Liner Note 4. Budget Strategies of Enshittification

November 9, 2022, Hyde Park

This is my ISRF Director's Note for November. Higher education's main response to political adversity has been accommodation. My comments on this here are relevant to the U.S. as much as the U.K. situation, including the data on teaching and research losses.

The Democratic and Labour parties regularly hint around about breaking with neoliberal austerity to build an equitable economic order, and then they don't. There are lessons for rebuilding in 2025 as well.  

Let’s say you work for Disney, and you’re part of the group that CEO Bob Iger instructed to “fix streaming.” By “fix” he meant, keep it from losing money in every quarter for a total loss of $4 billion in 2022. Bob offered a public hint about how to do this: “Basically we invested too much.”

You come up with a simple plan:

1. You invest less in new content, avoid challenging and therefore risky content, and cheapen existing content. You fire some people.

2. You raise prices, a lot.

Source: The Honest Broker.

3. You plan how to cut 100% of the loss over 2 to 3 years.

4. You ignore critics who call this an Endgame strategy and post rude charts about paying more to get less while subsidizing your creative decline.

The result is that 1 + 2 = 3. You do enough enshittification of your product and workforce (1) while seriously jacking up prices (2) so that you achieve (3), the actual ending of all your loss-making. The culture gets worse (4), but you achieve your financial goal of revenues equal to or greater than expenditures—about break-even in just two years.

Source:  The Honest Broker.

How does this compare to higher education policy in England and Wales?  

1. You have already been investing less in new content, avoiding challenging and therefore risky content and cutting existing programmes of that type. You have been cheapening existing content with larger classes, narrower module choice, and the like. You have been firing people.

2. You tripled your prices in 2012, but accepted simultaneous cuts in public revenue and the benefits are gone. The Labour party has just granted you a 3.1% fee increase for home students, which will increase their 2025 fees by £285 to £9,535. This will increase your teaching revenues for these students by £390 million per year. (The only other change is a minor increase in the amount students are allowed to borrow for maintenance.)

3. Instead of making up 100% of your loses, you plan to shrink them somewhat.  You lost £1 billion teaching home students in 2021-22, so with the 3.1% increase you can cut that by £390 million, or about one-third? Sadly, no: that inflation adjustment just keeps you from losing an additional £390 million on this year’s teaching . You’re still losing £1 billion pounds a year (more since that 2021-22 figure, and National Insurance rises will take £372 million of that £390 million). Your plan, in effect, is to reduce your home teaching losses by 0 percent!

4. You ignore critics who say your 1 + 2 = 0 as a solution for the university and you don’t address their concerns. You stay caught between the media, which exclaims that the £285 rise after an eight-year freeze “is a further test of students’ faith”, and universities, as when Sussex VC Sasha Roseneil states the fact that “unfortunately neither students nor universities will find adequate solutions in these modest uplifts.” Domestic teaching revenue remains nearly one-fifth below what it was for someone starting university in 2012-13. And the public maintains their perception that higher ed is unable to manage its affairs.

In the Disney case, enshittification makes you solvent, meaning you can theoretically avoid the Endgame strategy. (Ted Gioia, the source of those charts, is pretty sure you won’t, and indeed the logic of shareholder capitalism cuts against mature companies reducing their returns on investment by investing in better product.)

In the British university case, enshittification leaves you in the same hole you were in before.

What would work better? Not turning universities into corporations like Disney, but the opposite.

They should state their actual financial needs as required by their essential public functions, and then set up a plan with government to fix 100% of the shortfall between what the functions cost and what they can raise without further harming their students.

Take this HEPI chart from one of my previous notes.

Figure reproduced from Higher Education Policy Institute.

Home university students need to be taught properly; universities need a further billion pounds a year to do that. Government should supply 100% of that loss with a central grant, booked as an expenditure like schools or NHS.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies reported that “in 2023/24, £1,034 million was allocated to fund the teaching of high-cost courses, including medicine, dentistry and other laboratory-based courses.” This amount needs to be more than doubled, to fund the shortfall on the rest.

Similarly, in 2020-21 research lost nearly £5 billion. Research is a public good and national priority for all political parties. The government should fully fund the indirect costs of research, fixing 100% of that £5 billion loss. The sector could construct a five-year plan to achieve this.

Another chart from the same note:

Figure reproduced from Higher Education Policy Institute.

These shortfalls between student need and student funds are ridiculous. They are not shortfalls in grants but in the right to borrow. Universities should press government relentlessly to fund full maintenance costs, including restored grants for lower-income students.

There’s always great agony about the public supporting students, since as graduates they are cast as an elite. This isn’t true of most graduate salaries, but more importantly it neglects the public benefits, pecuniary but especially non-pecuniary, that all of society reaps from ever-larger numbers of highly educated people.

The standard view also neglects the reality that students are subsidizing the public with their fees. Not yet published calculations by our research partner James Brackley show students paying about five-sixths of the (declining) funding for their instruction.

Figure used with permission from the author.

Government grants covering home student shortfall would go part of the way towards equitable sharing of the costs of benefits that are social as much as they are individual.

Full public funding would make sense to the public if higher education organizations, like Universities UK, tied it directly to better student learning, more and higher quality research results, and better public benefits.

When universities pitch graduate salaries, commercial spin-offs, and other private benefits while ignoring the need for much greater public contributions, it is an Endgame strategy. But it wouldn’t be hard to replace.

HIGHLIGHTS 1: The Blame Woke Crowd; Nobel Prize Refusal, Bezos and Non-Democracy, Evolution Through Art, Fantasy Vice-Chancellor, Arendt on Big Tech

November 6, 2024, Lauren Halsey, Emajendat, Serpentine

THE BLAME WOKE CROWD

"Blaming ​“trans issues” for elite failures is quickly becoming the free space in Bingo of responsibility-evasion. We may look forward to high status Democrats citing trans people to explain away their losses to Barron Trump in the 2048 election. 

"It, of course, wouldn’t be a scapegoat frenzy without immigrants. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews blamed migration and Democrats’ supposed ​“open border” policies for the Democratic Party implosion on Tuesday. Ignoring the fact that this didn’t seem to factor into Democrats’ over-performance in the 2022 midterms when immigration was much higher, and the fact that Democrats have veered hard right on immigration in the past 18 months, Matthews insisted that ​“working people especially” feel ​“betrayed,” and they ​“feel their country has been given away.” Despite polls showing anti-immigrant attitudes distributed evenly, Matthews enjoys speaking on the Working Man’s behalf and wants us to know he can’t be appealed to with Medicare for All or free college or stronger union protections — but only with more anti-migrant demagoguery. . . . 

"That Democrats are bleeding working-class voters from all demographics is indisputable, so a guilty party has to be found. Obviously the solution cannot be a sustained discussion of economic left populism, as this would challenge the class interests of donors and corporate consultants." 

SOURCE: Adam Johnson, "Democratic Elites Blame Everyone But Themselves for Historic Collapse"

LITERARY PRIZE REFUSAL

"When news broke that Korean author Han Kang had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, it sent ripples through the literary world in Korea and internationally. In her home country, writers and proponents of “national literature” hailed it as a triumph for Korean letters. Bookstores saw Han Kang’s works fly off the shelves while publishers rushed to reprint her books, working around the clock to meet the sudden surge in demand. My inbox overflowed with congratulatory messages about Han Kang’s Nobel Prize in Literature—a curious déjà vu of when Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite swept the Academy Awards. Once again, being Korean seemed to make me a proxy recipient of national glory. Friends celebrated with me as though I had personally crafted the lyrical prose that earned the Nobel committee’s recognition, much like they had when Parasite made Oscar history. ...

"In an incisive 2013 blog post, Ursula Le Guin revisited Sartre’s historic Nobel Prize rejection through a contemporary lens, introducing the idea of the “Sartre Prize for Prize Refusal.” Le Guin created a satirical framework that honored principled rejection and critiqued the commercialization of literary achievement.3 Le Guin recounted a lineage of principled prize rejection, connecting Sartre’s foundational act to contemporary examples. Her discussion of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s refusal of the Hungarian PEN award demonstrated how prize rejection continues to serve as a form of political protest. Ferlinghetti’s suggestion that the prize money be redirected to support Hungarian writers advocating for free speech exemplified how rejection can be not merely negative but constructively political.

 

"Le Guin’s account of her own experience refusing the Nebula Award provides an example of how prize rejection operates in practice. Her protest against the Science Fiction Writers of America’s exclusion of Stanisław Lem revealed the intricate relationship between literary recognition and Cold War politics. This personal narrative illuminates how individual acts of refusal can challenge institutional prejudices and political orthodoxies. The ironic twist in Le Guin’s case—that her rejected award went to Isaac Asimov, “the old chieftain of the Cold Warriors” in her terms—serves as a perfect metaphor for the complexities of literary politics. This outcome demonstrates that even principled stances can have unintended consequences, yet this does not diminish the importance of taking such stands."

SOURCE: The Paradox of the Nobel Prize in Literature, BY Alex Taek-Gwang Lee

BEZOS, TRUMP, AND THE FAILURE OF DEMOCRACY

"When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.

"Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.

"Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.

"So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.

"What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

"Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration."

SOURCE: Jonathan V. Last, The Bulwark

WHEN ART EVOLVES, WE EVOLVE

 

"Williamsburg stands as a rebuke to the way corporate control of real estate and artistic commerce incentivizes the production of 'art' for profit alone, and as a reminder of what is possible through vigorous, aesthetically adventurous urban cooperation for art’s sake. As Bradley quotes saxophonist Henry Threadgill, 'When art evolves, we evolve. It’s a pursuit of truth.'"

 

SOURCE: Brendan Riley, LARB

 

 

MESSAGE FROM THE VICE-CHANCELLOR  (a fantasy!)

"Unlike other universities, however, who funded such obscenities not only with massive student fees from the children of the working class but also by hollowing out the ‘product’ that they ‘sold’, we are less exposed to the present downturn than our colleagues, with whom we hold solidarity against their managerial cuts.

 

"Here are few reasons why we are luckier. And we should admit, some of it is luck - not all, though.

 

"Firstly, we recognised the windfall for what it was and invested it in our core business - teaching and research.

 

"While other universities moved massive classes online, we kept class sizes small (even the online ones) and rewarded academics for spending time with their students in the moments it mattered - which were many more hours than the scab researchers supplying managers with the ‘data’ they wanted would admit.

 

"As an institution committed to equity, regardless of incentives to be so, this means that our wealthiest rags-to-riches graduates have a very fond attachment to our organisation, reflected in donations that would make us blush - except all our finances, every dollar - is open to public scrutiny.

 

"As a public university we are so committed to public accountability that not one contract is secret. The few partners who requested commercial-in-confidence contracts were told either we make it public or we don’t do business. This has helped engender trust in our organisation.

 

"Secondly, we trusted in and invested in our staff. No one wants to leave! And so our approach of ignoring the metrics that have corrupted the rest of the sector, eventually fell away for the individuals the rest of the system tried to imprison."

 

Source: Hannah Forsyth, F*cking Capitalism

WHAT YOU CAN LEARN FROM JUST SEVEN PAGES BY HANNAH ARENDT

 

"I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.

 

"But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.

 

"This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.  . . .

" [Here's Arendt,] in the opening pages of her 1958 book: 

"On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to 'escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.'” 

"On page two, she says that these people are 'directed towards making life artificia'”—sort of like virtual reality.

"On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create "artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.' 

"On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are 'the last to be consulted about their use.' So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used. 

"On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the 'higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.'

"On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating 'modern world alienation.'

"On page seven, she says that they inhabit 'an "artificial" world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings'—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world."

I read all this in astonishment.

 

Source: Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker

 

Liner Note 3: Why I Was Wrong about Trump's Defeat

November 10, 2016, Columbus, Ohio

 My heart goes out to the tens of millions of people who spent the campaign in Trump’s crosshairs and who will stay there during his four years of chaos to come. Trump’s victory feels very very bad. In the short run there’s no way to avoid mourning and despair, and disorientation.

 

There’s also no way to avoid a gruesome post-mortem.  We can, however, avoid the bad ones that declare a major cultural shift or claim that we now live in Trump’s America.  Both statements are false. 

 

The Pod Save guys note that Trump gained everywhere with all groups.  As of this writing, with votes still being counted, Trump is still a million votes behind his own total of 2020.  The difference is that Harris is still 12 million votes short of Biden’s count; Paul Campos estimates she’ll wind up 8 million behind him. (UPDATE Sunday Nov 10 is Harris down 5 million from Biden and Trump up 4 million from 2020.) There’s been no national shift to right-wing remedies that weren’t already entrenched in U.S. culture.  It’s important not to collaborate in Trump’s anointment of himself as emperor of a New America.

 

This post is an exercise in avoiding overinterpretation, which is just a first step in a response.  I’ll start with a bit of surgery on my own vision of Trump’s defeat.

 

First, I mentioned the “limits of the numerical” regarding polls, meaning they were wrong. They were, but in the other direction.  I linked to our edited collection with that title, but ignored my own argument there about the Democratic party. I’d argued that Dems in the 1990s had abused the authority of numbers to concoct a claim for the inevitability of deindustrialization.  They used neoclassical modelling to “prove” that the industrial classes objectively had to lose their jobs and middle-class status through offshoring and the rest.  Democrats used models to duck responsibility for their political choice to side with Reaganomics.  The closeness of the 2000 election was another warning to Democrats that the working class wasn’t buying their claim of general prosperity (as 1980, 1984, and 1988 had been). Voters knew the role of Democrats and their experts  in creating the rust belt.  This year they blamed Dems for inflation. Doug Henwood notes that 22% of voters said inflation had caused them severe hardship: “they went for Trump by 50 points.  More than half, 53%, said inflation had caused them moderate hardship. They went for Trump by 6.”

 

There’s a long pattern here. What Clinton and his New Democrats did in the 1990s was done by the Obama administration in 2009-10 when it helped unhouse millions because models and quant-talking bankers said save Wall Street not Main Street. We got the Tea Party in November 2010, and the Democrats have never regained real leverage in Washington. Biden bought himself out of this reality during the first two years but not the last two.

 

In response, I won’t again underplay what I know about political economy, like this history of the Dem’s sacrificial economics from which Kamala Harris didn’t break.  

 

Second, I said “Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.”  This remains true: they were good candidates who held good events where they performed better than I’d expected. But the campaign didn’t turn out their own base, much less win converts.

 

Here I downplayed my knowledge of the effects of the identity of the star of the show. Harris is a Black and South Asian woman, a daughter of immigrants who’d achieved a position of power, influence, and authority over people, including authority over white people.  The MAGA base was always going to reject this embodiment of a social position that makes them generally uneasy if not furiously resentful. A Black woman president may also have been too much for millions of Biden voters, the ones who didn’t turn up for her.

 

Third, I wrote, “Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.” The wording here created a red herring: the command of hatred and resentment is definitely a political power.  

 

I added that Trump “is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America.”  We can add now exit poll results suggesting, for example, that 40% of all 2024 voters and 87% of Republicans favor deportation for “most undocumented immigrants.”  

 

This is not a surprising America but a familiar one. It has always had to be fought by the Other America. The baseline anti-immigrant conviction gives hard-right candidates a big advantage going in.  Then Harris-Walz fell into the familiar Democratic trap of posing a weaker solution to a Republican-favoring problem whose terms they didn’t try to change.  I knew all this, and should have given it full weight.

 

Fourth, I noted a “contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro-union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law.” 

 

There was visible party unity, just not party turnout.  The versions of these unity issues acceptable to “a majority centrist coalition” are also either baked-in or inadequate or both, and thus unable to inspire people to the polls.  I personally dislike centrist coalitional thought, but it would work with the whole Democratic base. It apparently did not.

 

Finally, I smoked the hopium of street education in the form of door-knocking persuasion. 

 

We might think that education was defeated by spectacle and propaganda firehosed through the Republicans’ vast digital media system. That didn’t help. But I think education was defeated by a mass preference for its perennial alternative in America, which is power.  Since education-power (and its failures) is a topic of this blog, I should have put power front and center.

 

I wrote, “Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift” when someone helps you learn or you think through something on your own. I quoted the organizer Luwaunna Adams saying,  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”  I concluded, “Basically, I think ‘thinking for yourself’ is going to win.” 

 

Well, thinking for yourself did win—in a way I’ll qualify in a sec. I don’t like the tone of statement, since it sounds like the sort of thing educated elites always say about the right—that they are feeling, not thinking.  I know that Republicans certainly were thinking.  They were thinking that the economy was bad for them. They were thinking that Biden had done nothing about disorderly immigration while arming chaotic wars. 70% were thinking that the country was going in the wrong direction (Trump won these voters by 34 points).  Democrats were the incumbents and their candidate was defending a status quo that wasn’t working for them. They thought they didn’t need to think more about any of these issues, thank you very much.

 

Now to qualify. Thinking was on the ballot in the 2024 election. 

 

There’s some evidence that “people who hold accurate views on crucial political questions that have empirically verifiable answers overwhelmingly vote for Democrats” (Campos again). For example, there’s clear evidence that “real wages (wages adjusted for inflation) really have risen strongly for the working class in America, and stand substantially higher today than in 2019.”  Trump voters generally think the opposite, and voted on the basis of wrong beliefs.

 

This doesn’t mean that the numbers override or critique peoples’ direct experience of the economy. Their experiences are real, and they teach true things that macroeconomics does not.  But if voters are wrong about the overall picture, they are likely to vote wrong about policy.  Trump’s campaign was an unending carnival of wrong statements about the overall picture, and it systematically miseducated its voters.  

 

Educators in politics, schools, universities, movement organizations, can’t give this problem a populist pass.  We have to design a knowledge system that fixes it. The fix is especially urgent since those voters who most felt capitalism was failing them voted for authoritarian capitalism.  

 

We’ve heard how people are tired of experts, but Trump’s strategy is well beyond this. Trump persuades his followers through the charisma of impunity.  He has impunity specifically in relation to knowledge and to knowledge workers: the judges who insist on accountability to evidence, the climate scientists who show the effects of drill baby drill, the regulators who say crypto needs to be more transparent, the historians who situate his campaign’s racism.  Trump’s power is specifically power over knowledge.  That particular power has to be broken.

 

When we’re feeling better, we’ll figure out how knowledge strikes back.  And strikes with Trump’s non-college base rather than against them.

Liner Note 2: Trump will be defeated in Tuesday's election

 

Nov 5, 2008, UC Students in Grenoble

In 2016, I was one of the Democrats who was pretty sure that Trump could win.  Then in 2020 I was pretty sure he would lose.  Now I’m back to pretty sure that he will lose in 2024. I have a few reasons, including education, as I’ll explain. 

 

I’m not celebrating the Democrats here. I omit the Biden administration's failures (nicely recapped by Patrick Healy here). I do agree with whoever said, in this good discussion of relations between the anti-war left and the Biden war party, that defeating Trump is not a step that can be skipped.  These are reasons for this defeat.

 

First, there’s the technical issue of the limits of the numerical, meaning the limits of polls, or really the limits of the interpretative tweaking of polls.  The media is too positivist by half, and underplays the importance of the assumptions behind the weighing of the results.  The main thing I’ve heard is that the pollsters are obsessed with not undercounting Trump voters because they have in the past.  So they are likely overcounting Trump voters. Everyone in the media “knows” about weighting, and pollwatchers offer learned discussions, but they still talk as though polls are empirical snapshots. They are not.  The performance of the campaigns isn’t even close. I think the voting will be less close than the polls.

 

Second, Harris-Walz are as good as Trump at the showbusiness of campaigning.  His act is in serious decline: it’s bleak, rancid, and desperate. His escalation into the full Nazi is a sign that he knows he is slipping behind.  Harris and Walz are hugely successful in the arena I don’t really care about but know is important—money, ad buys, sound bites, celebrity endorsements, glamour connections, and other things that may sway many people, including those who don’t see politics as distinct from other forms of entertainment in the unending flow of processed images and sound. Harris and Walz are both very pro, and I think that’s the main cause of Trump’s rising fear.

 

Third, Trump’s dogmatic, irrational hatred may seem like a superpower, but it’s not.  We are supposed to be in the age of post-reason, where everyone is driven by emotion, affect, and image-created impulse and is also fine with that.  It’s true that Trump seems to command an Orc army in which not one foot soldier has been alienated by his firehose of provably false claims and civil-war inducing curdled vows, like deporting millions of US residents with the military.  But peak outrage is not the state in which people actually live, even the Trump faithful who are carried away at a rally as they might be at a football game.  Trump is certainly the choice of the reactionary millions—say the one-third of Americans and the three-fifths of Republicans who agree that immigrants poison the blood of America. This is a very high number: I’m not minimizing the problem and to the contrary am studying it. But it’s not a spectacle of mass mind-control that cannot be stopped by ordinary politics.

 

Fourth is a contingent semi-harmony among Democrats.  Some people have argued that Harris-Walz have built a majority centrist coalition around women’s rights to safety and respect, post-Dobbs abortion, meaningful environmental policies, supportive government, non-racism (if not active anti-racism), pro union workplace and wage policies, reduced inequality, and the rule of law. Since I think that’s where the majority of US voters are, I think this will work to build a majority.  The left will need to work hard to fix Harris-Walz’s timid economic plans and acceptance of Biden’s catastrophically bad foreign policy, with a focus on shutting down Israel’s war of annihilation in Gaza.  After they win the election.

 

Everything I read says that Harris-Walz have a great ground game and that Trump-Vance don’t have one at all.  They have liars’ circuses, which encourage the media to mistake part for whole and overstate the attending faithful—100 in Austin, 25,000 in New York—as a mass movement.  But on the ground, the education is happening, from house to house. Oliver Laughland reports:

 

I am out with two women, Leslie Hughes and Luwaunna Adams, whom I met two years ago when we were making a video in western Pennsylvania – a perennial battleground region in the US’s closest-fought swing state. . . . As we trudge the streets, knocking doors in the crisp autumn air, we meet a number of apathetic voters who tell the women they are not planning to cast their ballot this time around. One young man named Rashad says he cannot understand how Hillary Clinton could win the popular vote in 2016 and yet lose the election. “If ‘we the people’ chose someone, but the electoral [system] chooses someone else, what’s the point of my vote?” he asks Adams. Another woman says she finds it impossible to discern “which one is good and which one is bad” – and so has decided to sit it out. …

 

But Hughes and Adams do not give up. They stand for 10 minutes with each voter, running through many of the ways Trump failed during his first four years and why, they say, he should not be given another chance. They talk about how their rights as unionised cleaners are on the line. Adams engages in a frank lesson about the power of voting in her home state. “Your vote does count,” she says to Rashad. “You know what time it is.”

 

Both [voters, Rashad and an unnamed woman], are eventually won over and decide to cast their vote for Harris. Adams lets out a cheer of joy. “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you,” she tells Rashad. He agrees: “Especially in this era of brainwash. Everything is just brainwashing you to think a certain way.” He thinks about taking a break from social media.

 

It is a moment of clarification and a reminder of just how distorted reality has become in this election. Conversations like these may well be the only way to bring Pennsylvania, and by default the whole country, back from the brink.

 

Every activist, organizer, psychologist, or educator knows about the mental shift.  A second ago you thought this. Now you think that, which may be the opposite.  Your feelings change too. The shift is very different from reacting to words or images. It takes root. It has been interacting with you, your identity, and your life, and isn’t just something you’re skimming through. 

 

It’s hard to talk about this difference. we’ve demystified our binary oppositions between thought and feeling, active engagement and passive reception. We’ve also damaged our understanding of learning vs. watching things, or learning vs. viewing, as part of a tech barrage that ramped up with MOOCs in the early 2010s and has reached a new peak with “AI.” 

 

And yet these things are different.  Active thinking is what we try to achieve in class. It involves internalization, learning that “sticks.” It is recognizably different from rote response—there’s a large established literature on this.  It also happens here on the campaign doorstep.  

 

Luwaunna Adams has the best phrase for it.  “When you start thinking for yourself, you realise what the best choice is for you.”

 

Basically, I think “thinking for yourself” is going to win.   And therefore so will Harris-Walz. 

 

Then Trump’s ground game will begin, which will involve massive disputation of the election results.  But he will try that because he will have lost the election.

Why I'm Restarting Remaking

July 19, 2024, Three Cliffs Bay, Wales

Michael Meranze and I stopped this blog not long after I left UC Santa Barbara to take up my current job as Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) in London, England--it’s great!--and Michael became divisional chair of the UCLA Academic Senate and then co-chair of that campus’s Covid task force.  

 

We had a few relapses. I wrote a late-pandemic post on the UC budget in October 2021 and another in January 2022. Michael fell off the wagon in Spring 2024 to critique the New McCarthyism and the authoritarianism of administrators’ handling of student anti-war protests.  

 

But generally this has been my cooling-off period from the dominant focus on higher ed.  I have now been out of my professor job for four years. I moved from Santa Barbara to London, and am now a resident of the UK.  I’m also nearly two years past my period on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and my year as MLA president (2022).  My focus there was the political economy of the academic humanities and the need to build research infrastructure (my columns are here).  The break from higher ed blogging helped my research and writing to expand into other areas.  

 

And yet none of the issues we worked on here have been resolved or ameliorated.  Many have gotten worse, like academic freedom.  Understanding their interconnections with other topics, forces, and sectors has become more pressing. 

 

I’m going to restart the blog to cover an expanded range of issues confronting the creation and use of knowledge. It will cover the culture industries as well as education.  It will continue Remaking the University’s linking of teaching, research, academic content, consciousness, et al. to political economy.  Political economy blogs don’t tie their topics to culture: Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook is a case in point: no cultural or educational drivers there, though he has great art.  Here I’ll study these factors together.  I’ll emphasize social and cultural knowledge in our era of tech determinism  

 

Remaking II will also cover protest knowledge of the kind that Israel’s war in Gaza has provoked on campuses across the country and that has changed public framework for discussions of Israeli policy and the Middle East.

 

The blog will continue my version of critical university studies, with its focus on higher ed’s material conditions and its effects on learning and research. Thanks to Michael (and other, occasional contributors), we analysed a wide range of university matters from 2008 through early 2022.  Now the blog will cover related institutions as well. 

 

In addition to US higher ed coverage, I will be linking UC and US higher ed to university systems elsewhere in the world. I have a front-row seat at UK higher ed crisis—now openly recognized as such—and it’s an important parallel to the US situation. 

 

I used that baggage-laden term, culture industries. The three I follow diligently are journalism, publishing, and theatre, and will be writing about these. By virtue of longstanding local friendship circles I have a good sense of the working lives of many London artists, and will link to commentary on the current art system.  

 

My foundation, ISRF, funds annual grant competitions on open topics as well as focused internal research.  Our current research topics include “Alternatives to Green Finance,” “Political Affect,” “Political Economy and Race,” “AI, Learning, and Attention,” and “Future Universities.” I’m a kind of P.I. on these, and will discuss work in these areas as it becomes relevant here.  I continue to study the nature and social effects of literary and cultural knowledge, so that will turn up as well.

 

Given my job now, I also follow Greater Academia: foundations, think-tanks, museums, libraries, public engagement councils, and research-oriented community-based organizations. They will turn up from time to time.

 

Since public knowledge emerges as much from social movements as from universities, we’ll cover their work in relation to higher ed, media industries, and tech, especially their efforts to improve working conditions. 

 

This sounds like we’ll be spread very thin. We will be.  I can’t actually cover these terrains of cultural knowledge and activity without the shift from “I” to “we” that just happened. But we’ll figure out how to do this as we go. 

 

Part of the solution is that we’ll cover much of this material through citations and excerpts of other people’s writing rather than writing all the posts ourselves. We’ll have three kinds of posts:

            Liner Notes: regular posts, likely one from me per week.            

 Highlights: links and excerpts from pieces about the topics named above.

            Archives: institutional material, which will help correct the misleading histories of academia created by university PR operations and the media.

            

In the process, the blog will set a few themes on a collision course: the varying states of organized knowledge in the world today, knowledge labor, knowledge management, society’s knowledge needs and demands, propaganda and disinformation. And of course money.

 

I’m going to focus somewhat less on the knowledge refusers that on the knowledge producers.  What is happening to knowledge work, broadly conceived?  What has happened to the working conditions especially for cultural work—humanities professors of course but also graphic designers, local musicians, set dressers, and other trades and crafts? Working conditions was my MLA presidential theme in 2022. I will continue that theme here. 

 

The same goes for persistent funding problems. I’ll carry on with Remaking’s political economy of the university and its professional workers, and expand it to non-academic workers.  

 

Culture work is grossly underfunded everywhere. This is happening at a time in world history when none of our major problems can be solved without bringing cultural knowledge to collaborate with the technological dimensions. Problems like climate crisis, inequality, oligarchy, racism, xenophobia, and nonstop warfare all require STEM and non-STEM disciplines to work together. The polycrisis has been entrenched by the continuing acceptance of C.P. Snow’s 1950s model of a divergence between “two cultures” (for him, physics v. literature).

 

At the same time, culture should exist for culture’s sake. It is an intrinsic good. It is a human right. Its sidelining, its funding neglect, creates cognitive shortfalls for addressing both personal and world issues and a rights problem as well.  

Underfunding is a root cause of epistemic injustice, suffered by non-normative standpoint knowledge of every kind.  Epistemic justice depends on budget justice. We’ll cover it.

 

What about the new title: Long Revolution?   I was thinking of doing Remaking Knowledge Work, to reflect my preoccupation with knowledge labor and its institutional conditions. 

 

My colleague Stuart said, why not Knowledge Strikes Back.  That’s pretty close actually.  

 

The current title, Remaking II: Long Revolution, is meant to reference not only the knowledge wars in which my entire career has taken place, but pathways out of them.

 

I spent part of last summer on the Gower Peninsula in Wales, where I go to swim and read. I  wrote a chapter there for a volume on Raymond Williams’ concept of structure of feeling. The chapter is called “Raymond Williams’ Subtheory of Cultural Revolution,” and begins like this:

 

New politics, new economics, new societies: where do they come from? How do they eventually emerge?  How do cultural changes come to affect political and economic systems that seem hopelessly entrenched, if not determined to restore a vanquished past?

 

Raymond Williams called the process of emergence the long revolution. It was slow, and bogged down in its own hesitations and backsliding. It often stalled out for decades at a time. The general direction of the long revolution was democratization. This was democratization of politics but for Williams it was more particularly democratization of culture.

 

Within culture, the long revolution meant a democratization of intelligence, in which the entirety of a given society gradually gets full access to the infrastructures of learning and communication that eventually allows everyone to enact their creative agency in the society overall.   

 

I do believe we’re slouching towards world democratization in spite of our new dark age. But there’s no arc of the universe tending toward it. It takes continuous work amidst the constant backsliding.

I would like the blog to be a place for that work, where we can think these issues through collaboratively, and generate better ideas about how we can overcome our knowledge troubles and their kindred crises.  I hope you enjoy the new version of Remaking.