Zero Anthropology Project: Critiques of Mainstream & Social Media

The Zero Anthropology Project

Webfolio for Maximilian C. Forte

Whether it is the corporate-owned mainstream media, state-owned media, or so-called “social media” dominated by US firms, the Zero Anthropology Project has faced either direct censorship, or has been affected by various media purges and the monopolization of information control. In the academic context, similar experiences of “silencing” and anti-recognition have sought to impact the ZAP. As a result, we have developed a jaded view of both media and academia, and their incessant tendency of speaking power under the guise of “truth”. This is the main reason that the Zero Anthropology Project gravitated toward efforts like WikiLeaks, and independent media. The following is a rough selection of articles that speak to these points. The date of the last edit here was June 29, 2019.

2019. “Brexit, the Uncivil War: Watering Myths with the Teardrops of the Ruling Class”. Zero Anthropology, May 21.

2019. “The Kursk Disaster: Facts Sunk Beneath Waves of Drama”. Zero Anthropology, March 5.

2018. “Publicity or Marginality? On the Question of Academic ‘Silencing’ in Anthropology”. Zero Anthropology, December 14.

2018. “The War of the Public Intellectuals: A Review of ‘Best of Enemies: Buckley vs. Vidal’ (2015)”. Zero Anthropology, December 2.

2018. “Deactivism: The Pleasures of Life without Social Media”. Zero Anthropology, February 22.

2016. “101 Things We Learned from WikiLeaks’ Podesta Emails”. Zero Anthropology, November 8.

2014. “Realism or Iconography? The Pentagon’s Implicit Theory of Visual Representation”. Zero Anthropology, October 10.

2014. “The US Military as Great Chief, Father, Doctor, and Babysitter”. Zero Anthropology, October 1.

2014. “The Visual Imperium”. Zero Anthropology, September 29.

2014. “Pentagon Photography and Visual Anthropology”. Zero Anthropology, September 26.

2014. “Kagan’s False Paradox and the Pro-War Media’s Confirmation Bias”. Zero Anthropology, May 3.

2014. “Rwanda, 20 Years On: From Tragedy to Useful Imperial Fiction”. Zero Anthropology, March 24.

2013. “A Massacre for a Moral Martyr: ‘Person’ versus ‘Population’ in Humanitarianized Afghanistan”. Zero Anthropology, April 14.

2011. “Hortense Powdermaker and the Mechanized Mind: The Problem of Method and the Prizing of Know-How”. Zero Anthropology, January 15.

2010. “Burlesque Afghanistan: Pulp Fiction from an Embedded ‘Reporter’”. Zero Anthropology, October 6.

2010. “Neocolonialism: It’s Post-Independence, Not Post-Colonial”. Zero Anthropology, September 3.

2010. “Human Terrain System in the Media”. Zero Anthropology, August 21.

2010. “Suppressed Realities in the American Media: The Uncensored Acts of War”. Zero Anthropology, August 10.

2010. “More European Press Coverage of the Human Terrain System”. Zero Anthropology, July 17.

2010. “Militainment: U.S. Military Propaganda in the News Media, Hollywood, and Video Games”. Zero Anthropology, June 13.

2010. “Video Propaganda: Human Terrain System on National Geographic”. Zero Anthropology, June 10.

2010. “Punishing Publication, Banishing Ideas: YouTube Censors Your World for the CIA”. Zero Anthropology, March 2.

2009. “Glimpses of What the Mainstream Media Might Have Told Us About Afghanistan”. Zero Anthropology, August 14.

2009. “America’s Iranian Twitter Revolution”. Zero Anthropology, June 17.

2009. “Questions and Allegations about Robert Young Pelton’s Reporting on a Human Terrain Team in Afghanistan”. Zero Anthropology, February 24.

2009. “Bumming a Ride with the Occupation Parade: A Look at Human Terrain Teams in Afghanistan”. Zero Anthropology, January 23.

2008. “The Craft of the Online Anthropologists: The New Medium is the Message”. Zero Anthropology, May 19.

2008. “CNN’s ‘Mondo Cane’: Screaming Muslim Babies in India, and Gawking Journalists”. Zero Anthropology, May 2.

2007. “The Colonization Will be Televised”. Zero Anthropology, October 12.