There is some speculation that online education might emerge to fill in the gaps — after all, it does seem more suited to the sort of job-training focused paradigm that modern business-colleges must adopt.

This will, of course, utterly destroy the spirit of departments and campuses for faculty. The physical structure of the university campus has a massive role in creating the scholarly community of professors and adjuncts, and without it the entire academy-as-such is likely to dissolve — a program designed to produce nurses and coders as quickly as possible will be unlikely to create new philosophy papers.

This is inevitable, and will be unmourned by the new paradigm — what use would it even have for such irrelevances?

Of course, if there will be nothing left below the top-tier of currently existing colleges, then those remaining Harvards and Yales will begin to look significantly less legitimate — they will no longer exist at the top of a massive and learned community, but will be merely be isolated playgrounds for the children of the fabulously wealthy.

All this, of course, spells the ultimate death-knell for the ‘academic freedom’ (I honestly find the whole thing so alien that I cannot really be bothered to care about it) that inhabitants of the old paradigm —on both the Left and the Right—so greatly lament the vanishing of. In the words of Graeber:

…We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.

And of course — yes — the internet is where we are. Still, it seems odd that I am expected to support myself on other things while doing this as a mere hobby. I have my Patreon, which I must in vain hope flog before you:

But, at the time of this writing, that makes about $26 a month. Last month, my full payments from Medium came out to $19.89. If my income-growth predictions hold up, I expect to make a little under $54 off this whole thing at the end of this month. The irony of my being called a grifter over this is really quite cutting to me. If I wanted to make money dishonestly, running an incredibly controversial and mostly irrelevant blog seems to be just about the highest-effort lowest-reward way of doing so.

While, yes, this new change in how innovative ideas are produced — i.e., only if your desire to do so is essentially so strong as to be suicidal — is personally awful for me, it is clearly leading to greater and greater innovation. In the words of noted asshole Nyx Land (not to be confused with the more popular Nick Land, mentioned earlier, who she has slavishly named herself after):

My answer to this is that the proliferation of YouTube channels, podcasts, and blogs is a new rennaissance of ideas in the West. Never before in human history has there been so much smooth surface for ideas to be promoted and spread by almost anyone. Without any hierarchy of editors and advisors determining which ideas get to be published and which don’t, there is a bloom of difference that allows for discussions to take place with both form and content that would be rejected by academics. …What this all creates is a space for discussion that is faster and more open than any humanities departments could ever hope to be, even in the most liberal and progressive cases. This has, of course, resulted in many cases where reactionary ideas have found a space for their ideas to spread, and certainly influenced “real world” politics greatly as a result, but this is truly an unconditional process that will favor whoever can stay caught up… it’s only a matter of time before some sort of proper response to right-wing amateur theorists and propagandists forms that can adapt to the 21st century.

The only part of this that is incorrect is the idea that this is a smooth space in which competition is unconditional. This is a space that works according to the rules and structures set out by the massive online platforms that we are forced to use. The least of these is that the bad takes of formerly-successful intellectuals get more attention than the good takes of relative unknowns:

Do you think that I can say whatever I want on Medium? Or on Twitter? Or that the structure of these platforms doesn’t bias discussion in favor of some directions, and against others? Get real.

Of course, the academy had its own biases and limits — but it is no use pretending that we are now any freer.