Pandaemonium Architecture 6.0

In this course

Asprem is a scholar of esotericism and conspiracy culture who analyzes how spiritual and magical thinking intersect with contemporary political movements and information systems. His work on "meme magic" and the "cult of Kek" appears in the course readings to theorize how online communities construct alternative epistemic spaces through esoteric and magical frameworks, while his collaborative work with Dyrendal on "conspirituality" examines the convergence of spirituality and conspiracy thinking as a coherent cultural phenomenon. These pieces help ground the seminar's investigation of how AI culture, digital networks, and occult thinking create new forms of collective agency and belief-making in networked societies.

Mentioned in 1 reading

Aaron French

The Mandela Effect and New Memory

4

Like the ancient wisdom tradition of esotericism, knowledge claims associated with conspiracism are performed inside a “deviant” cultural space and involve constructing a counter-world that opposes an official world. Timothy Melley brings i…Bibliography Asprem, Egil. “The Magical Theory of Politics: Meme Magic, the Cult of Kek, and How to Topple an Egregore.” Forthcoming in Nova Religio. Asprem, Egil and Asbjørn Dyrendal. “Conspirituality Reconsidered: How Surprising and How…[^7]: Timothy Melley, The Covert Sphere: Secrecy, Fiction, and the National Security State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), 36–7. Here Melley is referring to postmodern society, not early modern Europe, but this astute characte…

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