How Academia Got Pwned (1)

This is the first post in a series about the glorious completion of my academic career, the internet, and the future of intellectual life.

This blog will now commence a strange and winding tale. If it requires many installments, and many detours, it is because I am still living this tale, and its telling is likely to affect its plot in unforeseen ways. There is a time for peace, when all the little lies must be respected so that things may carry on, and there is a time for war, when all of the little lies must be disrespected so that true life may carry on. Now is a time for war.

The completion of my academic career is now irrevocably underway, and it is time to bear witness. Whether my final day in academia comes in the form of expulsion or resignation remains to be determined, but that hardly matters. In the story of a life, bearing witness is the portal to an other life. This has always been the case, it has always been known, and it has always been denied by most people. Fortunately, this has never stopped a determined minority in every generation from acting on this insight, as true knowledge remains true, and actionable, whether anyone is convinced or not. Though I long ago ceased trying to convince anyone of anything, I remain obsessed with understanding these miraculous empirical mechanisms that somehow ensure liars always lose and truth-tellers always win. At least in the long-run, anyway.

Before the digital epoch, the long-run would sometimes take longer than a lifetime, which is why many true thinkers of the past would not be vindicated until after their death. But due to the compression of time that has come with the information revolution, the long-run of a life is no longer very long. The idea that one bad move on the internet can ruin someone's life — this is one of the dumbest and most reactionary bits of conventional wisdom out there today, promulgated by fearful people who mistake their anxiety for a law of society. The time it takes for an event to run its course rather seems to be shrinking, while the mechanics of reality modification are increasingly visible and tractable. Thus, today, while telling the truth continues to bring certain and near universal ostracism from mainstream institutions, this short-run punishment has also never been easier to ignore, escape, and overwrite — before the truth-telling wins.

Telling the truth always wins because it wins immanently, the telling is itself the motion of entry into an other life, and joy is at once its marker, motor, and reward. Telling the truth cannot not win, because it asks for nothing, expects nothing, and delivers to itself the only reward it wants or needs. Thus, although my tale will not convince a single dying liar to choose life, and such dying liars will certainly mock me for what looks like a colossal failure of ethics or strategy or both, I will nonetheless commence my tale in the most absolute and reckless honesty I can muster. Anything I might lose from doing so cannot be worth very much, and I simply cannot fail to win the only thing I have ever been seeking. If I can impart some passing insights or lessons to others on their own search for true life, then it will have been doubly worthwhile, though this brings some danger. The true life is always an other life, but the other life is always immediately available. There is no learning or permission required for the conduct of true life, despite what many people think. On the contrary, it is when one stops asking permission to live that an other life begins.

[These posts will constitute a first rough draft — or really just an initial brain dump — for a book I will publish soon enough. I am seriously toying with a Kickstarter campaign, but it depends on how much interest there is... I currently have an agent selling a different book, so for good reason he is not crazy about the idea of me writing and publishing a totally different book right now. But if there's enough interest in these posts, I could find a way. As always (as you'll find out in these posts), my solution is to just produce what I want to produce, share, and sort out the strategic details later. I originally thought I might call this book How Academia Got Pwned: The University, the Internet, and the Future of Intellectual Life but my patrons prefer Jumping Ship: Why the Politically Correct University Can't Survive the Internet. Naming things is the worst, I'll figure this out later. If you have any input on this or anything else, including questions about my narrative and/or ideas, I'll be reading all replies carefully. Thanks.]