Ethan Stoneman
Biographic Data
| ID | 377571 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ethan Stoneman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ethan |
| FAMILY NAME | Stoneman |
| SIGNATURE | STONEMAN E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hillsdale College |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8899-3665 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 9 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Recursive tracks
This article reads Stefan Grabiński’s 1919 collection The Motion Demon as a media-theoretical intervention in horror. Treating the railway as autonomous infrastructure rather than a gothic setting, it analyses the tales through the lens of recursion – systems that loop, regulate and intensify beyond human intention. I situate Grabiński alongside media and horror theory to argue that his fiction anticipates contemporary concerns about automation a…
“The Human Race Is to Become all Technocracy”
This article argues that C.S. Lewis offers a grammar for thinking the spiritual stakes of technics. Reading The Abolition of Man alongside That Hideous Strength , the authors propose that Lewis reframes technicity's peril not merely as “demonic” autonomy but, at its limit, as a Satanic revolt against the Tao, an inversion that clarifies why power severed from objective value becomes magic in the pejorative sense. Attending to the novel's polarity…
Writing for Machines, Formatting Originality
This article examines the institutional, technical, and ontological consequences of plagiarism detection platforms on contemporary academic writing. It argues that services like Turnitin and Grammarly do not simply detect plagiarism but actively reconfigure what counts as authorship, originality, and intellectual integrity. Drawing on historical and media-theoretical perspectives, the article traces plagiarism’s emergence as a culturally continge…
Brain Warfare and the Malleable Mind
This article examines mid-century mind control experiments—carried out by intelligence services like MK-Ultra and the CIA—as biopolitical strategy. This analysis has two main goals: first, to build theory at the boundaries of biopolitical research, examining the conditions under which something like a “programmable subject” can emerge; and second, to reframe a key episode in the scientific management of the US population. In service of these aims…
The Anaesthetic Crisis of Work and Leisure
Drawing on the quasi-legal human experimentation programs designed and implemented by the CIA between the 1950s and 1970s, the television series Severance envisions the possible corporate uses of brainwashing and mind control. The narrative centers on employees of a technology company, Lumon Industries, who agree to undergo a medical procedure ("severance") that separates non-work memories from work memories by implanting a microchip into the bra…
Toward a Telematic Aesthetics
From the Confessional Booth to Digital Enclosures
This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about 'confessional culture,' it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution - understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposur…
The White Knight
This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise …
Escape from the Digital Infosphere! Mutation and Disentanglement in Franco Berardi's Critical Media Theory
The purpose of this essay is to provide an interpretive and evaluative introduction to Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's critical media theory and to situate it with a view to understanding but also thinking beyond the limitations of an aesthetic practice rooted almost exclusively in conscious, language-based thought. It begins by examining the way in which Berardi conceptualizes the techno-social paradigm emerging in the passage from late industrial socie…
History at the end of the world
From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture provides no shortage of representations that subserve colonialist attitudes and perspectives. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) provides a rare decolonial fantasy, which is especially surprising given that it does so through the veneer of the big-budget superhero film. Registering a deep concern with public memory, the film spotlights and challenges the various …
American Conservatism Unmoored
The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly emergent and energized dissident right. Beyond the question of ideology, this article argues that an essential aspect of this realignment occurs at the level of strategy, specifically with the adoption of agitational tactics pioneered by the progressive left. It attempts to make sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of…
Sphere ecology
This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk’s spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescr…
Where We Produce One, We Produce All
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculia…
The Root of the Problem
Although often treated as a controversy between radicals and conservatives, the current public imbroglio concerning so-called identity politics is just as much a matter of disagreement within progressivism’s big tent. Such a dispute is especially pronounced between classical Marxists and rival radical leftist groups that position race, rather than class, as the central problem facing egalitarian change. Starting from the idea that historical narr…
Reel cruelty
This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the possible civic or pedagogical functions of true-crime documentaries outweigh the harm they are occasionally known to inflict. Although supporters of true-crime documentaries tend to downplay their potential to create or exacerbate trauma, their arguments, like those of the subgenre’s critics, presuppose that trauma functions as an unwanted byproduct. This…
Beyond the Worlds of Work and Leisure
The popular twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper shared much in common with his fellow countryman Ernst Jünger: both served in World War I, though in different capacities; both became successful men of letters who wrote widely and voluminously for decades; both wrote popular philosophical discourses while eschewing many of the stultifying trappings of what Schopenhauer disparagingly referred to as “university professors” (though to…
After Englobement
This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a successio…
Where We Produce One, We Produce All
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculia…
After Englobement
This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a successio…
Sphere ecology
This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk’s spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescr…
Reel cruelty
This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the possible civic or pedagogical functions of true-crime documentaries outweigh the harm they are occasionally known to inflict. Although supporters of true-crime documentaries tend to downplay their potential to create or exacerbate trauma, their arguments, like those of the subgenre’s critics, presuppose that trauma functions as an unwanted byproduct. This…
The Root of the Problem
Although often treated as a controversy between radicals and conservatives, the current public imbroglio concerning so-called identity politics is just as much a matter of disagreement within progressivism’s big tent. Such a dispute is especially pronounced between classical Marxists and rival radical leftist groups that position race, rather than class, as the central problem facing egalitarian change. Starting from the idea that historical narr…
Reel cruelty
This paper takes as its point of departure the newly resurgent controversy about whether the possible civic or pedagogical functions of true-crime documentaries outweigh the harm they are occasionally known to inflict. Although supporters of true-crime documentaries tend to downplay their potential to create or exacerbate trauma, their arguments, like those of the subgenre’s critics, presuppose that trauma functions as an unwanted byproduct. This…
Beyond the Worlds of Work and Leisure
The popular twentieth-century Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper shared much in common with his fellow countryman Ernst Jünger: both served in World War I, though in different capacities; both became successful men of letters who wrote widely and voluminously for decades; both wrote popular philosophical discourses while eschewing many of the stultifying trappings of what Schopenhauer disparagingly referred to as “university professors” (though to…
After Englobement
This article positions Peter Sloterdijk’s spheres project against Carl Schmitt’s spatial writings, showing that Sloterdijk’s anthropo-philosophical approach to spatial analysis implies a theoretical strategy for thinking beyond Schmitt’s fatalistic view of the deep contingencies shaping human social existence. Schmitt’s spatial pessimism is particularly noticeable in Land and Sea, in which he recounts the unfolding of world history as a successio…
Sphere ecology
This article makes the case for reading the German philosopher and cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk as a media ecologist. Tracing the media ecological implications of what is perhaps his most significant work, the three-volume Spheres project, it argues that Sloterdijk’s spatial analysis of human habitats, what he terms spherology, can be interpreted as offering a promising, distinctive approach to the study of media as environments. By redescr…
Where We Produce One, We Produce All
Hillary Clinton and Katy Perry drink the blood of murdered children to live forever, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks participate in the sex trafficking and molestation of children, and a cabal of Satan worshippers control global events from behind the scenes. This is the central, animating idea behind QAnon, a right-wing populist conspiracy theory that has achieved a level of saturation in American and global politics (in)commensurate with its peculia…
History at the end of the world
From 19th-century novels to contemporary computer-animated adventure films, popular media culture provides no shortage of representations that subserve colonialist attitudes and perspectives. Thor: Ragnarok (2017) provides a rare decolonial fantasy, which is especially surprising given that it does so through the veneer of the big-budget superhero film. Registering a deep concern with public memory, the film spotlights and challenges the various …
American Conservatism Unmoored
The last decade witnessed a drastic reconfiguration of American conservatism by way of a newly emergent and energized dissident right. Beyond the question of ideology, this article argues that an essential aspect of this realignment occurs at the level of strategy, specifically with the adoption of agitational tactics pioneered by the progressive left. It attempts to make sense of this sea change, first, by tracing in broad strokes the history of…
The White Knight
This paper examines how white-nationalist and identitarian fan communities read The Dark Knight film series as a coded attack on liberal values by the secretly sympathetic writer-director Christopher Nolan. In a classic esoteric reading, white nationalists posit super villains like Ra's al Ghul and Bane as giving voice to the true message of the trilogy, namely, that liberal countries have become decadent and must be destroyed so as to give rise …
Escape from the Digital Infosphere! Mutation and Disentanglement in Franco Berardi's Critical Media Theory
The purpose of this essay is to provide an interpretive and evaluative introduction to Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's critical media theory and to situate it with a view to understanding but also thinking beyond the limitations of an aesthetic practice rooted almost exclusively in conscious, language-based thought. It begins by examining the way in which Berardi conceptualizes the techno-social paradigm emerging in the passage from late industrial socie…
The Anaesthetic Crisis of Work and Leisure
Drawing on the quasi-legal human experimentation programs designed and implemented by the CIA between the 1950s and 1970s, the television series Severance envisions the possible corporate uses of brainwashing and mind control. The narrative centers on employees of a technology company, Lumon Industries, who agree to undergo a medical procedure ("severance") that separates non-work memories from work memories by implanting a microchip into the bra…
Toward a Telematic Aesthetics
From the Confessional Booth to Digital Enclosures
This article examines the confessional booth as an architected space that, by serving as a geo-epistemological enclosure, prefigures digital forms of data capture and production. In conversation with critical scholarship about 'confessional culture,' it analyzes how confessionals and digital enclosures embody different historical iterations of a cultural technique that promises absolution - understood as a cleansing process of transparent exposur…
Brain Warfare and the Malleable Mind
This article examines mid-century mind control experiments—carried out by intelligence services like MK-Ultra and the CIA—as biopolitical strategy. This analysis has two main goals: first, to build theory at the boundaries of biopolitical research, examining the conditions under which something like a “programmable subject” can emerge; and second, to reframe a key episode in the scientific management of the US population. In service of these aims…
Recursive tracks
This article reads Stefan Grabiński’s 1919 collection The Motion Demon as a media-theoretical intervention in horror. Treating the railway as autonomous infrastructure rather than a gothic setting, it analyses the tales through the lens of recursion – systems that loop, regulate and intensify beyond human intention. I situate Grabiński alongside media and horror theory to argue that his fiction anticipates contemporary concerns about automation a…
“The Human Race Is to Become all Technocracy”
This article argues that C.S. Lewis offers a grammar for thinking the spiritual stakes of technics. Reading The Abolition of Man alongside That Hideous Strength , the authors propose that Lewis reframes technicity's peril not merely as “demonic” autonomy but, at its limit, as a Satanic revolt against the Tao, an inversion that clarifies why power severed from objective value becomes magic in the pejorative sense. Attending to the novel's polarity…
Writing for Machines, Formatting Originality
This article examines the institutional, technical, and ontological consequences of plagiarism detection platforms on contemporary academic writing. It argues that services like Turnitin and Grammarly do not simply detect plagiarism but actively reconfigure what counts as authorship, originality, and intellectual integrity. Drawing on historical and media-theoretical perspectives, the article traces plagiarism’s emergence as a culturally continge…
Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Art (6 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Literature (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works)