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Hello Dark Markets subscribers - apologies for this week’s missing news roundup. I’ve been in georgious Buenos Aires, Argentina for a book release event - hopefully video from that and other appearances will be public soon.
By way of substitution, today I have some difficult thoughts about the group of former colleagues who have been almost entirely invisible from the creation, publishing, and even reception of my book: academics.
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This post is going to rile people up, but I have to write it.
Last week was the thrilling launch of my new book, Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia. To pick just one metric here that deeply matters to me: I had a public book release event in New York City. I’ve arrived. I’m realer than real.
But with that secured, I want to talk about one of the serious professional and interpersonal disappointments of this process. I have gotten immense positive feedback both from the cypherpunk and crypto communities where I now work, and in critical political circles here in New York, getting tons of invites to speak at events and go on podcasts etc. I’m thrilled to be part of a broad movement of serious thinkers tackling the immediate, real-world political challenge of TESCREAL and techno-utopian ideology, and my gratitude to hundreds of people in those worlds is boundless.
Before my turn to journalism, I spent about 10 years earning a PhD, then working as a researcher and teacher.
But I have received almost no engagement from the world of academia.
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I reached out to some of my former professors for research help on the current project, and heard nothing back. One of my dearest advisers couldn’t make time to read an advance copy of my work, much less blurb it. I have not been invited to speak at my doctoral alma mater. While I have treasured the endless excitement from my present-day colleagues, I don’t believe I’ve received a single congratulatory note from a former academic colleague or anyone I went through my doctoral program with.
This isn’t entirely surprising, on two fronts. First, working academics are obviously experiencing their own ongoing polycrisis, and I’m well aware they barely have enough time to make it through their days. My growing awareness of that material reality as I finished my PhD and moved through postdocs is why I originally chose to leave academia going on 15 years ago now. I can’t blame many of them for being too genuinely overworked to pay attention to much beyond their own immediate survival.
Second, I’m not surprised because leaving academia had already cost me several friendships, and I can only assume turned more casual professional acquaintances against me. I’ve written several times over the years about the reasons for my departure, including not just looming systemic breakdown, but what I sensed was a deeper and endemic philistinism – while many academics are passionate, a critical mass are careerist box-checkers who, bluntly, don’t share my hunger for knowledge and understanding. (Much less high-quality writing and public communication, which can be, without hyperbole, an active hindrance to academic research careers.) These are systemic problems, but I don’t blame anyone who took my critiques personally and decided to, in their own minds, shoot the messenger.
(For full transparency, I should also acknowledge that, as sharp-edged as I can still be to this day, during my twenties I was a full-blown son of a bitch: mean, arrogant, and casually condescending. A lot of these people, I’m sure, had and have perfectly good reasons not to like me, completely outside of professional factors. To those folks, I’m truly sorry for being an asshole. I hope I’ve grown.)
But I did have some genuine friends in academia, and the most deeply hurtful aspect of my career change was the discovery that they saw my departure primarily in terms of its impact on them. Their main concern wasn’t what was best for me, but that they would lose the ongoing aid of my collaborative labor. Some tried to dissuade me from my decision to transition into full-time writing, rather than supporting me as a friend, and I chose to cut contact with those people. The revelation that my colleagues saw me as a career lever more than as a person wounded me in ways that will frankly never heal.
And now it has been affirmed again, 15 years later. “Stealing the Future” would not be publishable under the U.S. academic publishing system. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest, because it’s exactly the book I wanted to write, and I know exactly what hell it would have been fitting it through the eye of the academic publishing needle. But it’s disappointing that the cost of that creative freedom is being invisible to the narrowing vision of siloed and atomized academic discourses.
The strangest part of all this, of course, is that “Stealing the Future” is a hugely theoretical and academic work, weaving insights from Baudrillard, Lacan, Franco Berardi, Kierkegaard, and many others through my analysis of the FTX fraud and the broader Techno-Utopian grift. In theory, it should be the academics more than anyone excited to read and share it. But no such luck.
I am in a difficult situation on this topic, because I am a huge defender of public higher education as an absolute necessity for a thriving society. We cannot continue to advance without the broad base of critical thinkers and skilled doers that can only emerge from broad, publicly funded universities. A huge driver of the instrumentalizing of academic careers and the narrowing of those universities’ scope is the politicized defunding of higher education that has accompanied our descent into oligarchy.
But the entire point of critical theory and social science, to my mind, is to find the way out of systems that limit our thinking and identities. We are in a bleak age for the democratization of knowledge, and those academics who have doubled down on the logic of the teetering ivory tower can’t entirely blame systemic forces for the declining relevance of their institutions.
I don’t in the slightest regret devoting my twenties and early thirties to the pursuit of pure knowledge about weird continental theory and technological history.
I just wish the people I shared that experience with were still having as much fun as I am.
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