Black-Pilled on the Internet
Apologies for not publishing a newsletter over the past couple of weeks. I have been a little preoccupied with nursing a bruised ego as a job opportunity that I was led to believe was mine fell through at the 11th hour. Given that my association with the Technology and Social Change protects is also due to end shortly, it has been a bit emotionally draining to tell my wife, the mother to our newborn child, that I will soon be unemployed.
So it is fair to say I have been a little weary as of late, especially seeing the absolutely dire state of the UK academic job market. Those of you who have followed this newsletter over the past year or so have followed me on this journey into the abyss of internet discourse to see what will emerge in the near future. To put it bluntly - oh God, we are not ready.
In 2016, German Sociologist Ulrich Beck's final manuscript, The Metamorphosis of the World, was posthumously published. Metamorphosis was a stark warning to Cosmopolitan institutions that they risked significantly losing the culture war as a decidedly anti-neoliberal public is beginning to emerge. Metamorphosis followed from Beck's World Risk Society (1998), which broadly argued that a new age was downing where cosmopolitan institutions needed to move beyond structuralist approaches to researching how society comes to understand harms so that we can better tackle the risks produced by neoliberal capitalism. Beck was both praised and enjoyed a well-established career within academia for challenging conventional scholarship by informing his peers that their epistemology was shit. Unfortunately, it seems a point of academic scholarship is to rigidly reinforce it's structuralist hegemony. Also unfortunately for Beck, he failed to see this problem - although his familiarity with Mary Douglas's work supposed he should have been aware of it.
I also should have been aware of the problems of academic scholarship. Although, I had thought that since my Gen X peers were now in charge, perhaps there would be a little more room for challenging, interdisciplinary, and forward-thinking research. However, having seen how poorly Harvard Kennedy leadership treated Joan Donovan, research lead of the Technology and Social Change Project, it is easy to see that the disruptive punks will always be kept on the outside. Without a significant commitment from management, Universities will become bland, risk-averse institutions that skate on by from finishing schools for capitalist venture, rather than civic institutions with any real social impact.
So, what does this mean for digital humanities and internet research? Maybe in another decade or so, the fields will become relevant. It will need a radically different approach to understanding what the internet is. The predominant focus of research is to understand how the internet works as a service delivery platform, where the information provided to users can affect specific outcomes. What a remarkably basic take.
Where the internet is, right now, is at a place where people organise meaning, understanding and comprehension of the "real" world. It is a place of ongoing struggle for legitimacy which pitches conflicting world views against each other. At the fore are agents that incorporate a broad spectrum of strategies to get their message across. What we need to do is understand how those strategies work in order to unpick harmful constructions of reality. That is the challenge academic scholarship routinely fails at.
The issue is that academic scholarship perceives an epistemological crisis. It is presumed that everyone agrees on the parameters of reality, the only problem is that some people observe the world wrongly. No. What we have been experiencing the past few years is the emergence of an ontological crisis, where different realities, and understandings of meaning, are in conflict. The ongoing debate regarding transgenderism is a prime example, and something I have documented throughout this newsletter. On one side is the position that transgender people are fighting to have their existence legitimized and live their fullest life like the rest of us. On the other side is the position that transgender people are the confused victims of this contemporary modernity. One sees transgender people as a distinct and valid category of gender representation, the other sees them as the end result of a destructive systemic process. The two views are incompatible, and one is gaining cultural acceptance.
Unfortunately, the current approach of academic scholarship wants to tinker at the edges of internet platforms to modify user experience. I am shocked by the number of digital research vacancies that demand mastery of Python or other coding languages - the focus being on creating digital interventions to reduce harm. This is the wrong approach because it fails to understand why particular representations of meaning resonate with people.
Adding to this problem is the number of senior academics that have "come online" in the past few years. They are well positioned to acquire research funding to propagate their own biases of internet users / how the internet works. Conspirituality is a great example because it is inevitably lumped in with Christian Nationalism. As such, any research simply reiterates the horrors of Christian Nationism without considering the possibility that Christian Nationalism is one endpoint of a radicalisation process.
The problems are worse in the UK, which views academic scholarship as simply a means to generate facts to inform policy decisions. There is not a culture which seeks to generate understanding of this contemporary techo-cultural moment, only a culture which demands the feasibility of change be demonstrable. So here I find myself staring into the void of unemployment, black-pilled at the state of academic scholarship that is unwilling to support new approaches to new problems. Perhaps things will improve in a decade or so, but I have a family to support in the meantime.