Emily Harnett

Emily Harnett is a Philadelphia-based writer, teacher, and cultural critic whose work bridges literary analysis and pop culture commentary. She teaches 10th- and 11th-grade English at an all-boys private school while maintaining an active publishing career in major outlets including The Atlantic, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Baffler, Lapham's Quarterly, Literary Hub, and Hazlitt. Her essays span contemporary fiction, internet culture, and technology's role in shaping modern belief systems.

UFO Culture Critique

Harnett gained prominence in UFO discourse through her 2019 review of Diana Walsh Pasulka's American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology in The Baffler, where she offered a scathing cultural analysis of Silicon Valley's co-optation of UFO mysticism. Her core argument: tech billionaires and venture capitalists have weaponized UFO culture's authentic promise of cosmic wonder and transcendence, transforming it into a tool for surveillance and self-aggrandizement.

Specifically, Harnett critiqued Pasulka's uncritical embrace of figures like pseudonymous "Tyler D."—a wealthy biotech entrepreneur who secretly films people—arguing that the book romanticizes tech oligarch behavior as "wounded genius" rather than interrogating predatory surveillance practices. She characterized this as symptomatic of a broader cultural surrender: as Silicon Valley monopolizes digital experience itself, it simultaneously appropriates transcendence and access to cosmic meaning, leaving ordinary people languishing in monitored systems while billionaires pursue their own alien salvation narratives.

Critical Intervention

Harnett represents an important voice in UFO studies: the cultural critic who examines belief systems not from a position of either faith or skepticism, but from literary and media studies perspectives. Her work highlights how UFO narratives—historically associated with resistance to government authority—have been repackaged as legitimacy markers for tech power structures. She asks uncomfortable questions about who gets to mystify and why, and what it means when corporations claim access to cosmic truth.