Chris Martin is an English PhD candidate at the University of Waterloo, whose dissertation research focuses on the QANON conspiracy community and the social media based disinformation networks that allow it flourish. When he’s not wading through the fever swamp… Continue Reading
“If ‘to dust’ is ‘to kill’, ‘dust to dust’ is to render into nothingness.” – Hyperstition Laboratory
Dubai is surrounded and entangled by demons. Thousands of humans are dead. They have starved, been shot, or consumed and blasted apart by sand. You, the leader of a US Army Delta Force special forces team, are tasked to walk into Dubai and find out what happened. Continue Reading
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), the surveillance state (1984), Mr. Hyde (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and the monster (Dr. Frakenstein): all are nuanced antagonistic forces that propel their respective narratives in order to address social and ethical issues. Compare that with an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, a planet approaching ecological disaster, an economy ever-reliant on dangerous loans and non-renewable resources, and you have to wonder: where are the quintessentially 21st century villains? Continue Reading
This is more of a thought experiment than a carefully crafted essay, so please bear with me. My research looks at how conceptions of heroism are negotiated across various media forms, with a particular emphasis on videogames. Videogames are teeming with heroes of all sorts, and they’re becoming an increasingly important space for defining who is, and who isn’t a hero. So when I saw that alleged murderer and cop-killer Chris Dorner had been hailed a “hero” by a surprising number of people, I couldn’t help but think – Could you make a videogame about Chris Dorner? If so, what would it look like? And if not, then why not? Continue Reading