Jason Read presents on his blog and book of the same title, “Unemployed Negativity,” at SPACE in Portland on Jan. 22. Sophie Burchell / The Forecaster

What is the staying power of “hurricane shark?”

This is one of the questions about popular culture that University of Southern Maine Professor of Philosophy Jason Read ponders in his blog, “Unemployed Negativity,” which he has been running for 18 years and recently compiled as a book by the same name.

“Hurricane shark” is a falsified image of a shark seemingly swimming on the highway after it has been flooded by tropical storm. The fake photo has been circulated by social media and news outlets over the past 10 years, believed again and again despite repeated debunking. In his writings on the image’s ability to last, Read considers how it taps into overdone fears of sharks, anxieties about weather and climate change beyond our control, and the news media landscape that prioritizes frenzy and extremity over accuracy.

“I think this shows to what extent you know this crossover from popular culture to the real world, or the way it makes sense for the real world, right?” said Read at his presentation on his work at SPACE on Jan. 22.

“There is nothing exceptional about this little story, it is in some sense mundane. There are countless YouTube phenomena that turn out to be fakes, but it does illustrate certain things,” Read read from his book, which was released by Mayfly Books on Dec. 4.

On his blog, Read philosophizes on popular media, analyzing what it says about the cultural moment. From movies including “Snowpiercer” and “Barbie” to memes about the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and the demise of coolness in Silicon Valley, Read draws connections to fascism, capitalism, individuality and immediacy.

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Read began the blog when he moved to Portland to teach philosophy at USM in 2006 after graduating from SUNY Binghamton. Transitioning from student to teacher, he sought a way to continue to share ideas and think critically.

“The blog made that possible in a way that seemed fitting, because with stuff like that, I feel like you can’t wait for an article to go through review and be published in a journal. Like, by the time it comes out, everyone’s gonna have moved on,” said Read.

“But you can watch a movie and then that weekend, just type something out and send it out, and people are still gonna be talking about it,” he said.

The blog’s title is a nod to German philosopher Georg Hegel, who said that negativity or conflict has defined humanity and if utopia were reached, then that negativity would be unemployed. It also reflected how this was Read’s project outside of the classroom, where he teaches classes on philosophy of film, the politics of knowledge and political philosophy.

“I thought that phrase sounds really cool, and it sounded really cool for a way of talking about things that I was writing about (at) the time that didn’t quite seem to be my day job,” said Read.

Read talking about the frequently recurring “hurricane shark” image, with the false image on the right and the original image on the left. Sophie Burchell / The Forecaster

“Had I known I would be doing this for so long, I maybe would have thought a little longer about the name that I picked,” he said.

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“Unemployed Negativity” is the second book that Read has crafted from his blog content. In March 2024 he released “The Double Shift: Spinoza and Marx on the Politics of Work,” based selected blog posts about labor. For this more general collection of writings, Read went through 18 years of work, finding posts that held up against the passage of time or were an insight into a cultural touchstone. For example, an essay about Occupy Wall Street was written at the beginning of the movement and had a positive outlook on its future.

“Even though that’s a moment that has very much passed, it is still part of our present. It still shapes something of the present we’re in,” said Read.

“Even though the piece was written very early on, is very optimistic about political change and so on, in a way it is very dated, but it still is a moment worth documenting, a moment that still shapes our current political vocabulary,” he said.

Read has presented his work at SPACE numerous times. Nick Schroeder, communications manager at SPACE, said that Read’s work encourages thought in a way that SPACE wants to facilitate in Portland.

“I think (Read) is kind of a unique person because he strikes me as somebody who’s a very public philosopher, or like a public figure in a sense. He makes himself really accessible,” said Schroeder. “I think he really has a special place in Portland.”

“I think he just has a style that is maybe becoming rarer in our society and culture. So it’s nice to be able to present something that he’s spent so much of his time working on,” he said.

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When the book “Unemployed Negativity” came out, Read contemplated ending the blog. But in the end, he wanted to keep writing, exploring conspiracy theories and popular culture of today and tomorrow. For Read, the blog remains a space to explore new ideas and figure out what he thinks about a subject or phenomena.

“There was a part of me which thought that it’d be fitting to publish this book and then sort of hang it up, and there are times when it definitely gets in the way of the productivity I should be doing,” said Read. “At the same time, I still feel like I need that.”

While philosophy blogs were more popular in 2006, said Read, a lot have since died off as their producers move to other mediums, such as podcasts. However, Read said his preferred method of thinking and communicating remains through writing, powering him to write the blog for nearly two decades.

“Sometimes you don’t know what you think until you write about it. Now, I don’t need to put it out in the world. I mean, maybe I could replace it with a journal or something, but it seems to me that I can’t not write. It just seems unavoidable,” he said.

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