44: Netflix & Pill

It was inevitable: QAnon has stormed HBO. Less inevitably, Conspirituality Podcast has been invited to an academic conference Down Under. In this episode, we’ll review how the first two episodes of Cullen Hoback’s “Into the Storm” lands, and wonder about what happens when conspiracy movements come under big-screen and academic scrutiny.

Cullen embedded within the labyrinthine Q-world for almost four years. He globetrotted, gaining incredible access to a network of social avoidants and keyboard warriors. His sympathy is both touching and problematic. Our own embedding in the wellness world — sixty years between the three of us — hasn’t been quite so weird or dangerous. But it does raise a similar question: how clearly can we see the conspirituality of the world we’ve worked in for so long? As Cullen tries to draw out the humanity and intentionality of the QAnons, how are we understanding — or missing — our own subjects? Then there’s the question of impact. Will America understand itself more clearly after Cullen’s work? And where will the scholarship on conspirituality go after we dump our research on that conference table?

In the Ticker this week, we review the new Lululemon mat, report on how Imran Ahmed’s team at the CCDH identified the social media Disinformation Dozen and succeeded in partially deplatforming conspiritualist power-couple Sayer Ji and Kelly Brogan. In the Jab, we’ll be looking at the woes of Astrazeneca Covid vaccine as they approach applying for FDA approval.

Show Notes

Lululemon gives the yoga mat a clever makeover

Lavrence and Lozanski on Lululemon’s neoliberal schtick

Workers making £88 Lululemon leggings claim they are beaten

CCDH’s “Disinformation Dozen” Report

Matthew’s thread on Zen and the Art of the Q-drop

On Psychological & Influence Ops in the Info Age: Q in the Crosshairs (CW: disinformation site)

Hyperobjects: ‘A reckoning for our species’: the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene

First we take Deakin, then we take Berlin