This site presents extracts from Michael Betancourt's current research and writing projects, with news about current developments. A portfolio of finished, published writing is available here.

His trilogy of studies on film theory using title sequences as a model uniting avant-garde, documentary and commercial motion pictures were published in the Routledge Studies in Media Theory and Practice series: Semiotics and Title Sequences, Synchronization and Title Sequences, and Title Sequences as Paratexts.

If you are looking for more on agnotology, digital capitalism or automated/immaterial labor, look at The Digital, which presents links to his most recently published articles and other research on the political economy of digital capitalism contained in his book The Critique of Digital Capitalism. This analysis identifies how digital technology has captured contemporary society in a reification of capitalist priorities. The theory proposed in this book is the description of how digital capitalism as an ideologically “invisible” framework is realized in technology.

You can watch his movies here.

Anything that can be automated, will be.
The robots will take your job.
This book is about what happens afterwards.

The Digital Agent versus Human Agency continues the analysis begun in The Critique of Digital Capitalism: the central place of human needs, desires, and actions in the creation of “profit” (value) is ignored in the rush to automate. Companies under digital capitalism cannot place the health of society on a par with their bottom lines. The familiar symptoms of this transformation in Bitcoin, “Fake news,” Universal Basic Income (UBI), and digital rights management (DRM), for example, are all responses to digital capitalism’s shift to automation and on-demand production. This ideology tries to erase and hide the importance of social relationships and the role of human agency in economic values that only become real through the social relationship called “exchange.” This new system of wealth concentration tries to deny how these human relationships must constrain the dictates of capitalism’s marketing, competition, and accumulation (which manifest as a continual demand to increase profit, productivity, and efficiency), if only through the limited amount of value available to extract and the collapse that must follow when automation recovers all wages as “lost profits.”

The challenge automation and AI present is ideological, a matter of deciding what kind of world comes after capitalism replaced human labor with machines. This analysis offers more than a diagnostic of the contemporary dominance of computer technology, suggesting models that can challenge it and reclaim the social realm from being just another commercialized resource. The Digital Agent versus Human Agency is a critique of this fantasy separating who works (labor) and who reaps the benefits of that work (capitalists) to show that value always depends on human action, a foundation that automation does not change.

In his latest book, Michael Betancourt explores the nature and role of typography in motion graphics as a way to consider its distinction from static design using the concept of the ‘reading-image’ to model the ways that motion typography dramatizes the process of reading and audience recognition of language on-screen. Using both classic and contemporary title sequences―including The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), Alien (1979), Flubber (1998), Six Feet Under (2001), The Number 23 (2007) and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (2010)―Betancourt develops an argument about what distinguishes motion graphics from graphic design. Moving beyond title sequences, Betancourt also analyzes moving or kinetic typography in logo designs, commercials, film trailers, and information graphics, offering a striking theoretical model for understanding typography in media.