I conclude with thinking through the pitfalls of eschewing the urgency of now within this form of climate witnessing.

I argue that they constitute about-to-die images (@bzelizer.bsky.social ) that subjunctively ask us to bear witness to probable futures both visible and invisible as the basis for present responsibility.

Bringing together contemporary scholarship on ice as a record of deep time (that becomes archive only when translated into spectral data) and computer simulation, I illustrate this sensibility in images of ice extents in the Arctic.

This mediated sensibility urges one to bear witness first to what might come to pass in the future (then) based on probabilistic pasts modeled on globalized data (t/here). It is an approach made possible by the techno-material entanglements of simulation (i.e., ice, mass spectroscopy, computer).

I develop a notion of climate witnessing based not on the 'here' and 'now' of the event but on a sensibility of 't/here' and 'then' (I know, I know… the forward slash is very 00's) that I see emerging in the face of climate crisis.

Perfect timing (end of the semester + holiday stress) for a new pub! Thanks to @stefcraps.com, Rick Crownshaw and Rebecca Dolgoy for editing fantastic special issue on Climate Witnessing.

"The Temporality of Climate Witnessing: Ice, Simulation, Image", - message for pdf.

brill.com/view/journal...

book cover with a red background featuring four missile silhouettes. The title "HOW THE COLD WAR BROKE THE NEWS" is displayed in white capital letters at the top. Below the title is an image of a folded newspaper. The subtitle reads "The Surprising Roots of Journalism's Decline." At the bottom, the author's name "BARBIE ZELIZER" is written in white capital letters.

American journalism has serious problems. But how did we get here? @bzelizer.bsky.social’s new book 📚 How the Cold War Broke the News📚 uncovers the surprising roots of journalism’s decline and offers a plan to make it better. Pre-order now: bit.ly/4mqcr68

Join us online or in person for two talks in association with the Stirling, Dep of Psychology, May 15 and June 5, 2025 - Professor Donna Rose Addis and Associate Professor Celia Harris leading researchers on memory and cognitive science.

Future Fatigue: How Hype has Replaced Hope in the 21st Century | TechPolicy.Press To resist AI hype, we must not reassert the fiction that we could “return” to a functional democracy, writes Eryk Salvaggio.

"... AI hype has emerged in the context of such fatigue. Promising to automate a workforce for each of us, this hype, like crypto hype before it" — and big data hype before that, and... — "reinforces a future of individualized economic power with a sexier allure than attending a town hall."

We said something like this in 2009
@benoloughlin.bsky.social
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

A guileful ruse: ISIS, media, and tactics of appropriation When Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in the throes of territorial demise, laid claim to the deadliest mass shooting in US history, the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, pundits declared it a sign of...

7/First, it plays right into extremist hands. Those w/ a variety of issues who the media deem to be inspired by ISIS end up featured in its propaganda. (It's clear that the group’s “top secret source” is simply the news media.)
www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1...

6/This is not to say that one’s online habits are inconsequential, but this narrative of inspiration does two things:

5/These become less relevant than one’s consumption of online content. (Depending, of course, on one's name, skin tone, religion, nationality, and so on; in this case the perpetrator is relegated to a “Texas-born US citizen,” rather than an American.)

4/as well as whatever condition the desire to kill one’s entire family might suggest.

3/one’s experience as part of the world’s biggest war machine that has killed scores in the war on terror, justified by security and laundered by the language of “collateral damage” ...
watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/f...

2/To claim someone is “inspired” by ____ is to suggest that that ideology, entity, etc. is the single catalyst that breathes life into violence. Important factors then take a backseat, such as

Tracking the Licensing of Scholarly Content to LLMs ITHAKA has developed a tool that tracks publisher deals to license scholarly content for use as training data by LLMs

"In recent months, several publishers have announced that they are licensing their scholarly content for use as training data for LLMs... To understand the dynamics around this fast-developing market, [Ithaka is] launching a tracker of these licensing deals."

Out now - Standard issue featuring articles by M. Beatrice Fazi, Mark B. N. Hansen, Piotr M. Szpunar, and Raymond L. M. Lee.

journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt

9/and toward an analytic of imaginaries situated in the anesthetic fields of media ecologies— spaces of speculation, contestation, and the non-dyadic play of visibility-opacity-invisibility.

8/Dust as both elemental media and noise, then and in today’s 3D-printed interplanetary futures, encourages a move beyond notions of how media opens up and forecloses (alternative) futures…

7/He argued that, because of its indiscriminate nature, the camera was inferior to the trained telescopic eye in separating signal from noise. (A play couched in debates over mechanical objectivity at the time.)

6/Second, as leverage. When Percival Lowell’s attempt to let the canals write their own record on celluloid failed, he tried to turn the camera’s evidentiary feat—that it collected rather than observed light—on its head to keep his vision alive.

5/Ancient astronomers looking up in the night sky saw a malefic deity, not a record of advanced engineering etched into an inscription surface.

4/First, as source. The visual noise of the telescope—Mars’ dust—facilitated the appearance of canals. Revisiting Evans and Maunder’s 1903 experiments, this optical illusion at the limit of distinct vision is not strictly cognitive. It was impossible without the telescope.

3/Emerging out of a complex ecology of media, events, objects, and ideas, this mediated future was the product of noise as much as signal, in two senses.

2/At the turn of the 20th-century the telescope was thought to reveal Earth’s future when trained on its nearby twin, Mars. Its “canals” were evidence of an advanced lifeform struggling to survive on a dying planet.

New Pub! The gist: The shape imaginaries take pivot not only on what media make clearly visible but on what they offer up for speculation at their eco-technological edges. Open Access @meejatheory.bsky.social
journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt...