Silver Bullets and Seed Banks A Material Analysis of Conspiracist Millennialism (original) (raw)

This article examines how millennial (and apocalyptic) prophecy in contemporary conspiracy theory culture is both constructed from, and in turn produces, material things. Influential radio host and filmmaker Alex Jones (b. 1974), constructs his prophecies of imminent ''Fall of America,'' engineered by a shadowy cabal of Satan-worshiping socialists, from material things—ammunition purchases, birth certificates , chemtrails and extreme weather. At the same time, his prophecies in turn nurture an industry producing water filters, ''seed banks,'' and freeze-dried food for the ''preppers'' who would survive—material expressions of their millenarianism. These processes illuminate how material concerns actively construct worlds of belief, whether religious or apparently secular.

2012 Millennialism Becomes Conspiracist Teleology: Overlapping Alternatives in the Late Twentieth Century Cultic Milieu

Due to shared conceptions of the degeneracy of the modern era and a common distrust of mainstream narratives, New Age and conspiratorial milieus have often cross-fertilized. Conspiracy narratives can provide accounts of the types of corruption to be remedied by the advent of the next world age, and prophetic narratives of a new age can provide a teleological focus for the eventual success or defeat of the conspiracy. New Age interest in the millenarian significance of the Maya Long Count calendar took hold in the 1970s as an array of expectations for an approaching golden age around the year 2012. As such expectations became a more well-established commodity in countercultural circles, the associated dates were eventually incorporated into a variety of conspiracy narratives. Each innovator of 2012 conspiracism adapted this dating scheme into his or her own context in a manner that is exemplary of the improvisational style that Michael Barkun noticed to be prevalent in contemporary American conspiracy discourse; ''2012'' became utilized as a teleological trope which could be incorporated wherever such a temporal focus was desired.

Future Clash: Popular American Apocalyptic Religion and its Contradictions

http://futureswewant.net/, 2019

This piece was commissioned for futureswewant.net/ by its curator Prof. Dr. Markus Schulz (http://markus-s-schulz.net/about/), Professor at the New School for Social Research and a co-fellow with me at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. The title plays on Alvin Toffler's best selling 1970 book, *Future Shock* (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future\_Shock), whose chief thesis is that we are living in a social situation of increasingly compressed time and disorientation produced by the advent of ever new technologies. The following essay takes up the apparent contradiction of best selling popular apocalyptic literature anticipating an imminent end producing massive sales and large fortunes for it creators who capitalize on the economic opportunities of a late industrial economy. The paradox is that belief in the swift return of Jesus is marketed in a way that participates in a neoliberal economy whose ideal is endless growth and production. The essay develops a lived religion approach to religious belief and practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lived\_religion) in the analysis of popular apocalyptic expectations and draws on Michel de Certeau's notion of reading as a practice of daily life. Its chief thesis is that the consumption of popular apocalyptic literature by the American public serves a particular set of social settings in which it finds its salience, a salience otherwise absent under different social settings where readers also lead their lives. Future clash refers to the way we live in multiple anticipations of the future, in ways that are not always logically consistent with one another. As such the essay challenges the idea that people who consume apocalyptic popular literature are dupes of religious hucksters and argues that consumers use the literature for their own purposes which may not in fact have very much to do with belief about the end of the world or the intentions of those who produce it. The essay contains language that some may find offensive.

Lets Make The Past Great Again: Studies in Conspiracy Theory Narratives (2016)

As humanity adjusts to globalization it is not moving toward the end of history but going into reverse. The complex meta-narratives of post-modernism and consumerism have led to a sense of overcrowding and the ‘blood and soil’ aesthetics of Radical and Romantic Nationalism seem like a crude and often brutal attempt to alleviate this burden and simplify these narratives. 'Let's Make The Past Great Again' explores the idea that the past has become another modern consumable and a powerful rhetorical device and stock option for 'Nostalgia Nationalists' like Donald Trump and UKIP's Nigel Farage. The article also considers the phenomenon in light of Umberto Eco's 14-point definition of 'Eternal fascism', fundamentalism, meta-modernism, social media, conspiracy theory, extremism and in the context of the various 'justice narratives' directed at voters in the West. Winning the justice narrative features as prominently in the tropes and pledges of Trump and Farage, as it does it in the books found in Bin Laden’s compound. Each of them tells a story of righting wrongs and restoring balances. The work of the Conspiracy Theorist is to negotiate a path through to a promised land where the air is clean and the ground more giving.

The Reels of Truth – Material Faces of Conspiracy Theories

Czas Kultury / EN, 2016

Philosophy, Social Sciences, Language and Literature Studies, Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Sociology The article is devoted the material “infrastructure” of conspiracy theories, co-created by the same technical artefacts and recorded on various material media “traces”. Following Wolfgang Ernst, the author assumes that the tools used to record and read data have their own non-human, machine temporality, which affects our understanding of time and history. Paranoid thinking therefore does not have to be merely the result of content circulating in media networks, but is also a result of human encounters with material technical artefacts. The article also addresses this issue from within the context of the contemporary media landscape, in which the materiality of media is increasingly hidden by ever-“thicker” layers of interface, limiting our control over the devices and tools we use.

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