Under the Dome : “Chinese” smog as a viral media event

Under the Dome, a video about smog in China produced by author and former television anchor Chai Jing, garnered 200 million views within 48 hours before disappearing from major Chinese websites. This essay examines the video’s aesthetics, distribution and reception with a particular attention to its relation to time. I argue that a focus on temporality allows us to discern the ideological conditions that delimit how we talk about Under the Dome and indeed China’s pollution in the context of neoliberal globalization. The celebration of the video’s digitally enabled instantaneity not only privileges technological solutions and consumer agency but also obscures the unequal relation of power to which the Chinese state and the workers within the global electronics supply chain have long been subject. What these discourses eclipse is an opportunity to rethink the accidental event as opening an alternative dialogue about the geological deep time of media culture.