From Pick-Up Artists to Incels: Con(fidence) Games, Networked Misogyny, and the Failure of Neoliberalism

Between 2007 and 2018, the pick-up artist community—“gurus” who teach online networks of heterosexual men to seduce women—gave rise to a different online community, that of “incels,” who create homosocial bonds over their inability to become a pick-up artist. In this article, we offer a conjunctural analysis of this shift and argue that this decade represents a decline in, or even a failure of, neoliberalism’s ability to secure subjects within its political rationality. We argue that neoliberalism cannot cope with its failures, especially its promises of self-confidence. Such promises themselves become exposed as confidence games, which are then rerouted through networked misogyny, resulting in ordinary and spectacular violence against women. Moreover, incels express their rage through language of uprising and a war on women. Their actions are on a continuum of reactive violent responses to women’s refusal of social reproduction roles and aim to defend and restore patriarchal order

Revealing Challenges of Teaching Secrecy

All teaching has something to do with transmission of hidden knowledge, secrecy, and revelation. But the teaching of secrecy itself faces particular challenges. Drawing on the authors’ experiences teaching secrecy-themed seminars to first-year university students, this paper pinpoints four such challenges: how to determine the range of phenomena to cover in a short course, how to prevent excessive interpretation of secrets, how to encourage students to take a fun topic with seriousness, and how to engage students in their own practices of secrecy. In laying out these challenges, we aim to contribute to a secrecy literacy: a needed competency so people can better evaluate efforts to keep secrets and appreciate the need for certain types of secrets while also being able to critique problematic forms. This secrecy literacy can provide a foundation for the skills needed to better manage secrecy in our professional and everyday lives

From pick-up artists to incels: con(fidence) games, networked misogyny, and the failure of neoliberalism

Between 2007 and 2018, the pick-up artist community—“gurus” who teach online networks of heterosexual men to seduce women—gave rise to a different online community, that of “incels,” who create homosocial bonds over their inability to become a pick-up artist. In this article, we offer a conjunctural analysis of this shift and argue that this decade represents a decline in, or even a failure of, neoliberalism’s ability to secure subjects within its political rationality. We argue that neoliberalism cannot cope with its failures, especially its promises of self-confidence. Such promises themselves become exposed as confidence games, which are then rerouted through networked misogyny, resulting in ordinary and spectacular violence against women. Moreover, incels express their rage through language of uprising and a war on women. Their actions are on a continuum of reactive violent responses to women’s refusal of social reproduction roles and aim to defend and restore patriarchal order

The Digital Touch: Craftwork, Gender and Tactile Media

This paper was presented at Paper Session 5a: The New Model Worker. While much of autonomist theory privileges the most developed sector of capitalism (the digital online media and communication industries), this paper asks us to turn our attention to a revived ‘pre-capitalist’ form of cultural production. This article analyzes the recent resurgence of DIY craft culture around the following themes: 1) immaterial and affective labour; 2) gender and the home; 3) time and capitalism’s historicity. It challenges the periodisation of immateriality by highlighting the informational and communicative practices embedded in craft culture. In so doing, we can rethink the temporality of capitalism by teasing out a labour thread that passes through capitalism without being reduced to its purview. The gendered dimension of digital labour displays affective and immaterial qualities that have persisted resiliently before, during, and, in time, after capitalism. Craft as power (the capacity to act) is an ontological accumulation of species-being that pushes us to rethink the ‘organizing’ of subjects. Craft, tied to what Nick Dyer-Witheford calls species-being resurgent, provides a key example of the ontological development of subjective powers, ones that become ever more resonant in the crisis and ruins of capitalism

Grassy Knoll-Edges: Conspiracy Theories and Political Rationality in the 1990s

311 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.This dissertation studies the recent proliferation of conspiracy theories in the United States and the attending ways official analyses have assessed them as a political problem. First, I examine the common representations of conspiracy theories by prominent cultural texts and institutions. Mainstream journalism (major newspapers, weekly magazines, and television broadcast news programs), alternative press organs (especially Left and liberal news magazines), and popular cultural media (television dramas and talk shows, Hollywood films, and best-selling books) are investigated for their similarities and differences with regards to representing conspiracy theories. Second, I analyze the conspiracy theories on their own terms. In doing so, I concentrate on how they take themselves as objects of concern, and I locate the points of intersection and conflict with the mainstream institutions that objectify them. I also examine how emerging technologies (especially the Internet) contribute to the dissemination of conspiracy theories, as well as to the concern about these theories by official institutions. Specifically, I focus on how the commonsensical representations of "conspiracy theories" are bound up with present day issues of political dissent and consent. What are the parameters of acceptable dissent in contemporary politics, and what new forms of consent are being forged? As reflections on citizenship, these representations of "political paranoia" continue the perpetual self-questioning of "the American Character" that composes American political history. I argue, then, that the recognition of conspiracy theories is also a recognition of our political possibilities and limitations in the contemporary American landscape.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD