Submission deadline: December 1, 2026
Event dates: March 25-27, 2027
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
The Four Horsemen of the Bropocalypse: Power and Culture Under a Tech Oligarchy
March 25-27, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Bloomington
The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been organized, to a degree that bears sustained scholarly attention, by a small cohort of men whose private fortunes rival the budgets of nation-states, whose platforms mediate the social and epistemic lives of billions, and whose biographical idiosyncrasies have become structural features of global infrastructure. Steve Jobs furnished the template; Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel have inherited and transformed it. This conference takes the tech founder seriously as a political, economic, aesthetic, and theological problem, and as an object adequate to humanistic inquiry.
The planning committee invites proposals for individual papers, pre-constituted panels, and roundtables across three streams — the Horsemen, their Mounts, their Kingdom. Comparative, transnational, and historically minded approaches are particularly welcome.
Stream One: The Horsemen The Four Leaders of the Bropocalypse
The figures themselves — as biographies, personae, cultural texts, and authors and products of their own myths. Questions to consider:
•How do we read the founder's letter, the keynote, the congressional testimony, the tweet?
•What work does biography do for the founder, and the founder for biography?
•How are their bodies stylized, optimized, and displayed? What is the cultural work of the turtleneck, the gilet, the cage match, the longevity protocol, the pronatalist announcement?
•How do spatial fantasies, such as the bunker, the compound, the rocket, the company town, relate to longer traditions of utopia, sovereignty, and flight?
Where do the horsemen sit in longer histories of capital — Hearst, Ford, Hughes, Rockefeller — and alongside transnational counterparts?
Stream Two: The Mounts Technological Foundations of the Bropocalypse
The material, infrastructural, and epistemic conditions that made these figures possible and that they have, in turn, reshaped — the technologies the horsemen ride. Work drawing on media theory, STS, infrastructure studies, and the political economy of computing is especially welcome. Questions to consider:
•How do recommender systems and engagement metrics constitute attention as a political resource? How should we read the fulfillment center, the algorithmically managed workplace, the gig contract? What happens to the worker when the workplace is built to render the worker illegible?
•What are the climatic, hydrological, and territorial costs of the immaterial satellite constellations, undersea cables, data centers?
•What models of mind, language, and sociality are inscribed in the chatbot, the agent, the avatar? How do these systems reshape pedagogy, friendship, intimacy, grief, work?
Stream Three: The Kingdom Institutional Context of the Bropocalypse
The regulatory, financial, philanthropic, cultural, and political ecology that has enabled, legitimated, and at moments resisted the formation under analysis — the terrain across which the horsemen ride. Questions to consider:
•What is the worldview of contemporary venture capital, and how is it produced and reproduced through the manifesto, the LP letter, the founder-mode essay?
•How has the research university — its endowments, donors, dropout mythologies — both produced and been remade by the founders it educated and abandoned?
•What does it mean that the largest funders of causes such as global health, climate response, and basic research are now the personal foundations of living billionaires?
•How should we understand the migration of significant fractions of tech capital toward the American right, and the ideological projects — network state, accelerationism, neoreaction — that have traveled with it?
•What can scholarship learn from counter-formations such as Wikipedia, the Fediverse, platform cooperativism, the union drive, and open protocol?
Submission Guidelines
Proposals for individual papers (20 minutes) should consist of an abstract of no more than 350 words and a brief bio (100 words). Panel and roundtable proposals should include a 250-word rationale alongside individual abstracts. Please indicate the stream; the committee reserves the right to reassign.
Submissions at https://forms.gle/uf5jwkNVWDBHbVcq9 by December 1, 2026. Decisions by January 30, 2027. Please direct any questions to [email protected].
Edward Dallis-Comentale, Erin Kelley, Amber Bowes, Robert Metaxatos
Indiana University Bloomington