Preternatural Claims, Precarious Workers: The Content and Distribution of the Most Successfully Crowdfunded Documentary

Authors

  • Dugan Nichols Simon Fraser University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2014.97

Keywords:

UFO, post-Fordism, green capitalism, Disclosure Project, Steven Greer, Sirius

Abstract

This article examines the raced, gendered, and classed world of UFO-related media with the intention of assessing its potential as a form of resistance. I use as a case study the largest crowdsourced documentary of all time, Sirius (2013), which explores exotic technologies and the exploits of ufologist, Dr. Steven Greer. Sirius’s affiliates conducted immaterial, post-Fordist labor to distribute the environmentally conscious film online, yet despite their progressive, utopian bent, they indicate that any technologies associated with the film will operate under market logic. Moreover, Sirius recycles racially fraught tropes of UFO culture, such as reflecting white ufologists’ desire to experience the Other or subject to understanding a gray race of beings they fear has challenged their racially privileged status.

Author Biography

Dugan Nichols, Simon Fraser University

L Dugan Nichols is a PhD student in Communication at Simon Fraser University. He's interested in Marxism, urbanism, austerity measures and their effects on race. Most of his research is in critical media studies and comprises discourse analyses.

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Published

2014-10-13

How to Cite

Nichols, D. (2014). Preternatural Claims, Precarious Workers: The Content and Distribution of the Most Successfully Crowdfunded Documentary. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 3(2), 76–102. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2014.97

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 2 (2014): Spring 2014

Section

Articles

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