Iain Boal is an Irish social historian of technics and the commons, based in Berkeley, California and London.
He was one of the co-founders of the Retort collective, an association of radical writers, artists, and activists in the Bay Area from the 1990s to the present.
He co-authored Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (2001), along with T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts.
The historians Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger have credited Boal with coining the term "Agnotology" in 1992 [1] to describe the intentional production of ignorance or doubt, often for commercial gain.
Originally conceived to explain the behavior of tobacco companies, it has gained more recent currency in the context of commercially motivated climate change denial.