Marcus Gilroy-Ware explores how conspiratorial thinking thrives in a digital neoliberal world where truth is sold to the highest bidder and where alienation is rampant.

Marcus Gilroy-Ware is a writer and scholar-activist who is focused on understanding how people learn about the world they live in through media. His work draws connections between a variety of fields, from political economy, to psychology, to journalism studies, to theorise the status of information in the late-capitalist public sphere. He is senior lecturer in digital media at UWE Bristol and author of Filling the Void - Emotion, Capitalism and Social Media (2017) and After the Fact - The Truth about Fake News (2020)"
More information: http://www.mjgw.net/

Conspiracy Games and Countergames is a podcast exploring the rise of conspiratorial thinking in a gamified, capitalist world hosted by Max Haiven, A.T. Kingsmith and Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou. For more information, visit http://conspiracy.games

Neoliberal feelings don't care about your facts - Interview with Marcus Gilroy-Ware (CGCG05)

Jeff Diamanti is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities (Cultural Analysis & Philosophy) at the University of Amsterdam. At the beginning of this podcast’s run, I recorded an interview with him where I asked some very broad questions about the relationship between humanity and our natural environment. Here, I had the chance to sit down with his new book Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum (www.bloomsbury.com/ca/climate-and-…-9781350191839/) and ask more pointed questions about not only the claims of that book, but about the pivotal moment we are currently in, where, as he notes, we are still continually “inundated with stuff drawn from the earth but not encountered as such;” we still, especially in the affluent parts of the world, experience the luxury of that sort of comforting disconnection of commodity from supply chain. But we also now face the mounting pressure of environmental collapse and the knowledge that collapse will be the consequence of this disconnection, where even “postindustrial” or digital capitalism is “coded in a language of intangibility” but still relies wholly upon “dead matter” to drive the system.

The pandemic has forced many more of us to attend to the material conditions that allow life to flourish. It matters that, in an instant, what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” can be “punctured,” in Diamanti’s terms, and the possibility of system-wide change can feel within reach. Yet, at the same time, DIamanti admits that some important methods of engagement don’t automatically translate, for him, into a politics; yet, these modes of thinking and feeling are vital pedagogically for encouraging a connection to what he calls the “elemental alterity of the earth.”

Part of this is based on an ethic of being a theorist who is also in and of the world, who makes a deliberate effort to “slow down” and experience the overwhelming forces around you. Who works to ensure that we’re allowing these encounters to inform our concepts, not the other way around. Anna Tsing’s “arts of noticing” are quite a bit different from the language of a “world to win” and are still potentially quite powerful, I think, for environmental communication (a problem I’ll take up in more detail in my conversation next week with Imre Szeman).

The hope, nonetheless, is to devise stronger questions and to work beyond the “expected conclusions” provided by readymade frameworks that basically induce a sort of “epistemological illegibiilty” when it comes to energy markets and energy futures, which inevitably leads to the continuation of our current impasse: the paradox of knowing we are cooking the planet for future generations of people are nonhuman beings, but can’t imagine real ways of correcting our course. In this context of profound blockage, Jeff likes to believe an engagement with the elemental alterity of the earth can open things up, these “massive and beautiful forces” can provides a grounds for revolutionary imaginings that don’t prefigure the social or psychological configurations of an energy transition.

Jeff Diamanti zooms in on the terminal & reinforces the elemental otherness of the planet

You might know Nora Loreto from her podcast Sandy and Nora Talk Politics. If you don’t, you should. Her conversations with Sandy Hudson aren’t just hilarious and relatable, they’re full of appropriately directed anger, and in many ways model a kind of solidarity that is necessary right now.

You should also know her from her two books: Take Back the Fight, which I discussed with her last year, and Spin Doctors: How Media and Politicians Misdiagnosed the Covid-19 Pandemic (https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctorshttps://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/spin-doctors). The new book offers political insights on precisely where the system failed, who it failed, and the roots of the political decisions that led to our current calamitous moment. 

In this interview, I ask about her fundamental motivation in writing the book. What is essential about documenting this dizzying time in detail? Why is it crucial that reporters and social critics document everything and think through what Loreto calls the “moving target” of the pandemic? She insists here that if we don’t, then we know that the virus’ impacts on especially the marginalized, those trapped in a hollowed out, profit-driven system of long-term care, the women who take care of the care labour required to keep society going, all of these underserved communities will be reduced to a footnote as the country pushes hard to return to something resembling “normalcy.”

Against that wanton desire for a snapback into the status quo, Loreto forces us to dwell with the nightmarish resurgence of straightforward eugenics in this pandemic. The logic of disposability forced on people in long-term care, the apathy shown toward data that reveals the overwhelming correlation between disability, transmission and premature death. The ignorance of officials who waited for data to confirm the vulnerabilities that organizers and activists already knew existed in a world still deeply stratified by race and class.

We end in a somewhat hopeful place, by trying to imagine what a robust left media could do in Canada. She says there’s obviously a pressing need for independent media to grow consequential enough to contest the attrition and monopolization that continues to hamper critical journalism in this country, but she says it can’t really grow in the intersectional, multivocal ways that we need it to if we don’t address and redress the overwhelming whiteness of the journalistic profession in Canada. 

This crisis made it feel, for a moment, like “anything was possible.” But making change at the root level in this moment required taking stock of the loss of collective power, the weakening of democracy under neoliberalism, and resisting these reassurances that “normal was right around the corner.” None of that happened, despite the fact that we could feel that this appeal to returning to some version of normal was maybe always a false promise. In the first months of the pandemic, fear felt omnipresent. Now something else seems to be intensifying: fatigue. And fatigue can be fatal.

Nora Loreto signals the need for social change & pushes journalists to dig deeper

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun holds the Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She’s also the Director of the Digital Democracies Institute there. The Digital Democracies Institute is a group of scholars and stakeholders from around the world who collaborate across disciplines to generate more democratic technologies and cultures.  Wendy herself has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she uses to understand contemporary trends and threats within digital media and emerging technologies. 

She is the author of books like Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition.

In this episode, Wendy and I talk about how existing network structures reinforce discrimination. She’s one of a string of theorists who have been critical of what she calls the “segregationist defaults” that exist within these networks that we’re supposed to assume are mechanical, other-than-human, and thus somehow devoid of prejudice. Instead, she says ‘no’: in fact, “Twentieth-century eugenics and twenty-first-century data analytics… both promote or presume segregation.”

This gives us a new way to approach the problem of political polarization. Chun argues that the assumption that people typically seek to associate with those that are like them—that look and think and act like alike—this assumption about a seemingly intuitive human tendency to group together in homogeneous ways is an assumption that historically produces itself as a fact. So it is not that homogeneous groups will somehow just naturally clash with other homogeneous groups, it is that an “unsustainable” assumption about homogeneity and homophily as baseline realities has obscured the inherent democratic virtue of difference and a diversity of worldviews. This “erases conflict,” but not in the sense of finding a way to cope with it or resolve it. And so, especially in an algorithm-driven era, polarization proliferates with overwhelming force.

We talk about these ideas that challenge the common sense assumptions that folks often have about the nature of contemporary technology, and also tackle things like facial recognition technology, the fact of artificial intelligence being an increasingly normal part of our lives. Wendy’s point is that facial recognition and machine learning are used in insidious, often exploitative, and almost always in discriminatory ways, but that they don’t need to be. 

AI, she says, doesn’t need to be a “nightmare” that undermines and displaces “human decision-making.” What if these technologies were democratized? What if—and it may seem implausible, given the tech monopolies that silently govern many of our interactions through the diffusion of different technologies—what if there was broader public power and greater participation in deciding what AI should and shouldn’t do? The point here is to, as she says, “point to realities and futures [that need] to be rejected.” Prediction does us no good without power.

Wendy Chun rejects the unsustainable assumptions that govern networks & make technology undemocratic

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. 

Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. When he said recently that he has never been more ashamed of his country, he was defending his country against what he sees as an increasing tendency toward fascism. It must be unbelievably difficult to stay the course and speak from his conscience about the scale of the violence Israel is perpetrating in Palestine. In fact, Levy says it feels “exasperating to write from this perspective and not have the impact he would like. 

He still maintains that “words are on the front line” of this struggle. How the violence is understood and what can be said has a significant impact on what sort of violence is permitted. So, too, does the form of resistance. Levy maintains that “If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear… from the agenda.” This is a people that are waged war against within an occupied territory enclosed by a wall. Why is there a boycott against the occupied rather than the occupier?

His writing is incredibly useful for people that want to understand the strategies of the Israeli leadership, which often uses provocation and assassination, a kind of brinksmanship designed, he suggests, to renew the license for widespread destruction and pacification of the Palestinian people. In this sense, Levy says that Israel “the peace objector.” 

Israel has imprisoned Gaza for many years, blocked them off from the sea, the air and the land. It regularly uses “violence and force” to subjugate Gaza, rather than coordinating a just withdrawal. Israel should not be “amazed,” Gideon says, “by the violence and hatred that [it has] sowed with [its] own hands.” The response has not been an attempt to understand the root causes or to reflect critically on its complicity. Instead, the IDF is waging a war on the civilian population, showing “contempt for the lives of Palestinian children” in its pursuit of “vengeance.”

This collective punishment is forbidden by international law, and at the current moment, and likely for several years, Israel will be on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Increasingly, the world is opposed to the Zionist regime in Israel and knows that there can be no military solution. Forcing an understanding of that into Israeli consciousness is extremely difficult, though, Levy says. In his experience, people in Israel are not bothered by the “moral aspects of the war.” This is why he has shifted toward focusing on the security and pragmatic reasons why this genocidal bombardment, this fascist fixation on punishing Gaza, is a failing strategy. He says that October 7th has created a bloodbath by opening the floodgates to a collective, vindictive military campaign that must be stopped.

Given his family history, the fact that his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and the fact that he understands the specific forms that fascism has taken historically, it’s significant that he has said that Israel is slipping further into fascism. It will continue if the US, Canada, Europe all keep averting their eyes. If the blindness continues, Israel will keep killing, destroying and settling in the region. This wretched situation will be addressed by aggressive action by the peace movement, by all of us raising our voices in opposition, and given the inaction, by those in Palestine rising up where necessary to defend their lives. This is because critics like Levy have the disturbing sense that “if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth… one can assume that there would be no protest” within the settler colonial Zionist state.

Gideon Levy implores us to thwart Israel’s wanton destruction of Palestinian life

Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes - What Kinda Music 

Song credits:

Produced by Tom Misch
Executive Production by Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes
Mixed by Russell Elevado & Tom Misch
Recorded & Engineered at Unwound Studios by Syed Adam Jaffrey
Vocals and Synth by Tom Misch
Drums & Percussion by Yussef Dayes
Strings by Tobie Tripp
Written by Tom Misch, Yussef Dayes, Jessica Carmody Nathan, Max Pope

Taken from the album of the same name "What Kinda Music" which is out now on Beyond The Groove / Blue Note Records.

Watch the official video here: https://youtu.be/4az3mKDOrEo

You can purchase or stream the album here:
http://whatkindamusic.com
https://whatkindamusicuk.lnk.to/whatkindamusicSo

You can listen to the single on all platforms here:
http://whatkindamusic.lnk.to/single

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What Kinda Music

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Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes - What Kinda Music

Following a federal election that exposed some serious issues with Canadian democracy, author and activist El Jones sat down with me to discuss how the rhetoric of emotion is used to simplify political debates around race and how the insularized ways we communicate get in the way of critical dialogue.

El Jones on the power of critical intervention as a driver of social justice

In this episode we discuss the importance of seeing culture, ideas and ideology as central parts of the struggle for climate action and an end to neoliberal extractivism. Jeff identifies a troubling "mood" that dominates conversations about the climate; this mood is part of a larger "haze" that prevents us from fully accepting the extent of the damage or the urgency of the threat.

Jeff Diamanti on capturing the climate emergency in a system that resists change

Bestselling graphic non-fiction author Box Brown speaks with me about nostalgia and popular culture, wrestling as an analogue for the theatre of politics, and (especially) the graphic medium of comics as a distinct way to look at history. His book Is This Guy for Real? The Unbelievable Life of Andy Kaufman, just won a much-deserved Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work -- Kaufman played in the lines between reality and fiction and Brown talks about the ways that writing about Kaufman's life meant figuring out relatable ways to represent an artist that defied categorization.

Box Brown on the complex frivolity of comic books

Artist and communicator Jodi Cooper discusses the complicated and exciting process of making a film that speaks to the fans who are financing it and satisfies the artists who made it. 

"The Woodsmen"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYB3sl6RJDs

Jodi Cooper on the promise and challenge of crowdfunded filmmaking.

Author and activist Max Haiven outlines some radical ways of approaching the challenges that we face globally, in a moment that seems characterized by a series of unprecedented and growing crises.

Max Haiven on the desire for vengeance and the demons of capital

This podcast features interviews with a variety of theorists, artists and activists from across the globe. It's guided by the search for radical solutions to crises that are inherent to colonial capitalism. To this end, I hope to keep facilitating conversations that bring together perspectives on the liberatory and transformative power of care, in particular.

Wendy Chun rejects the unsustainable assumptions that govern networks & make technology undemocratic

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