These posts are concerned with fragments and excerpts from Michael Betancourt's current theory projects, but which don't easily fit into other categories...many of these fragments become part of later publications.

The Digital has more on agnotology, digital capitalism, automated/immaterial labor, land my most recent published articles and other research on the political economy of digital capitalism. You might also want to look at these publications:

The Critique of Digital Capitalism published by Punctum Books

CTheory articles on digital capitalism and media theory

from Hz Journal, no. 19, July 2014: "Critical Glitches and Glitch Art"

More articles and translations into Spanish, Portuguese and Greek are posted on MichaelBetancourt.com

Conspiracy Theories are 'Animistic Fallacies'

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 10, 2020 | permalink |  |  

A vast, evil conspiracy is comforting. The paranoid belief in the capacity of authority to maintain itself and secretly dominate events provides an explanation—hidden power acting without oversight—that is easy to understand.

read more (236 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published March 21, 2018 | permalink |  |  

Various internet-based companies are protected from liability for the “content” they deliver to their customers based on the idea that they aren’t editing or producing that material. However, the question that algorithmic-based delivery and sorting should be raising is whether that activity does constitute editing: it selects what and when to show things and to whom, not based on a user-originated request or a “blank” selection such as chronology (putting the most recent things first, regardless of who they are from), but based on some unknown metric that only the company really controls: conceptually this action sounds like an autonomous version of an Editor (even if it is one generated by using pervasive monitoring to watch the customer).

minor update:

Censorship by online companies such as Facebook or any other "distribution platform" should be recognized for what it is: a tacit and explicit admission of their editorial decisions and activities. If they are to be regarded as merely conveyors of information, useful and interesting, to an audience that is also in the business of posting and creating that same information. For the company to then interpose itself as more than simply a disinterested platform, then why are they concerned with what the material posted by their audiences is? If they are not engaged in editorial decisions, as they consistently claim, then there should be no issues around censorship or other content-based selections at all.

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 30, 2017 | permalink |  |  

Historical cinema has a specific concept of its audience as passive, challenged by semiotics and postcinema. The semiotic view of audiences proposes an idealized, hypothetical ‘typical viewer’ who employs established lexical expertise to follow and embrace the established conventions of encoding/decoding. This viewer is precisely the “complicit” or ‘passive audience’ assumed in historical cinema and critiqued by politically engaged theories of media. These “traditional” viewers accept and employ, rather than challenge or interrogate, their use of established conventions. Although these conventions are historically concerned/used for the presentation and elaboration of narrative forms, these ‘typical viewers’ employ them to engage any media work that might invoke or suggest them, either through their formal organization—as in the still photographs of Cindy Sherman, or through the use of a familiar kinetic medium such as video, or the animated GIFs used on webpages.

read more (1267 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published April 14, 2015 | permalink |  |  

“Cultural authority” seems a nebulous concept. At the same time it is easily understood—we recognize it immediately when reading the program for any festival, screening, exhibition—even though the force it exerts remains hidden within the curatorial choices on display—as the specific form these choices present.

read more (391 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published November 30, 2014 | permalink |  |  

This theory work will be published as a book-length monograph Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or, the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space by Focal Press.

Part 6 of a 6 Part series proposing an expanded theorization of spatial montage, excerpted from a current book project.

Afterword

The potential of on-screen structures that appear as displacement is at once a deeply under theorized, but at the same time over-determined. The same series of structures are shared by both the avant-garde and commercial media “worlds.” The failure of existing theorizations originates with those theories’ demand that the displaced structures of windowing be essentially critical, ignoring the alternative uses that are apparent within commercial media production. The uniformity of this morphology that allows both collage/montage-like juxtapositions and seamless constructions of realist continuity demonstrates the independence of these structure’s meaning from their formal organization: these on-screen structures function at a more basic level than that posed by the interpretations of narrative or the combinatory potentials of montage-like forms. Developing a conceptual map to accommodate this range of forms thus becomes a necessary prerequisite for any hermeneutic critical assessment.

read more (1182 words)