Global Futures Vocab 2

Misinformation

false or misleading info shared with the intent to deceive

Disinformation

False info deliberately created and shared to cause harm or mislead. Need to trace why it was shared - like in journalism when news outlets spread misinformation, but the way they try to prove if it happened intentionally or unintentionally.

Soviet active measures - covert campaigns to manipulate opinion - during the Cold War.

2010s - present: Adopted in media studies to denote intentional falsehoods.

Malinformation

Information that is true but released strategically to do harm. A politician’s real medical records.

Post-truth

A condition in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief. Central debates on trust, expertise, and fact erosion.

  “Big lie”

A gross distortion or misrepresentation of the truth used as a political propaganda technique. Started with Hitler and now most commonly related to Trump and the “stolen” election.

Backfire effect

• Repeating lies even through fact-checking can actually make people believe in lies more.

• Popular findings suggest never correcting anyone because it only makes it worse.

• However, later research raised serious doubts about whether this effect is common at all - the study has largely failed to replicate.

Salience

The relative importance, prominence, or urgency that an actor—such as the public, the media, a political party, or a sovereign state—ascribes to a specific issue.

Neoliberalism

A political project to move certain decisions out of democratic reach and hand them to markets, using the power of the state to do that.

Neoliberalism Encasement

Using global rules, institutions, to protect markets so the next election cannot touch them.

Post-neoliberalism

An emerging economic and political consensus that rejects the free-market orthodoxy of globalization, deregulation, and minimal state intervention in favor of active government management to secure domestic supply chains, worker rights, and national industrial goals.

While the world may be slowly transitioning away in the wake of the pandemic, After 2023: direction shifts again. Javier Milei and Daniel Noboa anticipated the broader movement that followed. Not simply a 1990s return of neoliberalism - new right combines economic deregulation to more powerful policing and punishment, security.

Illiberalism

Wins the vote, then uses that victory against the courts, press, university and minority protections. Can have elections and still lose them, whereas authoritarianism governments can’t be removed through elections. Belief that they represent the nation, not these institutions in the way.

Liberal democracy

A political philosophy: rights, law, pluralism, limits on power. Compatible with a large welfare state. A system of government that combines competitive, multi-party representative democracy with the principles of classical liberalism—limiting state power and protecting individual and minority rights

Authoritarianism

Suppresses the vote. Power is concentrated in a single leader, a small elite, or a single ruling party, with few or no checks and balances, independent courts, or free political competition.

Majoritarianism

A political philosophy asserting that a numerical or social majority—whether based on religion, language, social class, or ethnicity—has the right to make decisions and hold primacy in society

Equality vs. fairness

People prefer fair inequality over unfair equality . No evidence that people are bothered by economic inequality itself, they are bothered with economic unfairness instead. When people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country, they actually prefer unequal societies. We want to make bad behavior costly and good behavior rewarded, as to avoid free riders in cooperation.

Populism

The idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another. “The pure people” and the “corrupt elite.” Can blend with many different viewpoints.

Ontological insecurity

A profound, existential state of feeling unanchored, where an individual lacks a stable sense of self, bodily integrity, or confidence in their own existence and place in the world

Emotional governance

Political leaders, institutions, and public administrators systematically monitor, shape, and utilize human emotions to maintain authority, guide public behavior, and achieve policy objectives. Populist agents seek to project a fantasy narrative that concurrently reinforces reified notions of belonging and alters norms regarding what is deemed to be acceptable behaviour

Climate governance

The system of rules, institutions, diplomacy, and actor networks that steers societies toward preventing, mitigating, or adapting to climate change

Anthropocene

A proposed, unofficial geological epoch defined by the time during which human activity has become the dominant driver of global climate and environmental change

Collective action

Built on “organizational resources” and “the formation of collective identities.” Understanding of who we are and what we want. Should agree enough for political mobilization. How do we create enough common identity that people will act together?

Connective action

"personalized content sharing across media networks.” Bring your own reasons. Make your own sign. Nobody checks your program. Can just share or join a campaign without changing identity, nothing costly. Could be the end of story.

Personal action frame

In connective action, can add to a cause through personal action frames to include your own personal reasonings for contesting something.

Affordance

A possibility for action that a technology makes available, or makes particularly easy.

Mnemonic affordance

What these technologies make possible in relation to memory: what gets preserved, retrieved, repeated, placed beside something else? What decisions were made and not made in the past?

• Past - temporal storytelling, what decisions were made, and what decisions were not made?

• Present - fires, droughts, disasters.

• Future - In ten years? Fifty? If emissions continue, if they don’t? What world will today’s thirteen-year-olds inherit at 50?

Negative utopian energies

Modern climate activist movements channel a "negative" energy—grounded in crisis, apocalyptic warnings, panic, and structural critique (such as anti-capitalism and the rejection of postpolitical consensus)—to force a rupture in the present and open up the possibility of a different future. In this way, the new generation of climate activism also contains hope, even if it appears to fully despair at first.

Postapocalyptic present

“The catastrophe has already happened.” An apocalypse without the promise of redemption. Without the promise of redemption, gives incentive to not do anything.

Cathedral thinking

Medieval builders began projects knowing they would never see them finished. You lay the foundation even though you don’t know the details of the roof. Act for the future that extends beyond your own life. Digital activism isn’t circulating info about the present, also circulating information about the future.