Joseph Masco > Quotes

“On the history of the concept of conspiracy theory, see McKenzie-McHarg 2019 and Thalmann 2017.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The power of conspiracy/theory is how it scales reality—from the interpersonal moment right in front of us, through institutions and media, all the way to social systems and world history.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“a document with serious foundational flaws,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“which could explain Taylor’s vehement denial that it was in effect.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Jain asks how biomedicine polices its own narrative.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“In the case of perpetrators of bullying, they bully by not following the rules they otherwise enforce, that is, by making exceptions for themselves, conspiring together against their own fears of otherness.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Bullying institutions are those whose very mechanism is to obfuscate the direct role they play in oppression and to hide those who benefit from others being targeted.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“no apologies”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Finally, national security fictions produced by courts are conditioned by their own distinct epistemologies as shaped by rules of evidence that we have just discussed.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“For more on the “narrative networks” project, see DARPA n.d.; Yirka (2011).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“What financial economists call “liquidity preference” (Modigliani 1944), then, is an example of what the cultural theorist René Girard (1996) termed “mimetic desire,” in the sense that our responses to the desires of others create a positive feedback loop—a form of social contagion with no internally generated countervailing tendencies (Orléan 2014, Aglietta 2018).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“fabrication and assertion were the raw tools of information warfare,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Faking nuclear vulnerability was subsequently installed as a basic part of the military industrial and defense strategy tool kit.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“As Bruno Latour notes, there is a scandalous likeness between conspiracy theory and academic critique, and many conspiracy theories are strikingly akin to expert discourse (Latour 2004, 229).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“A judicially midwifed theory of conspiracy had matured into official history in the annals of national security.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The self-interest behind his comments was clear—he had been attacked and was fighting back.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“What, exactly, is the appropriate analytic stance toward politics in the aftermath of such consequential revelations of governmental mendacity, domestic psyops campaigns, officially sanctioned illegality, and commercial tech giants’ complicity?”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The discipline-wide, broad-based intellectual framework necessary to have recognized the possibility that a virus could have contaminated tissue cultures and then have been spread through vaccines and have gained virulence after spreading almost certainly simply would not have existed”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“the act of bystanding often encourages others to bystand. It implies that what is happening is okay, is right, even a normal part of culture.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“duplicity of authority is constitutive of US politics.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Foucault suggests the persistent appeal of this notion, warning that in our thinking about power “we have still not cut off the head of the king” (88–89).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“This understanding was helpful for learning from those who suffer from illnesses that medicine ignores (Dumit 2006).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Isn’t the stance of the caricatured conspiracy theorist—the one worried about government surveillance, public deception, and the disruption of ordinary life by state and corporate entities—closer to the truth than that of the normative political subject who doubts that such things are done, but, if they have been done, trusts it must have been “necessary,” that is, a subject who chooses to refuse to question, let alone judge?”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“He repeated Max Planck’s half-joke about how “science progresses one funeral at a time,” noting that most journals changed their recognition practices only once those in power died. Many disciplinarians would rather die than change. They would rather abuse science and fellow scientists than admit their own role in retarding it.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“defense intellectuals, despite decades of energetic work, were never able to define the minimum nuclear capabilities needed to create deterrence,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“authoritarian tactic of pushing a counternarrative to observable reality,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“The response of mainstream journalists to this situation of intensified epistemic precarity has mostly been to declare the arrival of a new “golden age” of conspiracy theory.”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Their bitterness increased even as they pretended, even to themselves, to be polite (Piper 2018).”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory

“Dumit,”
― Joseph Masco, Conspiracy/Theory