community
Dear friends,
We’ve charted knowledge validation before. Or, I suppose, flitted around the edges of the supposed “validatory” power of the western hegemonic bloc. A bloc which is under threat, and yet remains largely outsourced under contemporary capitalist forms. Is the academy ready to be captured by the counter-hegemony, or are its tools, methods and self-important validations ready to topple to the disinformation racket of modern platform social media. Ok, we’ll scratch this itch a little further and ask some critical questions, because knowledge production remains an eternally under critiqued area of capitalism.
Universities and research institutes have long served as a big rubber stamp for some kinds of knowledge. Without getting into a material history of things like peer-review, we can see the influence of ”valid knowledge” on civil society for decades. The written form of record that these institutions produce inform a great many areas of bourgeois life – and, importantly, contribute to ongoing hegemonic reproduction. Take for instance an academic paper. For a paper to be written, we need researchers, researchers need jobs, institutions employ researchers, and in modern times, researchers must also seek funding from dried out pools. Each of these steps is political.
Universities, containing things to Australia for a moment, are beholden to government for funding and direction. This is achieved both through financing the institutions (parking the way HECS screws both universities and students for a moment) and through the provision of political acts (from actual acts, i.e., the University’s act) through to “strategic direction” through organs such as the chief scientist. Then there is the proliferation of academic hierarchy, most of whom are beholden to external interests, anything from political party membership, through to holding sponsored roles (i.e., xyz corp’s professorial fellow for killing the environment). Then, down layers of neoliberal ontogenesis, researchers are themselves beholden to political and corporate interests. Researchers, here, serve dual function: author/scientist, and reviewer/expert. The circlejerk of capitalism as epistemic master is complete.
Each layer of university existence is designed to prioritise stasis – not innovation, and the stasis above all else must ensure capitalism’s hegemony. Even if that means sabotaging the organs which support that hegemony in favour of new brutalisms. Bureaucratisation is the latest recycled fad in the onslaught of agency undermining processes designed to keep people from thinking their way out of capitalism. And it is at this point where a fundamental philosophical question emerges. This, as something I grapple with each day, is fundamental to theories of change:
Can the system which has created and maintained colonial capitalist hegemony be used to absolutely transform that system?
We might look to Lorde[1] on the masters tools at this juncture. From Marxist law[2], to intersectional feminisms[3]Lorde shook up notions of transformation using capitalism’s tools to change the world. While cynical inaction surfaces as a result of some of this thinking, decolonial and anti-capitalist thinkers continue to challenge the tools which reproduce our unequal system[4]. The essential tools, though, which emerge from the descendants of Lorde’s thinking, are in the epistemological re-shaping work which allow us to fundamentally challenge the ways our knowledge production happens, working with each other to find new ways of being and knowing[5]. A literal collective (that means all of us, intersectionally, not some of us qua capitalists) redefining of how we know and why that knowing matters.
This said, the general usefulness of universities and research institutes to capitalist hegemony seems to be in extreme doubt in our current political moment[6]. Look no further than the exile of researchers, academics and scientists from the US under Trump’s philistine and disinformation rulership[7]. But all over the world, universities and institutions which are responsible for anything from biomedical science through political philosophy are coming under fire and are contracting far faster than they are growing. Between the hegemonic apparatus embracing neofascism and the primary media form, platform social media, peddling ever more propaganda and disinformation with the goal of driving “engagement”, the process of knowledge validation is in tumult.
At this point, I believe, those of us in universities need to ask ourselves what we are striving for. Are we seeking endless reproduction of racist, sexist, ableist, and expropriative systems which feed the capitalist beast (and allow it to outgrow its need for us) all while cancerously destroying us and the rest of the ecology. Or do we look to what we could do to educate, work in relation with, and share our tools which have been too long kept guarded atop the ivory tower?
There is a fundamental need for us to shift the way we operate. Either we go: with the current hegemony we beg for scraps at capitalism’s table, reinforcing a broken and distorted system; or, we use the immense power still inside our institutions, the knowledge, processes and practices we know might be beneficial to people and communities to make strong relationships with people and communities. Not to “save”, and certainly not to “steal” from them, but to step alongside and work in partnership. The latter, fundamentally re-shaping the collective academic view of epistemology, is happening across intersectional work in a huge variety of arenas[8] – this is not “new” but rather, counter-hegemonic and thereby obstructed from mainstream view. This gives us an opportunity to reflect on what knowledge is, what thinking, knowing and doing could be, and how we want to relate to each other and to the planet – hope.
I started this thought with a pondering of what exactly it is universities offer students. Walking through Tarndanya’s Rundle Mall this morning, I further wondered, what can a university possibly offer an Aboriginal community? Further extraction? Further harm? Can we, in these current regimes, work toward truth telling, currently a distant glimmer, and build relationships with communities to recognise their aspirations, and centre those as ways of building a better future? I know for certain that the knowledge held in Aboriginal communities to date is far more complex and nuanced – and applicable with Country – than “western” knowledge. Yet universities concern ourselves with “educating” not recognising. We are worried about “validation” not acknowledgment. And we race to deficit narratives which undermine Community knowledge lest anyone else be labelled “knower”. Heaven forbid anyone else be as tastelessly pretentious as the bourgeois professor.
All the while, we waste literally millions on advertising campaigns to target future students, particularly the current lifeblood, international students. The marketing department wastes hours inventing empty slogans, targeted advertising copy, and finding ‘placement’ with no authentic groundwork to support their promises and claims. Decades of researchers barreling into communities and places with empty promises, delivering broken dreams, and producing decontextualised texts “about” rather than with have severed what could have been a powerful space for transformation of the Australian publics.
And this is but one, fundamental, space where university capitulation to corporate and hegemonic political interest fails civil society. Who cares, in 2025, if a “fact” is peer reviewed? Who agreed that these people are the ones who should be allowed to validate knowledge in the first place? Anything resembling truth, if we could even agree on what that is, is becoming increasingly scarce in our AI-fuelled pseudoscientific platform capitalism reality. Media literacy is at an all time low, and even the fundamental skill of searching the internet is being replaced by >70% inaccurate ecology destroyers[9].
It feels like now or never to pivot the purpose of education towards something which engages communities. Lest hallucinatory fact guessing machines replace the utterly human act of educating and we stumble into darkness. (mind you, it always feels now or never, so don’t panic, let’s strategise and contribute to the already growing counter-hegemony instead).
With care,
Aidan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audre_Lorde#Sister_Outsider also https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/audre-lorde ↩︎
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4544488 ↩︎
https://www.google.com.au/books/edition/Beyond_the_Master_s_Tools/72fuDwAAQBAJ?hl=en https://doi.org/10.1080/09540253.2021.1963420 ↩︎
Or actually for decades… https://doi.org/10.1007/s40309-014-0041-x ↩︎
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/jun/15/academics-science-trump-university-crackdown ↩︎
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/29/ai_agents_fail_a_lot/ ↩︎
Dear friends,
It’s been a minute, and there’s been some significant changes for both mind reader and for me as a human. Today I want to take a moment to appreciate the good and bad of what is emerging and present in our world. Our first shared moment is about the tragic, terrible, and inhumane Trump-Musk-drama that is not only a visceral distraction to churn through the absolute worst vitriol and hate speech at the expense of those already deeply marginalised by American society, but also a very real threat to the nature of contemporary social fabric and cohesion. The second is a moment of hopeful futures as energy which has been forestalled far too long begins to surface and push for radically ethical new ways.
It has been nearly impossible to ignore over the past month the absolute imposition of ‘noise’ over signal in our news, social medias, and relationships with one another. The now finely honed machine that is Trumpian politics has effectively engulfed the traditional media, and social commentators, in a haze of hateful, divisive, and utterly empty and fake information. This has been used to drive hateful, divisive and empty actions on behalf of those who themselves are exploited, but in positions of relative privilege, over those who carry intersectional ‘disadvantage’. We’ve talked at length about the nature of privilege and how it constructs particular identities as superior, how it systematically enables the erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems, how it undermines transformative potential of human connection through ‘noise’.
However, I find myself increasingly distressed at the way that this noise, produced by the Trump-Musk oligopoly, creates very real harm. Be it through the fear that is produced by human actions against those targeted by the noise, be it through the anger and hateful action of those inspired by that noise to believe particular wrong story ways, or through the harm that everyone who consumes news, engages in relationships, and reads the world encounters online, in our communities, and indeed in our homes. There is, though, a pattern to the manufacturing of consent that enables the hateful, violent and utterly wrong social conditions we are seeing in the U.S. and this pattern’s shape begs analysis:
[dramatisation] -> [amplification] -> [action/harm] -> [harm/action] -> [dramatisation]
Within the dramatisation cycle, here, there are age old raced, gendered and classed narratives which seek to utterly destroy the little remaining social fabric resting in the ashes of the neoliberal world. Through ‘othering’, amidst multitude technologies, a wrong vision of the world is produced for Trump-Musk and its followers, a reality akin to tribalism where ‘leader says’ is the only thought given – indeed, even when it is directly contradictory to a message espoused just 24 hours earlier. The dramatisation, a critical step, involves either the utter manufacture of false narratives which deliberately drive division, or the dispossession of people from their story to create conditions which enable dehumanisation. As part of this process, the dramatisation is left deliberately conjectural and laconic – an empty story, leaving a vacuum to fill the full shape of hatred, fear and division.
The news media then, races to fill this amplification process, filling its own conclusions into the abstract details provided by the wrongful, hateful, and vile story as was presented in the first instance by a Trump-mouthpiece. This serves twofold purposes, either it enables the Trump-Musk oligopoly to manufacture new details for the story to (re)sensationalise it, or it necessarily enables the amplification and redistribution of these narratives amongst the communities it targets: both for the ‘winner’ and the ‘loser’. Naturally, under capital, it matters very little which ‘side’ you are on to the media outlet, so sensationalisation of the ‘airy’ gaps in the story enable more ad sales, page views, and ‘promoted content’ – ensuring the (social) media beast keeps bloating on human suffering. Importantly, the ‘winners’ in this situation are by nature extremely more privileged than the ‘others’ they target, and there is absolutely no parallel between a hateful vitriolic racist, sexist, misogynist and a vulnerable, exploited community. However, both are ‘targets’ for capitalist exploitation along varied intersections, and are – to the neutral news another cent in the jar of ad viewerships.
Then comes an action/harm harm/action cycle which itself feeds further dramatisation by the Trump-Musk orifice. This action/harm cycle sees the oppressor, as always, throw more blows towards the oppressed, whose self-defence is characterised by the media as a transgression. The sadness, anger and despair of the community who was targeted, itself, becomes target of the next dramatisation or, simply, ends or further jeopardises that community’s existence. This also causes harm to the oppressor, every time dehumanising themselves in their violent, wrongful actions. What we see, now, with the Trump-Musk oligopoly is the capitalisation of human suffering. Another, probably not final, frontier for capitalist expansion and metastasisation.
Around we go, ever closer to a future of complete capital. Onto-epistemic control be damned, now the very life/death cycle of human communities is a space for the extraction of ‘surplus value’. What world do we live in? A violent one. We are violent to each other, to ourselves and our bodies, to our planet and her ecosystem. We are fundamentally controlled by a cancerous, toxic, and fundamentally ‘wrong’ socioecology. But does it end here?
I spend quite a lot of my time in the thinking/feeling nexus. Moving from heart to mind, mind to body, body to heart and around. In this process I notice the world around me, and I notice when it responds to kindness, and when it responds to hatred, despair, and malice. One set of these cycles self-replicates in such a way that there is a vacuum of hope: the hate cycle leads to more anxiety, fear, and distress. And while it is utterly important that we understand the fear, division, hatred and bullshit of toxic, divisive, and broken regimes, we also need to hold space for hopeful narratives of transformation that herald a brighter world. Because what is future thinking without some utopianism, and how can we truly ‘experiment’ with ways of being that are conducive to communal human flourishing if we do not find joy in the love, and hope that is possible despite the ontological frame in which we rest?
Here I offer very few words, but instead a half-formed thought on a way towards ‘freedom’:
Collective conscious,
Purposive relationality,
Deep time,
Earnest conversation,
Self-transformation, communal responsibility.
And I owe you more than this, dear reader, I owe you all very much – so as I think about the next chapter in mind reader, I think about the ways I can offer hope and reflective practice that enables change. Because I am utterly distraught at the state of the world as hatred surges, fear rises, and communities clinging for hope are smashed apart. But even through this, hope remains, and people find a way to push forward. So, I would like to find that future thinking, working, and being with you. A collective project to move from “just negative” to “negative” plus “futures”.
Ethics, hell relationality, and the possibility of something different are all just ideas. After all, if the universe developed us to be its conscious, it must offer something much deeper for those who listen, learn, and work in relationship with each other towards something better – not something hateful. The power of activism has always been in its deep hope, its need for a better way, and banding together to challenge a cold and empty world. It sure is cold, but it isn’t empty, so let’s keep constructing hopeful ways together. Broken worlds can lead to better next chapters, suffering can lead to hope and peace, and through actively and deliberately challenging divisive, racist, sexist, anti-queer, and anti-worker rhetorics we might collectively construct something new. It doesn’t take a whole system overhaul, just working at where we are to hold compassion, and listen.
Sorry for the fluff, just in a reflective mood this weekend.
Listening to ya right now, you exceptional humans,
Aidan