The Anti-Democracy Atlas

This atlas, created for Shannon Mattern’s spring 2021 graduate studio Mapping the Field, contains five different maps related to misinformation and online radicalization in anti-democratic spaces.

In this collection, I use five different methods to examine these topics: relational, organizational, geographic, visual, and temporal. Some maps relate to specific events in time, as recent as the U.S. Capitol Insurrection and as distant as a power struggle in Ancient Rome. Others look at pathways to radicalization, whether through social media ads or anti-woke Youtube networks. On the whole, The Anti-Democracy Atlas is an attempt to broadly map the different ways that powerful people use information—real or manipulated—to influence less powerful people and slowly chip away at democratic institutions.