Tagged: technology
MLA 2027 Special Session Proposal–Tales of the Late Human: Is this what extinction feels like?
The following is a Special Session Proposal for the 2027 Modern Language Convention to be held January 7-10 in Los Angeles, California.
What does it mean to survive under late capitalism—and for whom does survival remain possible? This panel takes extinction not as a future horizon but as a present condition: a slow, stratified process already embedded in economic structures, urban environments, and narrative form. Bringing together and bridging work from literary and cultural studies, earth system science, and science and technology studies, the three presentations gathered here examine how capitalism operates simultaneously as an economic system and an extinction-producing apparatus—one that reorganizes ecological life, human subjectivity, and the boundaries of the human itself.
The panel opens with Amit Ray’s analysis of what he terms the extinction economy: the self-accelerating circuit by which platform capitalism hastens ecological breakdown while simultaneously monetizing the crises it generates. Ray’s concept of autocolonialism—the internalized reproduction of extractive structures—provides a diagnostic for understanding why populations consent to technological “fixes” that deepen the conditions requiring rescue. Drawing on Disaster Capitalism and the Capitalocene, Ray argues that ecological collapse does not interrupt late-stage economic logic but intensifies it. As Michel Nieva’s Technology and Barbarism illuminates, this is barbarism wearing the face of innovation—techno-solutionism functioning as a civilizational alibi for annihilation, in which populations consent to extractive fixes that reproduce the very crises they claim to resolve. Silicon Valley’s Mars colonization fantasies represent the logical endpoint—capital exporting terrestrial collapse rather than confronting it. Crucially, Ray insists this is also a biopolitical failure: the racialized and classed distribution of survivability ensures that the costs of ecological collapse are borne by those least responsible for generating it.
Sean T. Hammond extends and complicates this framework by introducing the nonhuman as both case study and mirror. Where Ray locates the extractive logic in venture capital and techno-solutionism, Hammond finds it embedded in the built environment itself. His analysis of synanthropic domestication—traced through urban raccoon populations exhibiting measurable morphological shifts consistent with early domestication—argues that cities function as selection machines, structurally breeding compliance across generations. The raccoon’s self-selection into the “trash economy” illuminates what capitalism’s logic demands of any species that seeks proximity to it. Hammond’s reach back to the Epic of Gilgamesh as the earliest literary recognition of civilization’s domesticating violence places Ray’s extinction economy in deep historical context: the one-way transformation that begins with eating the bread and ends with a population adapted to conditions their ancestors would have found unlivable.
Christene d’Anca’s paper draws the literary and theoretical threads of the panel into its sharpest focus. Reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower through Lauren Berlant’s concept of “slow death,” Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, and Marx’s metabolic rift, d’Anca argues that contemporary fiction registers extinction as an aesthetics of abandonment—a narrative form in which the exhaustion of humanist assumptions about agency and progress becomes visible. Where Ray identifies the structural drivers of biopolitical abandonment and Hammond traces their embodied and evolutionary effects, d’Anca asks how that abandonment is lived and narrated: not as apocalyptic rupture but as the ongoing normalization of attrition. Butler’s speculative vision foregrounds adaptive subjectivities that emerge within systemic collapse, while McCarthy’s ashen landscape registers its absolute foreclosure of futurity—together staging the full range of end-times subjectivity the panel sets out to examine.
Alongside one another, these three presentations construct a layered account of extinction subjectivity under late capitalism. Ray diagnoses the economic logic; Hammond maps its embodied and evolutionary effects on bodies—human and nonhuman alike; d’Anca examines how that logic shapes narrative consciousness and the literature of survival. Across all three, a shared question emerges: if capitalism has rendered extinction profitable, compliance adaptive, and abandonment livable, what forms of critique, imagination, or refusal remain available? This panel does not offer easy answers but insists that confronting them requires exactly the kind of interdisciplinary exchange—between ecology, political economy, and literary form—that these presentations, in dialogue, make possible.
Injured Buddha ©2008 Banksy
Agnotology (or the Cultural Production of Ignorance) in Media and Culture: MLA-Toronto, January 8-11, 2026
Session 352. Date and Time: Friday, 9 January 5:15 PM-6:30 PM Location: MTCC – 714A
Panel Organizer: Amit Ray/Rochester Institute of Technology
contact email: axrgsl@rit.edu
This is an accepted Special Topics Panel for the Modern Language Association Conference in Toronto, January 8-11, 2026.
Agnotology, a term popularized by Historian of Science, Robert N. Proctor, refers to the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. In the context of media and technology, agnotology is seen in how information can be presented, manipulated, or withheld to create or perpetuate ignorance or misunderstanding among the public. These presentations aim to spark conversation by exploring how ignorance takes shape across three distinct cultural contexts.
NOTE: Due to visa issues, Rovel Sequeira will not be able to join us in person. His written presentation can be found below:
In “The Will-Not-To-Know: Prison Sexology and the Archive of Homosexuality in Colonial India,” Rovel Sequeira reinterprets early 20th-century colonial prisons as laboratories not only of sexual science but of ignorance production. The paper examines the role of agnotology in a suppressed scandal involving prison medical officers in Calcutta and the Andaman Islands, whose studies of same-sex practices among prisoners were censored by the colonial state. Labeled unscientific, these findings were barred from circulation even as they shaped prison discipline. This contradiction reveals a colonial will-to-ignorance: a refusal not only to generate knowledge but to allow its existence. Colonial sexology, rather than driven by a Foucauldian will-to-knowledge, operated through deliberate erasure. As focus shifted from anatomy to the surveillance of prisoner correspondence, knowledge was produced under intensified oversight and simultaneously disavowed. Ignorance became infrastructural, structuring sexual deviance as moral excess and legitimizing punitive isolation, while ensuring such knowledge remained hidden from public and scientific view.
Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte’s “Becoming A Crocodile: Brazilian Anti-Vaccine and Pro-Vaccine Memes During COVID-19,” explores Brazil’s pandemic media landscape. Amid staggering COVID-19 death tolls, President Jair Bolsonaro fostered a culture of denialism by downplaying the virus, spreading vaccine misinformation, withholding federal health funds, and calling COVID a “gripezinha.” Despite contracting the virus, Bolsonaro refused vaccination, later falsifying his vaccine card to enable international travel. Oliveira-Monte examines how this state-sponsored agnotology extended into digital culture through anti-vaccine memes that circulated widely on social media, reinforcing doubt and misinformation. These were met with counter-memes using satire and humor to expose Bolsonaro’s contradictions and encourage vaccination. By tracing this meme-based culture war, the paper shows how agnotology was both state policy and grassroots resistance battleground—mobilized to obscure science, but also to reassert it through digital critique and popular dissent.
In “Artificial Ignorance: Understanding the Role of AI in Modern Agnotology,” Amit Ray examines the deliberate opacity of Big Tech. Technology giants such as Google and Meta deploy secrecy to shield algorithms and data practices, often under the guise of trade protection and competitive advantage. These practices pose significant risks to individual privacy, democratic oversight, and ethical data use. Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has exacerbated this opacity through proprietary systems and inscrutable neural networks. While firms claim progress in transparency, most efforts amount to “open-washing,” masking closed, profit-driven operations as altruistic openness. The lack of meaningful regulation allows continued misuse, despite growing awareness of algorithmic bias and discrimination. The paper explores how open-source movements and independent research attempt to counterbalance Big Tech’s dominance, but these efforts often fall short against entrenched economic incentives. Ultimately, this analysis calls for robust regulation and genuinely open, accountable AI systems. He is currently working on a book entitled, Tales of the Late Human: Autocolonialism and Extinction, where he deploys the concept of autocolonialism–the manner by which digital platforms allow us to knowingly and unknowingly upload virtually everything about ourselves–to explore how hyper-capitalist techno-science simultaneously monetizes and exacerbates our threat of extinction.
Together, these three studies reveal that agnotology is not simply the absence of knowledge, but a strategic, contingent, and often institutional practice of withholding, obscuring, or discrediting information. Through the lenses of empire, media, and machine, these works show how agnotology is by no means a new phenomenon but is historically persistent and evolving in form. In the colonial archive, ignorance was enforced through institutional censorship and the classification of knowledge as deviant. In the digital pandemic age, ignorance moved through memes, state disinformation, and satirical resistance. In the age of AI, ignorance is embedded in algorithmic architectures, proprietary systems, and the economic logics that sustain them.
What links all three is the recognition that ignorance is not neutral. It is a political artifact shaped by institutions past and present—whether imperial, governmental, or corporate—often in service of control. Yet, each study also opens space for critique, resistance, and the reassertion of alternative epistemologies. The struggle over knowledge is ongoing and alive. In mapping these sites—colonial, viral, and computational—this synthesis calls for a broader awareness of how agnotology functions in our world, and more importantly, how it might be dismantled. Confronting the infrastructures of ignorance requires not only better transparency and regulation, but cultural strategies, historical awareness, and a commitment to epistemic justice that recognizes whose knowledge counts—and whose is erased.
Bios
Rovel Sequeira is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of English (by courtesy) at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Rovel is currently working on a book manuscript on sexual scientific histories and fictions in India, tentatively titled The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India. Rovel’s work has been published in Modernism/modernity, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and History of the Human Sciences, among other venues.
Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University. She has authored two books and several articles on her field. Her book Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature examines the intricate connections between literary production and political action by focusing on the politics of the Brazilian black movement and the literature of São Paulo-based Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje. She serves the profession through committees in several professional associations, including the Brazilian Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. She currently serves as the LLC Luso-Brazilian Delegate in the MLA Delegate Assembly.
Amit Ray is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Trained as a postcolonialist, his recent research focuses on issues of secrecy and agnotology within contemporary information systems. With neurologist Dr. E. Ray Dorsey, he co-authored “Paraquat, Parkinson’s Disease, and Agnotology,” published in the journal Movement Disorders in 2023. Since its publication, the article has been reprinted twice, which has led to subpoenas from Syngenta Corporation, a leading producer of the herbicide Paraquat, as part of ongoing class-action lawsuits.
Anominous.us 