Since the global economic crisis of 2008–09, and especially since the Covid pandemic, the world has come to seem more disorderly, disinformed, and polarized than ever. If the polarization makes our information ecosystem feel bipolar in the medical sense of the term, the world has also grown geopolitically multipolar, with the poles becoming more nakedly imperialist, or neo-imperialist, than we have seen in decades. This talk will draw from Adrian Ivakhiv’s work on the ecologies of digital media, and the specific media ecologies surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian war, to argue that climate change and its geopolitical pressures lurk beneath the growing surge of wars and authoritarian populisms. How to reckon with this is the challenge of our times.

Adrian Ivakhiv holds the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. His most recent books are The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in More-than-Human Worlds (Stanford University Press, 2025) and the anthology Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025).

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A ZeM – Brandenburg Center for Media Studies event in cooperation mit CATNEMI – Cinematic Atmospheres: Towards a New Ecology of the Moving Image as part of the ZeM’s annual focus “Platformatizations”.