Peter Ayolov
Bio
Peter Ayolov’s key contribution to media theory is the development of the "Propaganda 2.0" or the "manufacture of dissent" model, which he details in his 2024 book, The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent.
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Notes from a Quoting Mind: On Language, Power, and Repetition
Homo Citans: The Quoting Man Against Originality Homo citans names the human as a quoting animal, a being who speaks by repeating, citing, echoing, and rearranging the words of others. Every sentence enters the world already inhabited: by traditions, concepts, metaphors, and rhythms that precede the speaker. To cite is therefore not an exception of scholarly life but its default condition. Researchers, writers, and thinkers are links in a chain, not origins; they validate knowledge by showing where it comes from, how it travelled, and whom it passed through. Citation is thus not merely a technical practice but an ethical acknowledgement of interdependence, a recognition that thought emerges collectively rather than individually.
By Peter Ayolovabout a month ago in Writers
The One Problem
(This essay transforms the fragmented material into a single philosophical, future-oriented but non-naive vision. It treats humanity’s problems as one problem: governance understood as the art of living together over time, under shared responsibility, memory, and judgement. It avoids utopian innocence, and stages the solution historically: 2026, 2050, 2075, 2100.)
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Earth
The Obsolete Industry Dilemma
The Obsolete Industry Dilemma: What If the World Stopped Inertia-Production for One Year? Imagine not a technological breakthrough, not a green miracle, but a simple interruption. For one year, the world stops inertia-production: the endless manufacture of goods, services, movements, and institutions that persist not because they are needed, but because stopping them would expose how deeply human life has been reorganised around motion without purpose. This is not merely a pause in car production or construction or transport. It is a pause in the logic that turns people into components, societies into mechanisms, and the planet into an enormous clockwork Earth, rotating endlessly through repetition, habit, and systemic momentum.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Humans
The Automotive Dilemma
The Automotive Dilemma: What If the World Stopped Making Cars for One Year? Imagine a global pause button. For twelve months, the automotive industry stops producing new cars. No new petrol cars, no new EVs. Instead, governments, manufacturers, and suppliers redirect their full capacity to one task: retrofitting existing cars with electric motors and batteries. It sounds like a thought experiment, but the numbers behind it reveal a startling dilemma.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Critique
Electrifying the Existing Fleet
Electrifying the Existing Fleet: National Retrofitting as an Industrial and Climate Strategy Abstract The large-scale electrification of used internal combustion engine vehicles through retrofitting has emerged as a contested but increasingly plausible strategy within circular economy and climate policy frameworks. Rather than relying exclusively on the production of new electric vehicles, national-scale conversion programmes propose extending the life of existing vehicle fleets, particularly for government and commercial use. This article analyses the environmental rationale, economic viability, industrial constraints, policy landscape, and consumer adoption challenges associated with used-car electrification. Drawing on European case studies, cost comparisons, and current incentives, it argues that retrofitting is not a universal substitute for new electric vehicles but represents a strategically efficient solution for specific use cases, especially urban fleets operating on predictable routes.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Futurism
Moral Outrage Networks, The Sociology of Digital Anger (2026)
Peter Ayolov, Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger (2026) Moral Outrage Networks: The Sociology of Digital Anger continues and deepens Peter Ayolov’s earlier work The Economic Policy of Online Media (2023), in which he developed the theory of the Manufacture of Dissent and outlined the Propaganda 2.1 Model as an update to classical propaganda theory under conditions of platform capitalism. While the earlier book focused on the political economy of digital media and the monetisation of dissent, this new volume turns decisively toward the emotional infrastructure that makes such systems viable. Ayolov now advances a more fundamental claim: moral anger is not merely exploited by digital media systems but constitutes one of the basic structural conditions of morality itself, and therefore of social life in networked societies.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in BookClub
The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent
Peter Ayolov’s The Economic Policy of Online Media: Manufacture of Dissent is best read as a political economy of attention written from inside the contemporary media machine: a study of how dissent is not simply reported, represented, or ‘allowed’, but produced as a monetisable output of platform capitalism. The book’s organising intuition is both simple and unsettling. In the online environment, conflict is not a malfunction of communication; it is a business model. What appears to users as spontaneous outrage, grassroots polarisation, or organic ‘culture war’ is, at scale, a routinised industrial process—engineered through incentives, metrics, and infrastructures that reward emotional volatility and punish slow, careful public reasoning.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in BookClub
Toward the Linguistic Apocalypse
Toward the Linguistic Apocalypse What stands before the present age is not a technological crisis but a linguistic one. Artificial intelligence does not announce the rise of a new sovereign intelligence; it announces the collapse of an old regime of words. Power is unraveling not because machines are becoming conscious, but because language is becoming uncontrollable. The monopoly over meaning, interpretation, memory, and narration is dissolving, and with it dissolves the architecture of authority that depended on silence, delay, and scarcity.
By Peter Ayolov2 months ago in Critique
