Para-academic techno-philosophy

What the hell am I doing here?

I’ve spent most of my professional life as an academic working across the fields of critical theory and science and technology studies (STS.) For years, my goal was to develop a political epistemology of computing applications (mostly artificial intelligence / machine learning) through a technical lens, that is, to present their formal features as concrete instantiations of political principles. In December 2018, I wrote a blog post for Virginia Tech’s Institute for Policy and Governance that explains the rationale for this project. It’s something of a preface to my dissertation, which I finished in early 2020.

That post came from growing concern with academic tech criticism’s tendency to focus on “external” factors – direct inputs and outputs, plus broad effects – instead of taking a fine-grained lens to technology qua “internal” engineering choices. The line between the internal and external properties of computing technologies is always to some degree provisional, but staying squarely on the side of the latter only leads to the kind of vague thinking that underwrites technological capitalism. The task of addressing the big picture of technology with any real seriousness demands that we begin on the inside and work our way out to the social, cultural, political, etc., slowly and carefully. That’s what I believed back then, and I still believe it today.

This requires facility with areas of study and practice that seem very different on the surface, like machine learning and the theory subfields (political, critical, French.) In fact, ML and theory aren’t so far apart, but the whole point of the techno-capitalist vagueness machine is to make it hard to understand why. To get to the point where anybody other than specialists can grasp ML’s theoretical import, you need specialists to lay the groundwork. That was the role I aspired to.

So much cross-disciplinary synthesis can really only take place in the context of an academic career, or so I thought back then, which is why I went for the PhD. After two years, I’d grown tired of conferences and publications that uncritically assimilated technical objects to analytic frameworks that were never meant for them. The post talks about how the field of Critical Data Studies (CDS) seems to be premised on this mistake:

The benefit of using data as a basis on which to organize thought on new media cannot be understood by studies that illuminate its exogenous effects—which, in fact, describes the majority of existing CDS analyses. While these are helpful, they must be supplemented with the technical, endogenous definitions of data employed in the discipline of computer science.

I’m no longer committed to a technically rigorous, discipline-agnostic, ontological understanding of digital data as a basis for theoretical analysis, but with the advent of genAI, the precept is more important than ever: emphasizing inputs and outputs over the operations that connect them leaves us with net-negative knowledge about how computers are changing the world. This is because the representative regime of computation already accounts for and preempts other (older) approach to theoretical intervention. (“Epistemological” might work for what I mean by “representative” here, but I think it’s less correct.) To understand how computers enact politics (or culture, or sociality), you have to use the right tools for the job. This demands a certain degree of technical fluency, but it’s not the same thing as techno-optimism.

I’ll come back to this point, but for now, more scene-setting.

Originally, this newsletter was my way of dealing with a dry spell in my publication record. Between 2021 and 2024, I was teaching four courses per semester while navigating the job market and administrative duties that would be considered excessive even by today’s deeply anti-labor standards. This included chairing two tenure-track search committees during my own first year on the tenure track, a thing that should never happen and that I mention because it’s a clear indictment of my former place of employment, at least if you know anything about how academic hiring is supposed to work. It was difficult to get traditional publications off the ground under these circumstances, so in 2024 I turned to Substack to share essays about why Timothy Bewes’s Free Indirect: The Novel in A Postfictional Age should be considered central to an epistemology of LLMs (special interest at the time.) (Note that I have since unpublished those pieces; nobody has complained.) I did not have a larger vision for Substack in mind, at least not consciously, but in hindsight it was an early move towards what happened six months later.

I quit my job. That was in early 2025. The decision was mostly due to situational, day-to-day stuff, but the fact that relative security did not come with the material affordances (time, money, supply of genuinely useful interlocutors) required for serious research didn’t help. Fourteen months on, I can confirm that that position was less conducive to scholarly life than total non-affiliation. And I understand that in that respect, I was the norm rather than the exception. My days and weeks might have been exceptionally awful, but the structural barriers to scholarship that did anything other than recapitulate staid perspectives were not.

Still, this felt especially consequential for my particular agenda. The sort of tech research I’ve been aiming at is very hard to pull off within the confines of the neoliberal-administrative university, especially if your campus is badly underfunded, understaffed, and only interested in supporting faculty research for the purpose of maintaining accreditation (which is a fair description of a lot of higher ed today, maybe the majority of it.) Maybe I should be more charitable towards academic tech critics, because unless you’ve got a really good position at a really good school, you might find yourself forced to churn out publications without being properly equipped for the undertaking. But even if you do have a good position at a good school, the prospects for being fully understood and pushed in useful ways are growing dimmer, not brighter, as time goes on.

In other words, institutionalized academia is bad if you want to do good work on tech. I have to keep leaning into autobiography to bear this out.

My PhD is from an interdisciplinary program: ASPECT, the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought at Virginia Tech. This is a joint initiative between Philosophy, Political Science, History, and Religion and Culture (Religion and Culture is one unit.) All ASPECT faculty have their tenure home in one of those four departments, and from what I understand, it was at least partially inspired by the fact that none could sustain a PhD program on their own.

ASPECT’s main organizing principle is the criterion of “sufficient interdisciplinarity” for dissertations. When I was there, it had a strong unofficial bent towards the Frankfurt School, French theory, and assorted Marxisms, but I don’t think that’s still the case. As a choose-your-own-adventure doctorate, it rewards students who come in with a strong sense of purpose. I was ideally suited for it because I knew exactly why I was there. But when I started, I was honestly not prepared for PhD-level research and writing in the theoretical humanities and social sciences, or in anything really. My MS is in nonprofit management, and I didn’t do a second master’s. I was lucky enough to be exposed to continental philosophy and literary theory as an undergrad, and I was really excited by the thought of pursuing a literary theory PhD straight out of my BA. I might have gone that route if a professor hadn’t told me that the only successful literary theorists are already fluent in German or French by their early twenties. Her actual words included the phrase “a life of poverty.” Message received.

Ultimately, I decided on an MS that seemed to satisfy the conditions of “employable” and “meaningful” if not very stimulating. Scholarly curiosities became hobbies. This looked like carting around a battered library copy of L’Arrêt de mort (in English) in the same bag that contained textbooks on fundraising, stats for demographic research, and various nonprofit twists on b-school contrivances (Future-Proof Models For Visionary Leadership…). It was eh.

With one semester left in my master’s, I nearly had my own arrêt de mort, stupidly getting myself run over by a car, which was every bit as awful as it sounds. Late one night, a sedan struck me on my right hip, throwing me several feet before pinning me between the undercarriage and the pavement. Ten minutes passed until an ambulance arrived to scrape me up, during which I was a layer in a sandwich that started with the ground and included a messenger bag stacked with several books and a laptop. The pressure broke my clavicle, hips, spine, and teeth (astonishingly, my Mac survived with only a cracked screen.) But this encounter was propitious, since it left me with big-girl money for the first time in my life, which emboldened me to assume the financial risk of a humanities PhD.

For this reason and a few others, I spend a lot of time thinking about the calculations people make (or don’t make) as they begin to consider a scholarly career. It’s unlikely that I’d be doing any of this if it weren’t for the accident. And I’ve always seen it as my responsibility to keep my vision trained on what makes scholarly knowledge production possible, since the circumstances that have allowed me to participate in it are so remarkable.

I don’t come from an academic family and I didn’t make close connections with professors or grad students when I was an undergrad. Academe was terra incognita when I started at Virginia Tech; getting through it and coming out with a fighting chance on the job market meant that I had to become a quick study in tacit institutional norms. My friends at VT helped me, or at least did not laugh at me for, say, not knowing that there’s a difference between “PhD student” and “PhD candidate,” a fact that was lost on me until halfway through my first semester. This was enough to get me across the dissertation finish line and eventually land two full-time gigs as a professor, but the fact that I had commenced without any robust scaffolding in a recognized tradition had long-term repercussions for my capacity for very good scholarship. I am only just beginning to appreciate this, and I’m tempted to say that no longer having skin in the game (anything resembling a normal ac career) has helped me see the structural deficiencies in my knowledge base with clear eyes.

Choosing an interdisciplinary program was part of the problem. Ten years ago, I thought I would benefit from the freedom afforded by interdisciplinarity. I don’t think I was aware that interdisciplinarity was becoming more popular at the time overall. If I recall correctly, the prevailing sentiment was still that it’s a bad move from a job market perspective, since it makes it hard to brand yourself. I wasn’t concerned with this; my relatively lucrative brush with death had rid me of all fear of destitution. (I was kind of on steroids for a few years, nonchalant about a ton of real-life stuff while pouring blood, sweat, and tears into becoming a very good scholar seven days a week.)

What interdisciplinarity actually entails depends on who you ask. Some will say it’s just a marketing term. Others will say that it designates bona fide expertise in multiple disciplines (quite difficult) or that interdisciplinarity in the social sciences and humanities is a natural fit with radical politics (highly questionable.) This is not really a fruitful line of inquiry, but it’s worthwhile to consider why the term saw an uptick around the time I was setting my course. By the mid-2010s, academia had started to go full throttle on internetizing everything. (This is not the same as technologizing / digitizing everything; TL;DR, it’s the wholesale integration of networked / communicative digital technologies everywhere and to the nth degree, as an ostensive intrinsic good.) When I was an undergrad (class of ‘11), we still submitted essays in hard copy, and our professors returned them with red marks and a letter inside a circle. I only checked my .edu email once or twice a week, even as a senior. Course websites were thin prototypes of today’s enterprise LMSes; I have very few memories of interacting with them until I myself was teaching. Nothing I’ve ever done as a student required an app. Within a few short years, of course, all that changed.

As administrations read the writing on the wall (internetize or die), interdisciplinarity increasingly served as a cover for the subjection of non-technological disciplines to the new order. This happened in two ways: first, by rationalizing the consolidation of social sciences and humanities programs when they couldn’t stand on their own (à la ASPECT); second, by providing a pretext to the prioritization of initiatives that had something (anything) to do with internetization / “new media,” etc., over those that did not. (It’s not capitulation to financial interests, it’s progressive boundary-breaking!).

This was not helped by the fact that “the humanities” was never a stable signifier to begin with. Some humanities disciplines are well-positioned to reckon with tech from first principles; most are not. When you introduce the internet to the humanities writ large, you’re blindsiding the theoreticians who know they have as much in common with their colleagues in quantitative poli sci as they do with neuroscientists. You’re depriving them of critical breathing room. The point of philosophy and literature is to affirm functions for language and meaning that go beyond internetish directives. What I mean by “internetish” is proximal to what Anna Kornbluh means by “aboutist” in this passage from her 2024 book Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism, which takes aim at the twenty-first century university’s willful blindness to the effects of internetization on the singularities of literature, philosophy, and art:

Extensive data informatics, cognitive processing, and linguistics research take ‘aboutness’ as their core question, and the assimilation of aesthetic research to these other disciplines reveals just how much the administrative construct ‘the humanities’ elides the internal division between mediation and the immediate; ‘the study of human experience’ in anthropology, history, linguistics, and law differs from the unlived experience and unrealized possibilities produced by literature and art — but aboutness and empiricism redact that difference. (Immediacy, 177)

The funny thing is that large language models reveal the limited purchase of “aboutness” — reducibility to a stable, discretizable core that gives language a functional “inside,” thereby delineating an “outside” or external world — as an objective of humanities scholarship. This is a clumsy way of stating one of the takeaways of Leif Weatherby’s 2025 book Language Machines: Cultural AI and the End of Remainder Humanism (two notable reviews: from Daniel Bashir and Pete Wolfendale.) In its internetish turn, the humanities largely relinquished its ability to think beyond the aboutist paradigm, which is a dead end for the kind of meaning it’s uniquely positioned to theorize.

From what I’ve seen of interdisciplinarity, and my own experience as an interdisciplinary scholar, it’s ill-equipped to address this backslide. Interdisciplinarity and internetization are both downstream of the ongoing strip-mining of higher ed by private equity; both authorize and advance it. I never gained the deep subject expertise that might’ve helped me arrive at these conclusions back when I still had strong external incentives and support to publish in journals, speak at conferences, write a book, etc. But at the same time, the mental conditioning required to stay sane inside the tower would’ve kept me from fully processing what such conclusions meant for my future and the state of intellectual life in the United States and beyond.

And from what I’ve seen of the real conditions of academic labor, it’s a miracle that there’s even a small number of scholars out there who can speak productively to what it means for LLMs to handle ever-increasing volumes of communication. As Wolfendale writes in his review of Language Machines, “no one can be quite sure what communicative norms will evolve in a situation where most communication is computationally mediated, but it’s clear that the power of words is changing.” It’s not impossible to understand the nature of this power, but if such understanding ever prevails widely, it’ll be despite rather than because of academic norms.

AI is capital. This is indisputable. So is the university system, but until recently, it was still possible to effect minor forms of subversion as a scholar and pedagogue. The damage dealt to theoretical thought by internetization and its many guises (including most of what goes by the name “interdisciplinarity”) is one symptom of this crisis. So too are most of the institutional obstacles confronted by today’s scholars (especially those who are younger and more precarious) as they attempt to do good work. Wolfendale’s thoughts about a conventional academic career, which he credits to a conversation with Dominic Fox, are illustrative here.

I am mildly optimistic about the possibility for dissidents like Wolfendale to help us think wisely about technology, even in the face of the twenty-first century’s monstrous Real. And there are still scholars in the academy taking up this mantle. I don’t know what this looks like in my own life; I’ve gone back and forth on whether I want to seriously keep going with theory scholarship or give myself over to writing that resolves to nothing but poetics (see: the idiosyncratic, slice-of-life stuff I occasionally post, which always inspires un-subscriptions… my house my rules, or anti-rules as it were… ) while holding space for others doing the work (as a public-facing educator and conveyor of other people’s ideas.) I do think poetics and fictionality reign supreme, but maybe I’m not quite out of the game just yet. I am also newly affiliated with Bard Microcollege (I’ll be teaching a course for them this fall), so, not doing a good job of resisting the tower’s gravitational pull.

In any event, supporting scholars like Wolfendale and Fox (with money, attention, etc.) and initiatives like the Acid Horizon Research Commons might be our best bet at retaining any semblance of good sense as the machine expands. Sorry, I couldn’t end this without a plug.

There might be a part two to this post.