1. Polycrisis and its publics

In climate activist Luisa Neubauer’s reposting of a post from X, a McDonald’s store aflame is paired with a statement that the effects of the climate crisis will soon be felt by you (the consumer of the image) as much as it has already impacted other global communities (see Figure 1). The localised imaginary of a Los Angeles McDonald’s on fire is paired with the global effects of the climate crisis. By reconfiguring the online public to be the ones who will feel the impacts of climate change themselves in the future, the image captures a shifting relationship: the consumers of this particular crisis imagery will soon be forced to become the producers of such imagery themselves. Neubauer’s collage expands the affected public. The “series of disasters” referenced by the picture becomes itself an expression of the sense of a polycrisis moment whose public is not just the populace of Los Angeles.

Figure 1.

German climate activist Luisa Neubauer reposted a picture post from X (Twitter) to her Instagram page (https://www.instagram.com/p/DEriEbwNmX5/?igsh=MmhsZXkxZGk3Y2Zt).

Various celebrities posted about the crisis on their social media accounts.Footnote ⁵ Fuelled by unknowable algorithms, Instagram accounts from the likes of Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton enjoy heightened public visibility in the online realm. As influencers, celebrities, and VIPs update their millions of followers with heartfelt messages about their personal grief, their social media accounts are momentarily rebranded into signifiers of collective experience, solidarity, and support. However, when A-listers lose their Malibu mansions on the same day that the people who normally serve them their coffee lose their far more modest housing, narratives of community building and collective experience take hold at the same time as we witness the worst of capitalist wealth accumulation come to the fore. As one public documentation of the fire in the Palisades area on X shows, there is a genuine belief among the super-rich that the privatization of public services presents a credible solution to these moments of shared human crisis (see Figure 2). Under the guise of neighbourly care, the financial privilege of seeking access to private firefighters asserts itself as a credible request, for you shall “love your neighbours as you love yourself.”Footnote ⁶ The threat to real estate does not embody the destruction of family homes but becomes the threat to the product that has historically contributed to the creation of social and wealth inequality.Footnote ⁷

Figure 2.

A BlueSky post from user “mrsbettybowers.bsky.social” showing an X post by Keith Wasserman, CEO of a real estate investment firm (https://bsky.app/profile/mrsbettybowers.bsky.social/post/3lfaqm4nbp22w).

By identifying what publics are constructed and addressed in such imagery, public humanists contribute to making sense of the polycrisis condition. As Jeffrey R. Wilson and Zoe Hope Bulaitis contend, “Public humanities happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life.”Footnote ⁸ The public humanities often set themselves apart from the traditional humanities by virtue of their practical and community-oriented approaches – in general, their scholarly engagement with diverse publics.Footnote ⁹ Where the creation of knowledge in traditional humanities can often be geared towards academic readers and scholarly audiences, the public humanities emphasise their close tie to “real-world” issues. What is the role of public humanists in a moment of polycrisis?

We don’t need the public humanities to make sense of things like the climate crisis, pandemics, or economic instability, but the public humanist is uniquely placed to make sense of how specific publics make sense of these moments, as when the imagery of the Los Angeles wildfires prompts meaningful and scholarly engagement with documentary artefacts from the digital public sphere. When we, as public humanists, come across these and similar imaginaries that reveal the multiplicity of crises undergirding the Los Angeles wildfires, our work begins: to excavate these imaginaries publicly and showcase how a singular crisis moment can only ever emerge out of a multiplicity of hidden crises in this day and age. Wendy F. Hsu writes that “imagination is in essence an interpretive act, and interpretation provides the foundation for the humanistic practices of visioning, speculating, and reflecting. But interpretation can also lead to creative modes of humanist expression, such as making and design.”Footnote ¹⁰ With every interpretation of public discourses about crises, and by paying attention to how the public is configured within these representations, we can slowly and increasingly make sense of polycrisis.

2. Imagining America

We have become too used to seeing images of the effects of the climate crisis in other places – rising sea levels in Papua New Guinea or flash floods in Eastern Spain. Now, these images came to the centre of the Western visual imaginary: Hollywood. Los Angeles is deeply tied to its identity as the creative and economic centre of the American cinema and television industry, housing production studios like Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, Universal Pictures, Disney, and Sony.Footnote ¹¹ Suddenly, this factory – responsible for producing much of the Western creative imagery – unintentionally became the producer of images of horror and destruction.Footnote ¹² Not only do these images present infrastructural and environmental destruction, but they also bear the threat to the industry that itself constantly “imagines.” When we see the dream factory on fire, it’s a challenge to imagine our incapability of imagining aesthetic, cultural, or political alternatives.

The Hollywood sign on fire is actually an image produced with generative AI (see Figure 3). The sign was not endangered by the closest fire, the so-called “Sunset fire,” which was one of the first to be contained by the firefighters.Footnote ¹³ In the specific moment in which a crisis occurs, it is simple to point to the dangerous potential of such images spreading misinformation. And this risk is not to be underestimated, considering that the quality of information that emergency services and the public receive in such situations can be crucial to a quick and effective response. However, an AI image of the Hollywood sign in flames or a photo of a McDonald’s store on fire (not generated with AI) represents more than the Los Angeles crisis; they show the risks posed to the political imaginaries of the American Dream and wealth capitalism in America (see Figure 4).Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 3.

AI-generated image of the famous Hollywood sign on fire. Cropped copy taken from Instagram user account “badboy760_” (https://www.instagram.com/p/DEl0eBLRaKy/?igsh=cXc1Zml6eHQ0djI3).

Figure 4.

Palm trees close to a McDonald’s are on fire (https://www.sportskeeda.com/pop-culture/news-mcdonald-s-restaurant-flames-palisades-eaton-wildfires-rampage-los-angeles-los-angeles-fire-details-list-restaurants-impacted).

Imagery created and circulated on platforms like X (Twitter) and Bluesky documents a specific moment in time: one in which the notion of photography representing “the real” has long made room for digital alterations through computational methods. When we adjust our appearance in an Instagram selfie with image editing software, or lay filters over our pictures of the natural world, we attempt to bring the reality of the world ever so much closer to an imagined ideal. It is easy enough to label digitally altered images or images created through generative AI as misinformation, but they also serve to mediate polycrisis.Footnote ¹⁵ My intention is not to present these images as more important than images of crisis happening elsewhere in the world but to suggest that they form part of an archive of imaginaries of the United States’s present moment.

As generative AI contributes to creating this apocalyptic imagery of America on fire, it becomes the subject of the crisis moment. A post by user “Illumi.meme” on Bluesky shows how the memeification of the Los Angeles crisis integrates several contexts of cultural contention: the role of techno-super-rich individuals like Elon Musk, the excessive use of natural resources by generative AI, and populist attacks on the so-called “woke” agenda (Figure 5). Laying bare this moment’s additional layers of meaning – beyond the surface of the destructive horror it represents – public humanists are needed to unravel how “vernacular creativity can be utilised for collective civic talk.”Footnote ¹⁶

Figure 5.

BlueSky post from user “illumi.meme” (https://bsky.app/profile/illumi.meme/post/3lfbpm3vle22b).

3. Public humanities and polycrisis

What arises from the ashes when we stand in front of a dismantled dream factory? Scholars, practitioners, and citizens who understand themselves to be public humanists will be integral to excavating the multiple layers of meaning that build contemporary experiences and imagery of crises. As we interpret these images and narratives, whether one-to-one, publicly, offline, or online, our role should be to reveal the possible meanings of public crisis events. In doing so, we will, bit by bit, make sense of our polycrisis moment, which ultimately serves a political goal: to orient us to a collective capacity to imagine a future of (re)building communities where the haves and the have-nots are equal, and where the skill of public humanistic interpretative practice brings us one step closer to developing a repertoire of actions through which to build a better future for all.