In the wake of 2084: A Birthday party...a piece by David Graeber, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, which discusses sci-fi expectation hangovers and why redditors are unfortunately some of mankind's brightest. After listening to promises of ever-accelerating technological advances that would bring us boundless space travel and medically engineered perfection, why is the best we can do post-space race a pretty fucking lame Human Genome Project and really great special effects in science fiction films?
Then turning to the academy, we get a depressing take on GRAD LIFE:
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. 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.
Here's to the future of eccentricity, brilliance and impracticality, and to those of us with parents with livable basements! Reach for the stars, y'all.
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