The Curiosity Crisis: Why Universities Became Brothels

When universities bowed down to the junta many people were shocked, but I wasn’t one of them. Perhaps it was because after spending 11 years in US academia, I had already noticed a disturbing trend: education transforming itself from a vital social function to an industry with its own fast-moving consumer goods, brainwashed customers, greedy bosses, and shameless profit targets. Colleges and universities made the choice to turn themselves into expensive sandwich shops selling certifications, as opposed to nurseries of the future that cultivate integrity and freedom of thought. As they viciously compete like brightly coloured detergents on a supermarket shelf, today’s universities continue to call themselves institutions, when in fact they are consumer brands – and when you’re a brand, all you care about is selling units. You will bow down, bend the knee and roll out the red carpet to whichever dictatorship marches into your campus uninvited.

But when education becomes a business, it is no longer an education. It is the propaganda of its sponsors, and the indoctrination of its students into citizens that learn to bow down, just like their teachers. The first casualty of the financialization of education is always education itself: the very academic disciplines that are meant to question, challenge and reframe the most toxic narratives of civilisation, now become the servants of these narratives.

The selling-out of universities has put at stake more than meets the eye: not only are we compromising freedom of thought, but the future of humanity. Because when only the learnings that fit the targets of a predatory economic system make it to the reading list for the final exam, this is not an education but a deadly plague of confirmation bias. Our universities have become extensions of corporations investing in environmental destruction, inequality, war and genocide, when they should be places that question the narratives which brought us to this climate, ecological, and civilisational collapse. If our educational system can’t get this right, no one will.

Ironically, it is the collapse itself which is the biggest moneymaker both for the education sector and capitalism. When there are holocausts, universities create history departments. When there is a climate crisis, they create climate change academic programs. When it is time to critique what caused these crises in the first place, academic funding mysteriously runs out. As a society we are more primed to monetize our problems than to solve them, and to belatedly recognize them only when they have turned into full-blown crises. There is more money to be made from creating crises and pretending to address them than from solving them, a vital storyline in the playbook of late stage necrocapitalists. Capitalism operates within a web of tragically stupid self-delusions and economic hallucinations: it will always prefer to invest in quick-buck temporary fixes and pretend innovations for made-up market gaps, than in real solutions for true existential crises. Our universities mirror the priorities of this necrocapitalist society: they will invest a deluge of funds into converting knowledge to power, but only allow a trickle for academics who speak truth to that power.

When it comes to research, most academic scientists today are mercenaries hired by corporate interests, contracted to develop “products” and “solutions” without any concern for the impacts of their discoveries. This deliberate separation between cause and effect, and the solitary confinement of scientific disciplines into silos means that we cannot devise the systemic solutions that our systemic polycrisis demands. The task of picking up the pieces of yet another technological whiplash is left to sociologists, philosophers and ecologists who are only allowed to enter the disaster scene long after the damage has been done, scores have died, and society has been maimed beyond recognition.

Just like other underregulated industry sectors blinded by greed, growth and politics, academic research gets a big fat F in its ability to critique itself. Risks and downsides to research are always censored at the set-up stage in order to secure grants, or at the very least delayed until the product has been developed, commercialised and has sold enough units to fill up golden parachutes. Issues and concerns eventually surface, only belatedly though, and with the sole purpose of serving as incentives to design “a new, better version” of the product, and profit yet again. This isn’t science at the disposal of society. It is institutionalised fraud.

The reason why corporations fund academic science is so that they monopolize access to cutting-edge innovations, chain them down to intellectual property rights contracts, and monetize them to death on the stock market before they have even been invented. Academic scientists become whored-out corporate contractors tasked with developing the next set of blockbuster addictions, tech disruptions or weapons of mass destruction. While real-life brothels sell human bodies for money, universities sell the minds of their faculty members to corporations in exchange for the vanity of being able to crawl up the top 500 ranking list of “academic institutions”. The entire sector of academia has become one sad, disgusting cesspool of angry mosquitos biting each other, otherwise known as “healthy competition”. Those academics who suck up and are willing to whore themselves out to the corporates, can quit jumping in the air for dollar bills at street level, and take the elevator shaft straight to the bank vault.

There are personal reasons why I’m banging on about this, as someone who spent a considerable part of their life in universities and truly enjoyed the experience of learning: so much so that, part of me wanted to stay in school forever. As technology atomizes and zombifies us, we are in desperate need to reawaken the fundamentals of independent research, debate, and critical thinking that our universities are assassinating. There is more at stake here than freedom of thought in the face of corruption and autocracy. We are facing a crisis in what was supposed to be one of the most distinctly human qualities, curiosity. While the acquisition of knowledge is now easier than ordering a Big Mac, the search for it is becoming a dying art in a world where the average human prefers to accumulate data rather than understand it, and trusts AI’s answers more than they do their own research. We are becoming less inquisitive and more transactional in our relationship with information: we consume it but rarely critique it. Knowledge is being quantified, weighed and stored in the cloud, but not experienced, checked and interrogated. It has become an object of acquisition, yet another fast-moving consumer good in the necrocapitalist product conveyor belt.

Our dysfunctional relationship with information affects how we relate to nature too. The academic obsession of cataloguing and recording other life forms is an objectified view of Earth and its species motivated more by a desire to own and dominate, not study these life forms. Human-centric science limits the scope of research to how we can exploit other life forms, rather than how we can better understand them. For humans, Earth is nothing but a huge supermarket: we are much more interested in owning it than understanding it. This economic system takes living organisms, strips them of their rights, turns them into products, and replaces their sovereignty with an expiration date. Humans are not exempt from this treatment.

The continuing brutal objectification of nature allows corporations and their contracted scientists to dissect, disrupt and destroy the natural world in the name of “knowledge and discovery”. To ensure they don’t stray away from their commercial targets, scientists are conditioned to become emotional zombies: completely detached from their subject matter even as they are increasingly immersed in it. Emotion and ethics are virtually forbidden in science, leaving our civilisation powerless against dangerous discoveries and the dangerous minds that get hold of them. Scientists are trained to shut down their emotions and use only data to study their subject matter, essentially putting on mute a large part of their sensory complement. There must be zero emotion and zero connection with the item under study, in case it “impacts objectivity”. A climate scientist is not allowed to mourn the disappearance of an ancient glacier, except in their own private time away from the public. The same goes for the scientist conducting lethal animal experiments: they are forbidden from taking a moment to sit with their feelings, let their emotions “interfere” with their scientific study, because these emotions will very likely jeopardize the entire project.

Underneath cold-blooded science lies the narrative of human supremacy. The disconnection of the researcher is always dressed up as scientific objectivity, when in fact it is human supremacy in its most dangerous form. Mainstream science emotionally detaches itself from the subject matter whether it is an animal, a robot, or an entire society not because it wants to be objective, but because it does not want to give its subject matter any rights of its own within the study framework. The subject matter must remain mute, gagged, a passive, helpless object so that we can do to it whatever we please. In our eyes it only ever existed to be used and “studied”.

This pretentious objectivity is dressed up in sentience supremacy narratives: the superior, intelligent human playing God with the inferior, much less intelligent organism: not as a life form with flesh, blood, emotions and sovereignty over its body and soul, but as an object for personal use. Much of science objectifies organisms and does not even permit them to be “living”, let alone exist as biological entities. But they, just like us, are living beings made of the same fragile and perishable organic molecules. They have equal rights to life, and the same needs and entitlements to comfort and affection, however low in the pecking order of intelligence we decide to conveniently, and arbitrarily, place them. Those humans who view nature as an object lack any palpable sense of who they are, what they are, or even where they are. They spend their lives in an impenetrable darkness, living through millions of failed attempts to feel, see, and hear. In the end they become objects themselves.

Academia has an incredibly important value to society and should be owned by society, not by tech giants and broligarchs. Academics should be funded to pursue the research they feel is important, not what will create the next blockbuster product that makes a corporate boss rich. The social and environmental responsibility of universities should never be for sale, under any regime.

Thank you for reading. For more detail on how necrocapitalism operates, check previous articles or read one of my books. This newsletter is my main income but is FREE to subscribe to, thanks to the generosity of paid members. If you like what you read and can afford to support, your contribution is vital and greatly appreciated. Many thanks to all of you already supporting