is an important reminder of the prejudice faced by so many during the Second World War. Not only is the perspective of a Jewish solider fighting in the Red Army a unique one, but it is also an insightful and painful one.

Mendl Mann himself was born in Plonsk, Poland, in 1916. A keen poet and artist, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts before joining the Red Army in 1941, after being forced to leave Poland following the German invasion. During his time as a soldier, Mann witnessed the siege of Moscow and the occupation of Berlin, as well as helping to create various propaganda materials for the USSR’s war effort. It was Mann’s experience as a solider that informed this trilogy of war novels. A Yiddish language enthusiast, he was heavily involved in the literary movement to keep Yiddish alive, and his two prior books – At the Gates of Moscow and At the Vistula – were originally written in Yiddish before being translated into various languages. Despite this, The Fall of Berlin was never translated into English – until now. Maurice Wolfthal’s vivid and skilful translation truly brings Mann’s tale to life, examining the experience of war in an original and compelling way.

1 Arad, Yitzhak, In the Shadow of the Red Banner: Soviet Jews in the War Against Nazi Germany (Jerusalem, 2010) p. 24.

2 Gitelman, Zvi, Why They Fought: What Soviet Jewish Saw and How it is Remembered (University of Michigan, 2011) p. 1.

Mendl Mann’s 'The Fall of Berlin', translated and with an introduction by Maurice Wolfthal, is an Open Access title available to read and download for free or to purchase in paperback, hardback and various eBook formats here.

INC

LCCP Symposium Memory for the Future: Thinking with Bernard Stiegler

Bernard Stiegler’s unexpected passing away in August 2020 left many things unfinished. His philosophical work, that had started by a seminal theory of technics as memory and evolved towards an interrogation of the automatic society, now examined from the perspective of anthropic and neganthropic tendencies of the world marked by pervasive AI, ultraliberalism and climate catastrophe.

In order to commemorate the span of this multifaceted work, but above all in order to probe its future, the Leiden University Center for Continental Philosophy (LCCP) and the Institute for Science in Society of the Radboud University of Nijmegen summon a meeting of both academics and actors from civil society.

Due to Covid restrictions the symposium will take place online.

Program

Thursday 3 December, 2020: Stiegler’s Engagements

14:00-14:15 Susanna Lindberg: Opening of Symposium

14:15 – 15:15

  • Pieter Lemmens: “Bernard Stiegler in memoriam / eulogy / tribute”
  • Gerald Moore: “Covid-19 and the Intermittent Society”

15:30 – 16:30

  • Dan Ross: “From the market of information to the pharmacology of the gift”
  • Anaïs Nony “Scenes of disruption: future’s power and the technological rules of law”

16:45 – 17:45

  • Mischa Twitchin: “Mnemotechnics and the Discrete Voice”
  • Harry Halpin & Geert Lovink: “Stiegler’s Technical Legacy: Another Social Network Is Possible. A Dialogue between Harry Halpin & Geert Lovink”

18:00 – 19:30

  • Judith Wambacq & Bart Buseyne: discussion with Anne Alombert (Internation), Victor Chaix (Les amis de la génération de Greta Thunberg) and Maël Montévil (Project Plaine Commune)

Friday 4 December, 2020: Thinking Through Bernard Stiegler

14:00-15:00

  • Jean-Luc Nancy: “Stiegler, mélancolie et négativité”
  • Erich Hörl: “A Thinking of Suspension”

15:15-16:15

  • Antoinette Rouvroy: “Postscript on Automatic Society”
  • Erik Bordeleau: “The Cosmo-Financial Pharmakon: Tending techniques for (non)scalable localities”

16:30-17:30

  • Jan Masschelein: “School as ‘otium of the people’: the letter… and the voice?”
  • Paul Willemarck: “Necessary default and tertiary retention”

17:45-18:45

  • Jean-Hugues Barthélémy: Jean-Hugues Barthélémy: “Ontological Difference, Technological Differance and Semantic Difference. The Problem of decentered Reconstruction of Philosophy after ‘Deconstruction’”
  • Georgios Tsagdis: “Negentropy after Stiegler”

18:45-19:00

  • Susanna Lindberg: Closing Remarks

 

More information and registration: https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2020/12/lccp-symposium-memory-for-the-future-thinking-with-bernard-stiegler

INC

Call for Proposals: INC Reader #15 – Critical Meme Research 

As they metastasized from the digital periphery to the mainstream, memes have seethed with mutant energy. From now on, any historical event will be haunted by its memetic double — just as any pandemic will have its own infodemic that will recursively act upon it — issuing in the kinds of cross-contamination that Baudrillard already prefigured in the 1980s: of the convoluted age of simulacra, of epistemological crises associated with postmodernity, and of a generalized informational obesity whose gravitational pull bends reality to whatever “program”, in the multiple senses of that term.

In its idiosyncratic track, our responses to memes in the new decade demand an analogous virtuality. Beyond the so-called ‘Alt-right’ and its attendant milieus on 4chan and Reddit, memes have passed the post-digital threshold and entered new theoretical, practical, and geographical territories beyond the stereotypical young, white, male, western subject.  While academic scrutiny has largely lagged behind memetic production, online-facing media has tended to uncritically relay or clutch its pearls in ways that malicious actors tactically exploit. These conditions demand an approach that matches the deterritorializing violence of memes: their ability to abstract and frame, deduce and reduce, to distill and hide, and to alter our perception and behavior through contagious spectacle and cognitive terraforming.

Lastly, what will become of the meme that has been declared dead yet refuses to go away? Does the very notion of a meme become redundant once it is all-pervasive, like any successful cultural technology? Yet we also seek to revisit old territories: what can we salvage from these affective and aesthetic ruins to re-enchant our present appreciation of memes and meme culture? How can we (re)theorise the meme as something between a semiotic surface and asignifying network (or something else entirely)? How can we apply the meme (as it is now/as it will be) as a hermeneutic for the study of other online phenomena like the spread of conspiracy narratives? How are memes made and deployed beyond spaces of (sub)cultural production and what are the implications of this? 

What is it to see oneself in a meme? 

We invite authors from a variety of disciplinary and cultural backgrounds to contribute manifestos, essays, interviews, fictions, artworks and other speculative interventions in our understanding of what memes are, or will be, in the process of becoming.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • (Re)theorising the meme (between semiotic surface and asignifying network)
  • Non-anglophone & local meme cultures (Pepe in Hong Kong, meme-driven moral panics in India, anti-censorship memeing in China, Japanese imageboards)
  • Meme genealogies and web histories (usenet, Something Awful, YTMND)
  • New approaches to online visual culture (archive.org, altpedias, image analysis)
  • Artistic appropriations of memetic styles and tactics
  • Unfunny memes & attendant notions of influence, manipulation, gamification, and war (in propaganda and political campaigning, armed conflict, population control, genocide, global intelligence, viral marketing) 
  • Memes and online identity politics (gender, race, class)
  • Memetic subjectivities and political affects (zoomers, doomers, Karens, Chads, Wojaks)
  • Conspiracy theories as memetic narratives
  • Normiefication and its counter-responses (ironic/post-ironic, wholesome, surrealist, dank, meta memes)

Proposals/abstracts should be around 300-500 words. Send these to criticalmemereader[at]networkcultures.org by 16 December 2020. Final texts should be 500-5000 words and submitted by 10 March 2021.

Janneke Adema

Evaluación de las intervenciones sanitarias en salud global. Métodos avanzados

Bajo la dirección de Valéry Ridde y Christian Dagenais

Traductores : Clara Bermúdez-Tamayo, Alberto Fernandez Ajuria, Olga Lerata Pinan, y Jaime Jimenez

Para acceder al libro en versión html, haga clic aquí.
Para descargar el PDF, haga clic aquí (próximamente).

***

¿Cobertura de atención médica universal en 2030 para todas las personas, de norte a sur? El logro de este ambicioso y muy necesario objetivo de desarrollo sostenible requerirá no sólo una voluntad política excepcional, sino también pruebas sólidas sobre la forma de alcanzarlo, incluidas las intervenciones sanitarias en salud global más efectivas. Por lo tanto, evaluar esta evidencia es un gran desafío. Ya no podemos simplemente medir su efectividad: necesitamos entender por qué han sido (o no) efectivas, cómo y bajo qué condiciones.El objetivo de esta obra colectiva, que reúne a 27 autores y 12 autoras de diferentes países y disciplinas, es presentar de manera clara y accesible, en francés, una antología de enfoques y métodos avanzados en la evaluación de intervenciones: cuantitativos, cualitativos, mixtos, que permitan estudiar la evaluabilidad, la sostenibilidad, los procesos, la fidelidad, la eficiencia, la equidad y la eficacia de las intervenciones complejas. Cada método se presenta en un capítulo a través de un estudio de caso real para facilitar la transferencia de este valioso conocimiento.

ISBN PDF : 978-2-924661-98-7

DOI : pronto
525 páginas
Portada dirigida por Kate McDonnell, fotografía de Christian Dagenais
Fecha de publicación: noviembre de 2020

Índice

INC

OUT NOW: TOD#38 Satellite Lifelines

Satellite Lifelines: Media, Art, Migration and the Crisis of Hospitality in Divided Cities just launched and can be found online!

“Hospitality is central to the question of political frontiers where admittance and refusal across state borders may be a matter of life or death, and also touches on the fundamental ethical question of the boundaries of the human, the constitution of the subject, how and why we set these up, and ways in which we can attempt to bring them down. A majority of migrants today now seek refuge in cities rather than in camps, prompting us to reconsider the way in which we need to rethink urban space to accommodate newcomers more long-term. Who has the right to belong? And on what terms? As we can no longer separate cityscapes from mediascapes, we need to also reconsider how these now almost indistinguishable ‘-scapes’ constitute ‘connected’ places of exclusion and belonging. In this dilemma of who is in or out, the political unwillingness and inability of dealing with the notion of the Other, the blame has been assigned to those who are assumed to “unprogrammable” within national narratives, which resulted in the ad nauseam repetition of the term “refugee crisis”.

What I argue is that it is not the refugee, migrant or immigrant who is in crisis. If we shift the lens to include host societies as part of this so-called crisis, my suggestion is that we instead call it a “crisis of hospitality”, where host societies are equally implicated in this dilemma. What we lack in political and media discourses is a language of hospitality, a way to properly name these issues and these subjects if we are to act politically towards emancipatory politics of the right to the land, the right to the city, the right to belong, and the ethical responsibility towards the Other.

Considering that politics, urban planning and media platforms are unable to resolve this dilemma, in Satellite Lifelines, I turn to philosophy and art instead.  Satellite Lifelines is a the same time philosophical inquiry, a historical survey of divided cities and politics of urban exclusion, and artistic research. I take the reader to a multiethnic suburb in Sweden, where a participatory art installation on satellite dishes on modernist façades become a surface for understanding host-guest relations. In working closely with residents in a co-generative capacity, notions of belonging through transnational media and multiple reflections on what it is we call home flourished. Is it the vibrations from television broadcasts from faraway homelands resonating in large TV screens in living rooms while in exile? Is it the notion of community building from the ground up, which provides the grounds for social, urban and media justice movements? Or can home be found in the essential meeting with the Other through the face, as Emmanuel Lévinas suggested? Questions about being trapped in eternal guesthood also came to the surface, and suggestions as to how art projects through a “hospitable turn” can open pathways for the right to host.”

– Isabel Löfgren

Download or order a copy of the book here:

   
INC

Out now: Internet, Mon Amour – Chronicles before yesterday’s collapse

‘The future was yesterday, when we were inseparable from computers and smartphones, for better or for worse. Even when we would have preferred to do without them, because we knew they could prove to be our worst enemies. The global surveillance scandals of the Internet were just the tip of a icebergs, mass manipulation was just the beginning: we were all vulnerable! Misplaced curiosities, scams, identity and data theft, porn sales, haters…’

The Great Internet Plague 

In her book, ‘Internet, Mon Amour – Chronicles before yesterday’s collapse’, a collection of short novels in a Decamerinian frame, Agnese Trocchi sketches a situation where ‘we are at the end the Great Internet Plague and a group of hackers, artists and geeks escape in the mountains to tell each other the stories before the collapse’. 

‘Internet, Mon Amour’ was born from the desire to understand our relationships with the machines that are part of our daily life. ‘We are aware that too often we are embroiled in chains of command that are invisible to us as they are covered by layers of make-up. The distance that separates us from understanding hardware and software is hiding under comfortable and smart surfaces. We are alienated from the tools that we use.’

The result is a hybrid between an essay and a collection of short stories framed in speculative science fiction. Above all, it’s an invitation to collectively use our imagination and to play together.

Post covid-19 era 

‘One could sense discouragement and sadness in the air. The intentions were good: to let go of the disaster and to meet with friends again, in a welcoming and protected place. But each one brought the wounds of the vicissitudes just experienced. Many had lost loved ones, all had to abandon their jobs, or their homes too. Distorted lives. How could anyone remember? Telling what had been before, without getting caught up in melancholy, anger, fear?’

The prologue of ‘Internet, Mon Amour’, could indeed very well be situated in a post covid-19 era to come. Ironically enough, the book was written before the current pandemic, yet the crisis gives the book new meaning. The scenario imagined for the book, a ‘Great Plague’ was born from the bad habits perpetrated by human beings in their unhealthy relationships with technological devices, technical beings; mutual abuse and oppression led humans to isolate themselves and destroy the social bond that held them together.’ Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? 

And, of course, the logical follow up question would be when the situation will return to normal. ‘Obviously there is no turning back and in the meantime it will have become even more difficult to eradicate the technologies of domination from our lives, addicted as we will have become to the platforms of e-something. In the meantime the capitalism of disaster, joyfully rubbing its hands at the unanticipated opportunity, collected an enormous amount of data and metadata about our behavior.’

Trocchi remains positive however. She wants to imagine that ‘once out of the emergency some of us will have treasured this experience, observed the vulnerabilities and started recreation to transform us starting from the weak points. A path that begins looking at non-gamified tools and conscious choices.’ 

To learn, teach and play with machines

The short novels include various themes; from AwayFromHome (‘we remember and think of those who relied on technological tools of undoubted power, connected in extraordinarily large networks throughout the whole world, fast and omnipresent; and they trusted in the prodigious help of these networks owned by others to communicate with other humans, to find what they were looking for when they were not at home’), relationships (‘because the great denied of […] relationships mediated by digital machines were precisely the machines themselves. Only a few tried to know them, only a few cared’) and sex (those who entrusted their intimate relationships to powerful technologies […] [-] if they worked for professional, emotional, and family relationships, why shouldn’t they work for sexual relationships) to scams (unrepeatable business prospects, stratospheric gains, exceptional savings, opportunities not to be missed) and recreation (the desire to find new, intriguing paths, never definitive solutions, to confront problems as ancient as the world; to the enthusiasm of the game made for the pleasure of playing, without prizes or awards. […] Machines as street companions, from which to learn, to teach and above all, to play with). 

You can read the entire book here. For hard copies, mail ima[at]cirex.org (you will be asked for a donation),  buy it on Amazon or find it at  L200: Langstrasse 200 in Zurich, Switzerland.

Agnese is also open for publishers that distribute in Europe, the United States or Australia. She is also open to collect more stories. Suggestions can be sent to ima[at]cirex.org.

Agnese Trocchi is social media strategist, copywriter and storyteller. She has always been curious about our relationship with information technology and with the media, was videomaker and net.artist. Her net.art and video art works have been exhibited in events and galleries around the world.  She deals with hacker pedagogy (conferences and training) with C.I.R.C.E. 

C.I.R.C.E. (International Research Centre for Electric Convivialities) proposes workshops of digital self-defence, hacker pedagogy, convivial informatics for all curious people to get to know each other better, and to get to know the machines they live with.

 

Open Book Publishers

Vigilantes in the Digital Age

Vigilantes in the Digital Age

by Christopher Hubbard

Click. That’s how easy it is for social media users to upload information to public platforms, whether as text, pictures, or videos. This simple capability has transformed the public from an audience of passive observers into a crowd that can take collective action, and thus have an impact on social and political life. Social media platforms allow their users to engage with others on topics ranging from the trivial to issues of life and death.

With the advent of social media came the inevitable rise of digital platforms being used for the purposes of vigilantism. Introducing Vigilant Audiences, edited by Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov and Qian Huang, explores the groups and audiences that behave in this way. As the introduction notes, vigilantes can be organized either individually or collectively and are oriented about a target that has allegedly violated a “social order” via criminal activity or an action or utterance considered “morally offensive”. Vigilantism itself is characterized by acts that seek to right some wrong, where law enforcement has failed and others feel compelled to take the law into their hands. Besides motivations that might align with justice, vigilantes might engage in such acts for financial gain, such as revenue from YouTube videos.

The book takes a case-study approach, diving into particular examples of vigilantism: actions and discourses of fandoms; select groups in Russia who claim to act on behalf of society, such as Lev Protiv, who compels smokers and drinkers to respect the law; and the 2017 white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville which prompted Twitter users to post pictures of participants and asked followers to identify those people, to name a few. The societal and cultural backdrop of vigilantism comes under scrutiny, and the connections between digital media platforms and those activists who utilize them is considered through the lens of performativity and technical mediation.

Aside from the various aspects of vigilantism mentioned above, this text also factors in the role of the audience and how digitally oriented groups might differ from more conventional, non-digital groups.

Backlash

Vigilante-esque actions are easy enough to find on social media, with so-called ‘cancel culture’ often explicitly targeting someone’s reputation or their job. This is explored in Introducing Vigilant Audiences, which notes the backlash faced by high-profile figures such as Amy Poehler and Daniel O’Reilly, whose comedy has resulted in negative consequences for the creators themselves. A character in the show Difficult People, produced by Poehler, made a joke about R. Kelly urinating on Blue Ivy when she turns 18. O’Reilly, through his character Dapper Laughs, utilized offensive comedy that, albeit that is what originally attracted his audience, resulted in the cancellation of his show.

Recently on social media, I came across instances of vigilantism on both Reddit and Twitter that stuck out to me. On Reddit, someone had exposed racist and anti-immigrant comments that blamed Asians for the current Covid-19 pandemic. Not only were the comments, which originally came from Facebook, relayed to other Reddit users, but so was the identity of the person responsible for the comments (an act that actually contravenes the rules for posting). The person who reposted the comments also revealed the original commentor’s work address and urged others to call her workplace to file complaints against her.

Similarly on Twitter, one often finds a hashtag including a show or famous person’s name alongside “isover,” calling for that show or person to be cancelled and boycotted. A few recent instances include a short clip of Billie Eilish forcefully throwing a bottle into the crowd and liking a meme that implied that Louis Tomlinsin was uglier than a former band member, both of which caused #BillieEilishIsOverParty to trend. A few people on Twitter expressed frustrations over cancel culture and how insidious it has become. Last year, #CamillaCabelloIsOverParty was posted by a few, with some citing the reason as her Tumblr account with racist posts years prior.

It is worth noting that the consequences of acts of digital vigilantism can be startling, unintended, and call into question the proportionality of this form of ‘justice’. A case explored in the book involves a 68-year-old woman who pocketed another person’s wallet; footage of the incident circulated online and went viral. Following a slew of hateful comments against her, the woman ended up taking her own life.

Introducing Vigilant Audiences offers a vast array of such case studies from around the world. Given how prevalent and pervasive instances of digital vigilantism is, this open access book will give both scholars and social media users alike the tools to recognize acts of digital vigilantism and their origins and motivations

Minor Compositions

The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – The “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78)

The Magneti Marelli Workers Committee – The “Red Guard” Tells Its Story (Milan, 1975-78) Emilio Mentasti In a large factory in Milan in the mid-70s, a few dozen workers organized themselves against both the management and the unions in an autonomous Workers’ Political Committee. Soon, this “Red Guard” consisted of hundreds of workers fighting against layoffs and relocation. The Committee … Continue reading →