#346 | Disaster Spirituality: The Self Project & How The Apolitical Is Political w/ Matthew Remski
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conspirituality podcast co-host and journalist Matthew Remski returns to the podcast, bringing his ongoing analysis of online cultists, grifters, and conspiritualists to a discussion that relates to the book he co-authored with co-hosts Julian Walker and Derek Beres titled 'Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat,' forthcoming from Public Affairs/Random House in June.We begin our discussion by delving into what Matthew describes as the \\"amoral attention economy\\" and how becoming \\"professionalized into the cursed news cycle\\" impacts one's mental health. Matthew has taken it upon himself to jump into the fray of online \\"disaster spirituality\\" and the circles of culty health and wellness grifters-a psychologically and emotionally taxing beat to be on. Based on personal experiences he's had, some of which he shares in this interview, along with a deep research background into cultic dynamics and abuse in spiritual movements, Matthew has developed an ability to adeptly spot, analyze, and critique the charismatic, narcissistic, self-aggrandizing public personas that contaminate public discourse. He walks us through the dynamics at play, and provides a material framework for understanding how these figures and ideas become so influential to begin with. Following the threads from the Satanic Panic to QAnon, and from QAnon to anti-wokeness, Matthew identifies a set of motivations and circumstances that sets the stage for moral panics and their destructive consequences. Conspiracism becomes inevitable within various spiritual/health and wellness subcultures, communities, and cliques that emphasize the apolitical over the political, the project of the self over class consciousness. Matthew identifies how the apolitical is, in fact, very political, and how \\"doing your own research\\" is only half the story.Matthew Remski is a cult survivor and researcher. His 2019 book, 'Practice and All is Coming: Abuse, Cult Dynamics and Healing in Yoga and Beyond,' is the first systematic analysis of pervasive cultism in the modern yoga world. He researches and writes on abuse in spiritual movements at his website, as well as for publications like GEN by Medium and The Walrus. His current research is pivoting to look at cultic dynamics in conspirituality and eco-justice movements. He lives in Toronto with his partner and their two sons.Episode Notes:- Preorder 'Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat' from Bookshop: https://bit.ly/3NuyJFj- Subscribe to Conspirituality and learn more: https://www.conspirituality.net- Learn more about Matthew's work at his website and follow him on Twitter: https://matthewremski.com/wordpress / https://twitter.com/matthewremski- Music produced by Epik The Dawn: https://epikbeats.netWEBSITE: https://www.lastborninthewilderness.comPATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lastborninthewildernessDONATE: https://www.paypal.me/lastbornpodcastSUBSTACK: https://lastborninthewilderness.substack.comBOOK LIST: https://bookshop.org/shop/lastbornpodcastDROP ME A LINE: Call (208) 918-2837 or http://bit.ly/LBWfiledropEVERYTHING ELSE: https://linktr.ee/patterns.of.behavior
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.101 | 0.015 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it