Here is an example of agnotism: this news story makes it clear the extent to which powerful organizations will use their money and connections to attack, undermine and discredit their critics.
The paradigm of digitality, isespecially at a technological levela reification of the modernist grid. Fundamentally a process of segmentation of ordering, its contents are essentially identical, divorced from the physical variability inherent to other material constructs by the unrelenting oppositions of binary code (the aura of the digital). The meaning of these codes stand apart from the form of the work (the aura of information), once it has been rendered into an unstable, human-readable form. It is the transcendent part of the early abstraction that finds itself mirrored by the ways that the underlying physical encoding of reality in data samples, paradoxically both literal in its insistence on measurement of the discrete physical features of the world, and immaterial in how this meaning is held apart from the electro-magnetic switching of microtransistors within blocks of matter.
Consider three apparently identical images: (a) is an uncompressed raster file specifying each and every pixel displayed; (b) is a compressed version of the same raster data; (c) is a version of the same image, but produced and described using vector graphics. The apparent content of the image is irrelevantit could be a photograph, typography, or simply a collection of linear elementsbecause any type of image can be stored in one these three ways.
Here is a short teaser sample from an article soon-to-be published on CTheory:
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designation is agnotologic capitalism: a capitalism systemically based on the production and maintenance of ignorance. [13] The accusations of fraud against banks such as Goldman Sachs for creating derivatives designed to fail and then claiming that these commodities are of the highest valuedemonstrates this process of misinformation designed to obfuscate, confuse and confound functions to create ignorance. This situation is partly a function of ideological blindness, and partly a reflection of the all-too-human desire to believe in positive scenarios such as the well known, but hypothetical, free lunch. Coupled with an affective performance, the agnotological dimension can only produce a social dynamic of misinformation.
