{"podcast":{"title":"Conspirituality","slug":"conspirituality-582888","podcast_index_feed_id":582888,"rss_url":"https://feeds.megaphone.fm/GLSS1122389842","website_url":"https://conspirituality.net/","image_url":"https://megaphone.imgix.net/podcasts/244201b2-c360-11ed-8a91-97e8b69444b5/image/Conspirituality_Show_Art__1_.png?ixlib=rails-4.3.1&max-w=3000&max-h=3000&fit=crop&auto=format,compress","author":"Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker","episode_count":811,"summary":"Dismantling New Age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy-mad yogis. At best, the conspirituality movement attacks public health efforts in times of crisis. At worst, it fronts and recruits for the fever-dream of QAnon. As the alt-right and New Age horseshoe toward each other in a blur of disinformation, clear discourse, and good intentions get smothered. Charismatic influencers exploit their followers by co-opting conspiracy theories on a spectrum of intensity ranging from vaccines to child trafficking. In the process, spiritual beliefs that have nurtured creativity and meaning are transforming into memes of a quickly-globalizing paranoia. Conspirituality Podcast attempts to bring understanding to this landscape. A journalist, a cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic discuss the stories, cognitive dissonances, and cultic dynamics tearing through the yoga, wellness, and new spirituality worlds. Mainstream outlets have noticed the problem. We crowd-source, research, analyze, and dream answers to it.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-26T20:20:18.804323+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888"},"episode":{"title":"Brief: Conspirituality Viewed Through Neofeudalism and Vectoralism","slug":"brief-conspirituality-viewed-through-neofeudalism-and-vectoralism","published_at":"2026-06-20T10:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888/brief-conspirituality-viewed-through-neofeudalism-and-vectoralism","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888","url":"https://pdst.fm/e/swap.fm/track/6bpBPtHL977KJxLX2zPs/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLSS9446534610.mp3","audio_url":"https://pdst.fm/e/swap.fm/track/6bpBPtHL977KJxLX2zPs/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/GLSS9446534610.mp3","summary":"Matthew applies three interlocking frameworks to the conspirituality phenomenon—and to the podcast itself. Drawing on Jodi Dean's theory of neofeudalism, Yanis Varoufakis's technofeudalism, and McKenzie Wark's vectoralism, he argues that conspirituality is an epistemic crisis—a problem of bad information spreading through inadequately critical communities—but also a structural product of platform capitalism's feudal logic. Dean's four elements (parcellated sovereignty, new lords and serfs, hinterlandization, and catastrophic anxiety) explain why certain populations are rendered susceptible before they encounter any specific piece of misinformation. Varoufakis names the extraction mechanism as cloud rent. Wark shows what this means for the producer: a hacker class worker who owns every tool except the vector that makes the work valuable. Matthew then turns the analysis on himself, exploring what it means to have spent six years building critical content inside the infrastructure he is criticising. Show Notes Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?' Los Angeles Review of Books, May 2020. Dean, Jodi. 'From Neoliberalism to Neofeudalism.' Emancipations, Vol. 3, Iss. 3, 2024. Dean, Jodi. 'Neofeudalism: The Messy Political Economy of Transitioning to Something Worse.' Emancipations, Vol. 4, Iss. 3, 2025. Dean, Jodi. Capital's Grave: Neofeudalism and the New Class Struggle. Verso, 2025. Dean, Jodi. 'Communism or Neo-Feudalism?' New Political Science, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2020. Varoufakis, Yanis. Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. Bodley Head, 2023. Wark, McKenzie. Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Verso, 2019. McIntyre, Lee. How to Talk to a Science Denier. MIT Press, 2021. Heron, Kai. 'Are We Witness to the Disintegration of Capital's Laws of Motion? A Rev…","meta_description":"Matthew applies three interlocking frameworks to the conspirituality phenomenon—and to the podcast itself. Drawing on Jodi Dean's theory of neofeudalism,…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":2076,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/conspirituality-582888/episodes/brief-conspirituality-viewed-through-neofeudalism-and-vectoralism/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/conspirituality-582888/brief-conspirituality-viewed-through-neofeudalism-and-vectoralism.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}