Hosted by the International Inequalities Institute on Tuesday 26 March 2024.
Speaker: Erica Lagalisse, Visiting Fellow, LSE III
Chair: Shalini Grover, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow
“In 2018 Erica Lagalisse wrote Occult Features of Anarchism (2019) as a fellow of the III, and now returns to tell us about how her post-pandemic popular education tour about “conspiracy theory”, which followed its launch and translation, has opened up into ethnographic research connecting contemporary New Age spirituality, the current “psychedelic renaissance” and eugenics in the 21st century. Lagalisse illustrates how cosmopolitan “digital nomads” share fears of biotechnology manipulated by occult powers, but also similar hopes in psychedelics research, cryptocurrency and technology writ large as sources of social justice. Across this counterculture, cryptography and the blockchain are not only seen as powerful tools of social engineering and justice, but also continuous with the perennial “occult” magical tradition. Funded largely by “cryptocurrency” themselves, “media shamans” entertain occult conspiracy in government, but also a general reverence for the power of the “occult”, a willingness to engage political action in the “occult” oneself, and a shared imagination that digitally perfecting the management of secrecy will somehow inaugurate social equality.”
Erica Lagalisse 