Last week I released a free audio of my chapter on the need for ‘critical wisdom’ in an era of societal disruption and collapse. I linked to it from an essay on a counterproductive phenomenon I refer to as ‘conspiracy porn,’ which has taken off as Big Oil seeks to capture widespread and justified anxieties about regulatory capture and government overreach during the last few years. The outlandish theories about the causes of disasters, promoted through social media, are just the latest efforts of a sector that has spent decades and millions of dollars in promoting denial of climate change (e.g. see here and here). As anxieties grow, people will be more vulnerable to manipulation of all kinds, with both mass media and social media providing avenues for ‘psychological warfare’ on the public by different factions of capital.
Continue reading “Critical theory ain’t woke”